One of my sometime beta readers asked me a couple of hours ago if I could give them a link to this story, which led me to the realization that I’d apparently never told anyone I’d written it. In all honesty, I forgot. This was a story written for Yuletide, an annual fanfiction gift-story group, and they don’t reveal the names of the story authors until after the holiday – meaning I couldn’t tell anyone I’d written it until then either, and it never even occurred to me afterward that I hadn’t announced it or added it to Stories on AO3. Oops.
The particular pinch-hit request I picked up for Yuletide 2017 asked for some kind of explanatory story for the universe of the EDS Cat Herder commercial. I wasn’t able to give them everything on their wish list, but I did my best to create a universe that would make some kind of logical sense out of an 18-year-old, 60 second Superbowl commercial about herding cats and the result was Fluffy Trails.
Some of those are actual cowboys, by the way, and they improvised a lot of their own dialog.
There is also another semi-related EDS commercial which was about running with the squirrels (as opposed to running with the bulls).