The bath disaster

 The first couple of times I bathed Tiger it went really well. It actually went better than I thought it would. Growing up we had a couple of cats, but they were mostly outdoor cat's but I remembered bathing them and how they would claw at you. I wore gloves when I bathed tiger and I just held the back of his neck under the faucet and lathered the soap and rinsed him off. He did fuss and squirm a little bit when I rinsed him off, but it really wasn't that big of a deal. However there was this one incident when I was bathing Tiger that didn't go so well.

This incident happened on one of my trips home to see my parents in San Angelo. San Angelo is a cute town in West Texas, the best way to describe it and it's whereabouts it that it is close to Lubbock, and I guess you could say it's close to the Permian Basin as well. I was driving and talking on the phone to both parents and the way it was sounding through the phone was that I was on speakerphone. That is how it sounded the way my dad was chiming in anyway. I was explaining that tiger needed a bath, and we came up with this idea to bath Tiger in this old washtub that my mother had hanging on the backyard fence. My mother had it hanging there for mostly decoration purpose's. It sounded like a good idea at the time. However that actually turned out to be not such a good idea.

I got to my parents house that afternoon and did the whole catching up thing with my mother, father, and brother, as well as my grandmother who was living with my parents at the time. After some relaxing and hanging out with the family and having them tell me what all has been going on with them and other family members, I got everything set up to bathe Tiger. I put on the gloves like I have done the previous couple of times that I had bathed him.

I put water in the washtub that I had planed to bathe Tiger in and I put him in it, and he didn't like that one bit. He made that high pitched raer sound that cat's make and he used his hind legs to scratch forearm and his claws were like daggers. I remembered growing up having two cats but they were mostly outside cats but there claws didn't hurt as bad as Tiger's did. I immediately grabbed Tiger by the scruff and pulled him out of the water and he scratched my forearms some more and I threw him in the sunroom in the back of the house. I knew right then and there that this was not going to work. I went into the bathroom and got the first aid kit and bandaged up my forearm then cleaned up the set up for Tiger's bath.

I explained, to my parents what happened and after talking about it we started to understand why Tiger was so good when I bathed him at home and why all of a sudden when I bathed him at my parents' house, he wasn't so good. 

It was because I put water from the water hose into the washtub and that water was cold. There was no way that I could adjust the temperature like I could at home when I bathed him indoors. At my apartment I would usually bathe Tiger in the sink and the water was usually warm and so he was ok with that. He wasn't 100% comfortable because cat's aren't real fond of water to begin with but at my apartment he did better than he did at my parents house with his outside bath.