Kitten: Destroyer of Life

Boyfriend and I are pretty bad a keeping plants alive. One time, we even killed a cactus. However, right before we got Kitten, we decided that we were going to make a real effort to keep some plants around the apartment. We went out and bought quite a few plants of varying sizes and put them around the apartment. We made sure they had sunlight and watered them according to their instructions. We even bought those glass watering bulbs, As-Seen-On-TV. So basically, things were going pretty well.

Then we got Kitten. As soon as he was large enough to jump, Kitten began to systematically destroy our plants.

He has three main methods of destruction:

     1. Eat the plant

     2. Scratch and rip off the leaves

     3. Smother the plant

[Note: The following pictures are from Kitten's youth. He was going through puberty and looked a bit weird.]

Here, we have an example of smothering the plant. At one point, this was a very nice decorative chilli plant; it had lots of little chilli peppers on it and was quite cute. Kitten essentially created a nest in the plant pot. By the time Kitten was done with this plant, it was just a bunch of brown twigs. 

On the floor beside the chilli plant is a plant that Kitten destroyed by eating the leaves. Unfortunately, I never got a picture of him eating it. Probably because Boyfriend and I were worried that the plant was poisonous and were focused on getting Kitten to stop eating it, not on taking a picture.

This here, is the chilli plant near the end of its life. As you can see, there is nothing sticking out from the top except some dead twigs.

In this picture, Kitten is about to move onto his next victim - Hibiscus.  

At one point we even had Hibiscus flowering. It had beautiful red flowers. But leaf by leaf, Kitten ate it until it didn't have enough energy left to repair itself.

You can also see from this picture that Kitten knows he isn't suposed to be in the plant pot, but of course it was a game to him. A game that he always won.

In these last pictures we have some type of tropical tree thing. Kitten liked to use this one as a scratching post. He would also scratch at the leaves and try to pull them off. Sometimes, he would even try to eat the leaves. We were always most worried about Kitten when he would attack this plant because the leaves had very sharp tips. Boyfriend and I were pretty convinced Kitten was going to poke his eye out. Luckily, he never did. Though he did succeed in destroying this plant as well.

These plants represent only a small portion of the plants that Kitten has destroyed. We stopped taking pictures because his once adorably destructive ways became just plain annoying. Boyfriend and I are down to two plants now: one we keep behind the TV so Kitten can't get to it, the other is an old bamboo plant that we keep in the kitchen. Kitten sometimes will show interest in the bambo, but generally he leaves it alone.[Until recently we actually had two bambo plants. The other one was on our windowsill, but Kitten learned to jump up there too and knocked it off the ledge breaking the holder and spilling rocks every where.]

  
    Basically, Kitten hates all things living.