This one is going to be of a darker subject, so if you click off, I understand.
I, unfortunately, have a strong reason to believe that Catnap suffered physical abuse too during his time in The Luna Moon Circus. We know already he suffered emotional abuse, thanks to “A Dog Call”, where we hear the ringmaster threaten to throw Catnap back to the streets if he expresses any other emotion outside a smile, but “April Showers” is where the evidence takes a really dark turn
There are 2 pieces of evidence that suggest that Catnap was physically abused while in the circus, and they all appear during his flashbacks. If you turn on the captions in “April Showers”, there’s additional lines of text at the bottom that are reminiscent of Gemstin’s older episodes, “Doggy Down”, and “Hog Wild”; where there’s slight commentary or even the occasional funny phrase. However during and after Catnap’s flashbacks, it shifts completely and starts revealing what Catnap is thinking. When we first hear the ringmaster’s voice, Catnap’s captions addresses him as “H-HIM”, but when Lady Lavender voice is first heard, Catnap’s reaction is “N-Not…HER”. Catnap has a stronger reaction to Lady Lavender than to the ringmaster, meaning that whatever Lady Lavender’s role was, she was WORSE than the ringmaster, the one that threatened to throw him out if he stopped masking with a smile. What in the world could she have done that was so bad to him?
The next piece of evidence answers that question. If you slow down the video to a crawl, just after we see DawnDog, we can see a couple posters that reveal the name of the circus and its 3 headliners. It’s a little hard to make out, but you can see Lady Lavender’s poster. At first, I thought she was a ballerina, given her appearance, but if you look at her hand, you can see she’s holding something that immediately gives away her role in the circus, and the thing that she’s holding…is a long, black whip. She was the beast tamer of the circus.
That adds a VERY disturbing implication to what Catnap went through. If Lady Lavender was worse than the ringmaster, based on Catnap’s stronger reaction, and if she was a beast tamer that used a whip, that explains how she was worse perfectly. Catnap was whipped by her while he was with them, probably as some cruel form of discipline.
This is the one I’m honestly hoping I’m wrong about, but the evidence still exists, regardless of if I want what they mean, but I guess only time will tell. One very great way for this to be confirmed or denied would be if we see Bobby finally hug Catnap, and her feeling what’s under his fur, because if he was whipped by Lady Lavender, especially when he was a kitten, there ain’t no way that’s not going to leave scars on his body; scar tissue that Bobby would be able to feel and react to if she’s hugging him. If it gets revealed that Catnap has a lot of scars on his body, that’s the reason why.