What It Looks Like When Opposites Attract

Our big cat, Bailey, who is 13 years old, has an overactive thyroid and needs to take a pill twice a day. We disguise it in a little pill pocket, but whether or not she’ll actually eat it is anyone’s guess.

So yesterday morning she refused to have anything whatsoever to do with her medicine, which meant being constrained by my husband while he shoved the pill down her throat. But then last night, she gobbled up her pill like it was the best thing she had ever tasted.

I, being the artsy-fartsy, liberal arts student that I am, immediately began pondering out loud the complete randomness of her behavior, and how this was probably a significant, illustrative example of some kind of chaos theory.

But my husband, the engineer, disagreed. “Nah,” he said. “I prefer to think of it as that we don’t yet know all of her required parameters.”