Lala/Juanito

For 17 days this winter my cat, Lala, was sentenced to the cat collar of infinite shame while recovering from a dubious laceration on his tail. For more than two weeks I fed him his wet food every day, because the poor guy couldn't eat in the collar without making a mess. We napped together. We bonded. We synergized.

About halfway through this ordeal, I noticed he seemed to be more obedient in the collar. Of course his limited mobility would be the more obvious reason that he was getting into less trouble than usual, but there seemed to be more to the story.

Then toward the end of his recovery, I removed the collar to let him bathe himself. When I went to put it back on him, he sat so calmly with his chin pointed straight up in the air, and patiently let me adjust the tension of the cord, tying a bow he could not undo. My girlfriend and I watched him together in quiet wonder; this normally quite rebellious and difficult cat was behaving like a trained show dog.

The wheels in my brain started cranking. We joked about the possible similarities between BDSM collars and cat collars. We wondered together how much of the obedience training might remain once he was fully healed.

Then I remembered a guy I worked with about 150 million years ago. For the purpose of this story, the only thing you really need to know about Juan was that he was a successful gay male bartender whose arrogance can only be described as an objet d'art. By that I mean, he thought so highly of himself that he scarcely ever had any reason to speak to me, in spite of the fact that I was his barback at least a few nights a week. To be fair, he was well tipped and he tipped me well, so I didn't really care much. I had no illusions about our status. Nevertheless, it has to be said that Juan was a catty bitch.

Then one day Juan showed up to work exhibiting symptoms from a condition called Bell's Palsy. For anyone who hasn't heard of it, it results in paralysis in a main facial nerve on one side, leaving that side of your face slack while the other side functions normally. It is rather unfortunate, especially since doctors don't seem to know much about what causes it. So Juan showed up to work for a week or two like that. No matter how I felt about the guy, I felt compassion for him. No one deserves that nonsense. I'm not joking about his condition in any way. What I did find funny at the time however, was that Juan was suddenly nice to me. Just like that. I'd worked with him for years and he barely ever spoke to me, but when he was dealing with this condition he actually said hello to me and interacted with me quite a lot more than usual.

What do you think happened when the palsy symptoms went away? Juan went right back to being a big old bitch.

So when my girlfriend and I were wondering about Lala, and whether he would return to his status of unholy terror once untethered from his shameful salad bowl shaped necklace, I told her the story about Juan the bitchy bartender and his bout with Bell's Palsy. Together we debated the rhetoric of whether Lala's inner Juan is gone? Or is that catty bitch coming out when we untie the collar? Is Lala only being nice to me because he is feeling weak and sorry for himself?

Yesterday we freed him from his restraint. He spent the first few hours in that twitchy sort of trance only cats can achieve, darting around like a frenzied maniac. That was when he earned the nickname Juanito. As it turns out, Lala's inner Juan is not gone. Then later on he crashed and slept most of the day, and we saw his snuggly, lovable side. He really seems to have two personalities.

Now that we are on day 2, I really think he is a changed little man, Juanito moments aside. I cannot officially attest to the efficacy of collar training your cat, but it seems to have made a difference with mine. Who knew?