My cat Becket does some strange things sometimes. For instance, when I get home from work, he often does this. Don’t know why, but he does it enough that I suppose he just likes it. But this thread isn’t about that.
It happens late at night, usually when I’m either winding down to go to bed or already there. He grabs one of two “toys” (I put that in quotes because of the toys he chooses) and starts to just walk around the apartment crying. The first “toy” is his sister’s old collar. She’s still here, she’s fine. In fact, they’re grooming each other on the couch next to me right now. The other “toy” is an old plastic target bag that I have tied up in many knots. Don’t worry, the bag is safe, they’ve had it for over a year and there has never been a problem. But he just walks around and cries with one of those two things in his mouth.
He tends to pace around a little and then eventually comes to me. Most mornings, I awake to find the target bag in bed with me. He did it briefly last night while I was watching television so I managed to get two pictures of him with the Target bag - here is the first pic and the second one.
My older brother’s late cat Weeble used to do this exact thing, as well. He had an orange rat toy and after everyone went to bed, he would walk around with it in his mouth crying. Does anyone else have a cat that does this? Any idea as to why they do it? He doesn’t seem to be looking for comfort or even attention. He runs away if I try to pick him up. If I call to him, he won’t come. It’s not a terrible behavior, just odd.
That mirror thing is funny! Olive never reacts to mirrors.
I’ve given up questioning Olive’s motives. Her weird thing is wandering into the next room and then crying pitifully as if she’s been cruelly abandoned. :rolleyes: Such a drama queen!
One of my cats does this, except she does it with a toy mouse. She frequently starts meowing in this weird way, almost as if she’s in distress, and whenever I come to investigate, the toy mouse is invariably right by her.
Cuervo does the mirror thing, but everywhere, not just mirrors.
He also does the second, but only with his girlfriend. His girlfriend being a small grey stuffed cat. He drags her around by the scruff of her neck (we’re assuming the gender), dropping her next to the bed then trying to mate with her.
i get that from miss magnolia all the time. drama queen, that one. :rolleyes: yowls like her entire world has come crashing down around her, but when i finally track her down, she just looks up at me and lets go with one of those sweet little trills of hers as if to say, ‘what?’
When I was a teen and still lived at home, we had a cat called Butler (invariably shortened to Butty when we talked to him) who was a absolute water fanatic.
Everytime my mother took a bath, he would sit outside the bathroom door and just howl
until my mother let him in. He would sit beside the tub with the most expectant look. My mother would take a sopping sponge and wet him down until he was soaked from head to tail. He would then happily leave and go lay down someplace.
One of my cats, Zen, has peculiar bouts of aggression that I’ve never been able to figure out.
I can play-wrestle around with him like a dog, gently spank him on the butt, roll him over, etc. and the most he’ll do is nip gently at me playing back, keeping his claws retracted. However, there will be times that I’m sitting on the couch playing video games or in bed reading a book, and he’ll randomly surprise attack me and actually try to hurt me (he’s put some pretty deep bite marks in my arm and once scratched my eyelid so badly I had to go to the ER). I can see a the look on his face when he’s about to do it and when I try to get him away from me, he’ll meow angrily. I suspect he was abused when he was a kitten (I got him at 1-year-old) and my vet is at a loss as to his problem.
Otherwise, he’s the most social cat anyone has ever seen. When I have people over, he hangs around them like a dog. He loves people and people love him.
My most favorite cat of all time came into my family when I was ten, and lived to be 17. He was always a really sweet people-cat, but in his later years he really, really didn’t like it when no one was around. He wouldn’t even go into the next room before the yowling commenced - if he happened to wake up facing away from all of us, he’d start in. “Dude, were right here!” someone would say, he’d look around, see us, and be like “oh, OK. Cool.” I remember this happening a couple of times when he was asleep on my lap!
