It’s Like Herding Cats . . . Into Hoops . . . Masquerading As Obstacle Courses

It just gets more and more difficult to be a cat, what with their owners expecting so much out of them:

Sheryl Crowe – no, not Sheryl Crow, the singer, but Sheryl Crowe, the cat with the second name that is spelled like that of Russell Crowe, the actor – had a choice of going over, under, around or through a big plastic hoop. On the far side of the hoop stood her owner, waving what cat people call a “teaser,” a stick with a sparkly ball on one end.

The idea – the big new idea at the cat show that opens at Madison Square Garden on Saturday – was that Sheryl Crowe would see the sparkly ball, jump through the hoop and go on to complete what amounted to an obstacle course. Yes, an obstacle course for cats.

Sheryl Crowe saw the sparkly ball, all right. But she slithered through the gap beneath the hoop. As her owner, Lauren Castle-Flynn, explained, “We’re not doing over, we’re doing under.”

In the annals of humans and cats, Sheryl Crowe was in uncharted territory as she previewed the course for what the Cat Fanciers’ Association, an organizer of the show, calls the agility competition. In the 99 years of the association’s existence – 99 years of judging things like the color of a cat’s fur and the shape of its head – it has never set up tunnels to run through and obstacles to jump over. Or not.

. . .

The agility course was set up inside what amounted to a large cage. Black plastic fencing, the kind homeowners in the suburbs put up to keep deer from lunching on the Montauk daisies that were planted last weekend to replace the ones that were brunch the weekend before, had been stretched across wooden frames. On one side was a door with a latch.

“Everybody always says, ‘I don’t think you can train a cat to do this,’ ” said Nikki Sanders of Columbia, S.C., whose cat, Lem, came in third in the agility competitions in two other cat shows. “Well, they’ll follow a toy. The fact they do all the obstacles is more important than the time. If they refuse, they do get penalties.”

This “Feline Agility Competition” begins in earnest this Saturday and Sunday at Madison Square Garden.

See also: Cat Fanciers’ Association CFA-IAMS Cat Championship official website.