#shramp!

My roommate bought some shrimp

Not, like, real shrimp. Thank fuck. I can't STAND the smell or taste of real shrimp. I can handle if he cooks it as long as I'm not in the kitchen but otherwise? Nah, hard nah. But he bought shrimp. For the cats.

To be clear, I live with my SO and our roommate and we (my SO & I) have two black cats. A boy who naturally bigger and a girl who naturally smaller - we took them a vet and everything to make sure, they're just built that way - and they're siblings, about 1.5 years old. And they*behave* like siblings - playfighting, being little shits to one another, stealing toys, etc. - but I've also just never had cats THIS chill.

They have no self-preservation instincts. I mean, like, ZERO, guys. Binx, our boy, tried to jump into the oven. While it was on. Bast, our girl, when let onto the balcony in a cat harness and on a leash, attached to said harness obviously, jumped not ONTO the banister/railing/whatever-the-fuck-its-called, but HALFWAY THROUGH the metal bars. This obviously nearly gave me a goddamn heart attack and I've not let them onto the balcony since. (Which is good because there's a family of birds now nesting near the porch light and by God, I KNOW these little idiots would yeet themselves off the balcony to try catching one.)

Anyway, they're also super chill. They have basically no trauma responses to literally anything. Binx doesn't like the Roomba but isn't Terrified by it, Bast follows it like its a particularly weird, also stupid, cat. They don't react to loud noises in movies or games, aside from Binx not liking thunder when it storms. They let us scoop them up in all sorts of positions - baby upright, baby cradled, scruff and up, etc. - and if we get close to a wall, they just sniff it, not even bothering to put a paw up to stop it from getting closer.

Aside from the first and only time I'd seen Bast upset (a story for later), I was genuinely under the impression these cats just, like, don't have much aggression in them. There's accidents with scratches and all, but that's par for the course when you get a cat. Or a cat gets you.

So the shrimp. These are technically replacement toys for the two, equally small toy shrimp Roommate bought them about a month or so ago. Those didn't last 48 hours. One straight up disappeared - still expecting to find it later, tbh - and another I watched them tear apart. Something about the toy shrimp made them go nuts for them.

Today, Bast followed me into the bathroom - because I was not quick enough to stop her - and rolled onto the bathmat and started nomming on her shrimp. Binx, following SO who came to ask me something (look, we've been together almost 10 years now, I know I have no privacy, lol) and laugh at me about the cats following me, went over to sniff at the shrimp toys.

Bast hissed loudly at her brother and LOW GROWLED at him. Binx, to his credit, mustered his one (1) brain cell and decided to Respect Her Boundary. He fucked off pretty quickly, and Bast resumed regular play behavior.

And I laughed in disbelief. Like, holy shit, what? She'll let him step on her head to climb over her for snuggles - and vice versa, to be fair - and let him nudge over to eat some of her food (if we're not watching) and even let him eat some of her catnip, but the maybe 3-inch long shrimp? The one that's roughly a third the size of her whole head? *That's* the line?