Pet Art: More Trouble than It's Worth?

by Aimee Amodio | More from this Blogger

07 Mar 2008 03:54 PM

The seventh annual Oregon Veterinary Conference is going on this weekend. We've had a lot of out-of-town guests stop by the cats only boarding facility (and cats only veterinarian, too) to look around. Yesterday, some ladies who run a boarding facility in West Virginia came by specifically to look at our boarding set up.

As pet owners, the women are mostly familiar with dogs. They only added cats to their boarding plans in order to increase their business! But, they said, the feline end of things has been challenging.

They mentioned one thing that has been a smashing success for them: dog art. Basically, they dip a dog's paw in non-toxic paint and let him or her tromp around on a canvas. How arftistic! Owners have been buying these works of pup art like crazy. (My dog Moose tried to help paint the outside of the house once, by wagging his tail into the wet paint.)

So of course we got to chatting about the possibility of doing cat art. It'd be great, I thought. Put down a canvas, make little puddles of color, and let the cat do her thing.

Then a few downsides to the idea popped up:

• What if the cat doesn't feel like wandering around, and instead flops down in the paint?
• What if we can't clean all the paint off the cat's feet? Is there a non-toxic paint that would just go away without a lot of clean up? Or an edible paint, in case the cat tries to groom herself?
• Lots of cats like to rub their faces along things to scent-mark them -- would we end up with multicolored cats who have paint smeared along their bodies (and paint smeared all over the walls)?

So... it doesn't look like the cats only boarding facility will be offering purrtraits painted by artistic felines any time soon. It's a fun idea to imagine, but in practice... definitely a disaster in the making!

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Aimee is a fiction writer... dog lover... music lover...

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