CATNIP MANIA!

Last Friday night my house was the scene of a very Babe*-esque event. It started when I returned home from shopping for my weekend food supplies, among them four cans of wet cat food and a small bag of catnip. Catnip is an herb that if ingested in large amounts by cats literally intoxicates them, making them turn somersaults, dash around madly, and become more active in general. It's perhaps the feline equivalent of cocaine. In small doses, however, catnip can act as a digestive aid. It was for this reason that I bought it at the pet store.

When I arrived home that night, I opened a can of wet food for my three cats. On top of each cat's portion I sprinkled a pinch of catnip, just enough to help them digest their meal. I vaguely remember putting the bag of remaining catnip on the kitchen table afterwards. I then sat down at the computer to check my e-mail. As there were several messages from friends and relatives, I decided to take the next little while to write back to them.

While I was responding to my messages, one of my cats, Mama (I call her Mama because she had kittens in the past), came up to me and started rolling at my feet. I thought she wanted attention, so I bent down to scoop her up in my arms and put her on my lap. But she wasn't interested in my offer of affection. She instead started rolling around wildly, at one point nearly five times in a row within what seemed like the blink of an eye. Then, while on her back, she started turning in circles around the leg of the chair.

This was quite out of character for Mama. She's generally a very calm and unexcitable cat, which can sometimes be a disadvantage in trying to make her exercise so she can lose weight. Lying around on the bed is her favorite pastime. On the other hand, she is very easy to handle. I sometimes refer to her as the Virgin Mary because she's so peaceful, so good, and so motherly that it's hard to imagine her mating with a tomcat to have her kittens.

But now she had become a whirling dervish. She didn't want to come to me; she wanted me to come to her. So I knelt down on the floor and gave her a belly rub. She responded by swatting at my hand with her front claws. She was only playing, of course, but even this sort of roughhousing was unusual for her. I decided to play along with her and pulled on her tail. With this she turned around and bit my hand as hard as she could.

Then I turned around and couldn't believe what I saw. Some sort of green powder was scattered on the kitchen floor. As I went to look at it, I spotted a small plastic bag on the floor near the table. Immediately I realized what had happened. Mama had gotten on the table, pushed the bag of catnip over the edge, and proceeded to strew the contents all over the floor and to get "high" while sniffing them. As feline expert Warren Eckstein says, catnip is a "little plant that packs a big punch." But until Mama got a large dose of that little plant, I didn't know just how big a punch catnip actually packed.

*From the movie Babe.

EMILY, 17, CANADA

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