When Pippin was smaller than he eventually became, he liked to go under the sofa, especially after toys. He'd put one under the sofa and then chase it out from under.
This was in my parents' house while we still lived there, and this sofa was the one in the living room on the wooden floor. There was another sofa on the carpet in the den, but that was a sleeper sofa and didn't have the room underneath, although that didn't deter him from creeping underneath when the sleeper part was out. All the photos I have are of this sofa, actually, when I was playing with him with a fabric ribbon while he was underneath.
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| June 2000 playing under the sofa bed |
But back to the one in the living room. This was really quite a favorite place to play, and as he grew by leaps and bounds, it became more and more difficult for him to get under it. If he could get under the edge, the inside part of the couch was higher, and he was fine.
He would squirm on his belly to get underneath. This worked for a few weeks and then he couldn't get the leverage because he couldn't even stand a little bit. He got out by turning on his back and pulling himself out with his paws on the edge of the sofa, but it never really worked the other way around due to the whole bottom of the sofa interrupting his grip.
The last time he ever went under the sofa I remember quite distinctly. He tried to get under, and couldn't, so he backed up to the other side of the room. Like a funny car revving up to start at full speed, he tensed every muscle in his body and then launched at high speed across the room, toward the couch. Which I was sitting on at the time.
I waited with baited breath for him to run into the sofa; I couldn't figure what else was going to happen besides the worst misjudgment in the world.
At the last possible second, when he was going full out, he suddenly dropped to his belly, all four feet splayed out around him, and slid neatly under the couch. It was a you-tube worthy moment, if only I'd had a video camera.
It was also a good thing I was there and saw him do this, because only by splaying out flat, and thus flattening his shoulderblades too, had he been able to get underneath. This meant that he actually couldn't get out by himself, even by his now-normal method of dragging himself out upsidedown with his paws on the sofa edge.
I asked him if he was stuck, and when he refused to answer me indignantly in the negative, I figured he was stuck. (A cat isn't going to admit they're stuck, after all.) He could still move around underneath, but he couldn't get out. He did try and then gave up, which was when I came down and asked if he was stuck.
So I grabbed both front paws with one hand, flattened his head to the floor with the other, and gently dragged him out from under the couch. He understood what I was doing and made himself as flat as possible, which was nice--it was possible he would have fought against that kind of treatment, since as a rule cats don't like you pushing their heads down.
He never went under the sofa again, although I did find him occasionally looking at it mournfully as if remembering the good old days when he could chase his toys under the sofa and not rely on a human to retrieve them.
And you know how I know he never went under again? Because I never had to extract him from happy sofa land again, either!
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