Out of Quarantine

Max got to move out of quarantine last night and he is very happy about this. While he is still a very chatty cat (at least compared to Boo and Sly), it's a much happier chatter than the pathetic meows from the bathroom. :)

In order to keep Max's space small, but still allow him to see and smell the household, he is now living in an exercise pen with a lid set up in the middle of the dining room. Sly was quite concerned to find that, not only had the interloper moved, but that he now had one of the "good" litterboxes! After I showed Sly that the other "good" litterbox was also clean, he got over his issue fairly quickly. So far the boys have spent a fair amount of time looking at each other up close and tagging each other through the ex-pen bars.


We were just about to tell Sly to quit taunting Max, when both cats tagged each other and then flopped over "dead". There was a little more "tag you're it" action, but they also spent several minutes trying to out-flop each other.


After the last round of "tag", it was apparently nap time. Each boy retired to his own cube, although Max didn't stay there for long. Apparently he needed to be out of the cube to see what was going on in the house.


Today, while Joanna and Sly took a nap, I let Max out on his harness and lead for the first time. So far, he is pretty sure that the harness is evil and spent about 10 minutes trying to walk backwards out of the harness before he figured out that it would not work. Then he tried flopping and rolling/squirming out of the harness, only to discover that he couldn't escape the harness that way either. After he finally gave up on escaping the harness, we wandered around the house looking at a few things. Max and Tribble did stare at each other briefly while standing about 3 feet apart and Max was clearly interested, but he didn't act predatory at all, simply curious. After about 25 minutes, Max decided it was time to flop on the carpet that sticks out in front of his ex-pen. I groomed him for a few minutes with the Zoom Groom (he's still giving up small kittens in spare fur) and then decided that it was time for Max to go back in his space so I could get some work done.

Later tonight, or possibly tomorrow, we will do the first introduction between Max and the girls. More details and pictures to come.