Agent Foxtrot - my cat does the same thing. I don’t get it. I asked my vet about it, and he basically said that “some cats are like that”. He’s improving with age, but it still happens once in a while. And sometimes it really hurts. I can tell when he’s getting worked up…he gets a certain look in his eye and his stance changes - I’m sure you know what I mean.
I’ve figured out only one thing that changes his attitude - a ten minute timeout in the bathroom. I’m just slightly faster than him, and if I see Demoncat arising, or if he suprise-chomps me out of the blue, I scruff him (have to, picking him up in that state is a death wish), carry him to the bathroom, and give him a ten minute time out with the lights off. When I go let him out…happy kitty again.
My cat does it. I think that that’s when she realizes she’s slept all day and wants to play now. Usually she carries one of her toy mice into the bedroom and leaves it on the floor.
Same thing! If Zen starts getting too attention whorish (he gets mean if you don’t give him the attention he wants) or if he’s getting “that stance and look in his eye” (I know exactly what you’re talking about!), I’ll pick him up and put him in the bedroom for a time-out. When he comes out, he’s perfectly normal again, whatever “normal” is for Zen.
Last time we went on holidays, we had a catsitter come and check on him - my friend Will came every day for a bit and hung out with the cat. This fellow doesn’t have cable at home, and was more than happy to come watch sports or whatnot for a while. Bart bit him out of the blue one day when he came in and, god forbid, turned on the game instead of playing with Bart first. Thankfully, Will is a cat person - he said “No!”, ignored him for a bit, then played with him.
“Normal”. Indeed. There’s nothing normal about this cat. That’s why I like him so much, he’s got oodles of character.
Weirdly enough, my cat Gia does this with an orange rat toy as well! (it’s an orange flat stuffed ball shape with a green tail.)
She walks through the hallway with it in her mouth and cries. Sometimes she’ll bring it up on the bed and drop it by me. I decided to throw it, just to see what would happen. What happens is that her fat, fluffy ass turns into a fat, fluffy bullet and she bolts to wherever I’ve thrown it, retrieves it and brings it back to me. Sometimes we’ll play fetch for 10-30 minutes before one of us gets tired. What’s truly odd is that Gia is an early 2002 model and, for the first 8 years of her life, never EVER did this. Early this year we discovered she had the kitty equivalent to breast cancer and had a very extensive surgery done to remove one half of her
mammory glands (one side of her body, basically) and related lymph nodes.
Once she healed, she turned into a retriever*. Weirdest thing.
*But only with the orange mouse. We misplaced it once and had to buy a duplicate orange mouse, which she now also will play with. But she does not care about any other colored/shaped toy.
My Luna does the same thing with her fuzzy-ball toys, to the point of bringing them into the bed (though not usually when we’re in the bed). She will walk around with them in her mouth, making a sound that sounds like she’s in terrible distress. We call it “crowing”.
Growing up I had a cat that exhibited similar dragging stuff around and meowing behavior at night. It was usually balled-up socks or sometimes the bath mat from the bathroom, which in retrospect must have been pretty heavy to drag around.
Cats can definitely be bizarre. Except for my female’s separation anxiety whenever I leave the house, and the male’s overwhelming desire to be right next to me when at the sink brushing my teeth, my current cats are fairly normal, laid-back cats. As Ragdolls, I guess that’s to be expected.
You could try substitution. Take the bag away for a minute and give the cat something else. Then give the cat back the bag. Then slowly increase the seperation time.
You could also try tiring the cat out. Don’t let the cat sleep, play with Mr Cat as much as possible.
Look at the cat’s whiskers when they play. They’re the best indicators of mood. A happy cat has whiskers that stick out AWAY from the face. That is a sure sign the cat is happy and not serious, even if aggressive. If a cat’s whiskers are pulled back to the face, then he/she is mad and is serious about it
My cat will chew on the edge of any book I’m reading. He’ll never chew on books I’m not reading. And I don’t mean that he rubs up against them. I mean chew hard, and take hungry looking bites out of them.
