Aaron Landry

Torii 6 on Flickr

(Post originally from Minnesota Meow)

Name: Torii
Nicknames: Torrents, Panther, Torii Monster
Born: 05 May 2002
Lives in: Camden, Minneapolis
Lives with: Kurtis and Angela Scaletta, kitty siblings Gilda, Bertie, Lucy, and Pip.

Torii is an 18 pound “miniature panther.” He lives with four other cats and enjoys eating, napping and harassing his siblings. Torii was found after answering an ad on the Internet for free kittens. He attempts to be an alpha cat by trying to assert his authority over the other cats in the house by hissing and growling. He picks on the newer cats (Lucy and Pip) a bit more but is settling down.

Torii’s biggest passion is hunting down cotton swabs. As Kurtis explains:

When Torii sees you with a cotton swab, he waits eagerly for you to throw it away, bangs on the door to the little bathroom cupboard until it springs open, and rummages in the trash until he finds it. He then takes the swab out into the hallway where he has a bit of fun with it before decapitating it on both ends. The little stick corpse often ends up on the bed, in the water bowl, or in one of my slippers.

While Torii doesn’t seem to mind the yummy ear-wax tips of the swabs, it grosses us out a bit, so we’ve taken to just dropping one or two for him to play with when we get one out for ourselves. We pretty much call Q-tips “cat toys” now. As in, “Honey, we’re all out of cat toys — put it on the list for Target.”

Kurtis writes kids books and works at a local university helping instructors teach with technology. His debut novel Mudville will be published by Knopf in 2009. Angela also works at the university, does crafty stuff, and rescues the occasional cat. It’s her fault they have five cats.

More photos of Torii hunting down a cotton swab are in Torii’s Flickr set.