Cats and Cactuses
The domestic cat must have an extraordinary ability to suppress pain and discomfort because surprisingly they sometimes climb large cacti and sit on the top.
Cats and cactuses go together in a most uncomfortable way. It astonishes me why a cat wants to climb a large cactus as if he was climbing a tree. There is nearly always a story about a cat stuck up a saguaro cactus in Arizona. These are tree-like cactuses.
Here is a video of a cat descending a saguaro cactus:
It makes me wince. But the cat descends as if he is descending a tree. Yet when you look close up at a saguaro cactus you see what I have shown in the image above.
So, what is going on? How do cats do this? Has anyone else discussed what I consider to be a phenomenon? A cat that vets have named Prickly Pete is the current internet “cactus cat” celebrity.
He was tangled up in a prickly pear cactus. This is more a bush-like cactus. It took vet techs about 2 hours to remove all the spines that were inserted into every part of his body. Sometimes the spines can be poisonous. Great care has to be exercised in removing them to protect both person and cat.
Bearing in mind how horribly sharp and nasty these spines are, how do cats climb through them for 25 feet and then sit on them?
You would think that a cat would immediately jump off a saguaro cactus when he felt himself impaled on all those spines. Perhaps these cats were desperate to escape something. This is probably the likely reason.
However, the cat in the video stayed for three days on top of the cactus. I guess the point I am making is that cats must have a greater ability to withstand pain than the human. It seems that way to me.
If a person pricked his finger on one of those spines he’d yelp and then moan like hell.
When we see a domestic cat silently put up with a thousand pricks from a monstrously sharp and long cactus spine, in informs us about how cats so successfully hide pain when seriously ill. It is hard to know when cats are in pain when suffering a life-threatening illness. If we can’t assess whether a cat is in pain when seriously ill, how can we make a good judgement on whether to elect euthanasia as the most humane course of action?
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