I want to get an animal that does weird stuff that I can videotape and put on youtube to make millions selling mugs and t-shirts.
I think individual cats have a much higher chance of doing something uniquely weird (yet cute) that could be marketable.
Nearly all my cats did this, and I was wondering if all cats did this:
Cat #1: Loved cello music. He would nap in front of me when I practiced cello. He would also prefer to lie on the couch since it gave him a better seat.
Cat #2: Loved humans so much, if you carried her she would just lie there no matter what position she was in. I would often balance her on my head while I walked around, but she had an annoying habit of sucking on my hair.
Cat #3: Could fit ping-pong balls in his mouth (he was huge) and would often beg for food to give to some stray cat he found. He could also do tricks, like sit, shake hands, lie down, etc. because of his addiction to dried anchovies.
Cat #4: Only boy in a litter of 6 kittens. When his sisters were napping on my lap, he would try to climb up my leg to join them. When he realized claws hurt me, he would just use his pads and slide up and down my leg. When we had to give 4 of his sisters to the shelter, he would often start looking for them whenever he heard a cat meow on the tv.
Cat #5: Ate cockroaches. He would also “talk” with me:
Me: Hello!
Him: Meow!
Me: Did you eat breakfast?
Him: Meow?
Me: You didn’t eat breakfast?
Him: Meow!
etc.
Cat #6: aka “Hooker.” She would bring male cats over all the time and make cat sex noises under the house for about 5-8 hours. Had two litters, the 2nd one was by a son from the first litter (cat #3 or 5 above, we’re not sure.) The only sister of cat #4 we kept. She would also attack me every morning at exactly 7am to get breakfast. I had to wrap myself up in a blanket like a corn dog to protect myself.
My cat’s completely retarded. She’s been going in and out of the same door for five years but still stands at the hinge end and looks surprised when it opens the wrong way. She also hasn’t worked out how to push doors open - she pulls at them and shuts them on her paw.
As she’s gotten older she’s become much more affectionate. Now when she wants cuddles she comes up to me and says “quack”. She then lies on my lap, upside down, rolling around until she falls off, then looks embarrassed.
We catproofed the back yard so I leave the back door open a bit for them most days. My husband’s cat still hasn’t figured out that she can’t cram her face in the door crack while I’m trying to open it.
My cat loves to jump in the empty laundry basket and get swung around - the faster and higher, the better.
All intact cats are weird. Most young cats are weird. I try to not say that cats are weird, because that’s really redundent.
My old cat won’t eat in the same room as my younger cat. The younger cat knows to leave Fred alone, but if Fred sees Lucky, he stops eating and walks off. That’s not the weird you want to hear about…
Lucky likes to sleep on my roomba. Evil bitch that I am…I like to turn it on when he’s not looking. The look on his face when the roomba is going to the wall is priceless. Silly cat never seems to realize that he can jump until just before going face first into the wall.
Old joke from Reader’s Digest (Life in these United States column, iirc…paraphrased):
“I had an emergency call from work so I asked my brother to pick up our cat, Skippy, from the vet after being neutered. My brother flat out refused. I asked why, and he said, “I don’t want Skippy to think I was involved.””
My current office assistant, where I work at a shelter, where we take in strays that are discarded for a myriad of reasons, no few of which are lack of spaying and neutering, (cough) Ahem.
---- anyway, turns out he likes to lick fresh ink after it’s been put to paper. Marker, ballpoint pen, doesn’t matter, he licks it until the paper’s soggy.
My senior cat, Ponch, would rather sleep/lay on almost anything besides bare floor. If I bring home a box/carton of something (pretty common since I order stuff online and shop at Sam’s Club), he will try to ‘claim’ the box by laying on it before I get a chance to put the stuff away. He will drag the throw down from the sofa so he can lay on it instead of the bare floor. He will climb into my reusable canvas shopping bag rather than lay on the bare floor. Kittehs is teh wierd.
My junior cat, Stryper (aka ‘Strypie’) is very vocal, and we do have conversations. Stryper knows that when I get up in the morning, it’s breakfast time. Yay!!! (My cats free-feed dry food, but they get two cans of wet food per day, which they share; a can in the morning ‘breakfast’, and a can in the evening ‘dinner’); but anytime I come out of my bedroom, and head in the general direction of the kitchen (which I have to do, since that’s the way the bathroom is), Strypie thinks it’s breakfast time, even if it’s only 2:30AM or so. So I’ll come out of the bedroom, and we’ll have this conversation:
S: Meow!
Me: No, cat. It’s the middle of the night. I’m just up to pee
S: Meeooww!
Me: No! If you’re hungry, go have some kibble. You’re not getting breakfast yet!
S: Meow, meow, meow!
At which point he starts following my every move, to the point of being directly under my feet, even following me into the bathroom, then back into the bedroom, ‘talking’ to me the whole time about the unfairness of not getting food when he wants it!
They seem to sense when we have out of town guests coming to visit, or when we are going away. A few days before the out of towners were due to arrive the cats took up residence in the guest room. They never go in the guest room to hang out, but when Grandma and Gramps were on their way by train, the cats moved into that room, together! They hung out, dozed, bathed, and just waited around. Then when my parents arrived, one cat went into hiding, the other remained sociable. Both would try to sneak in their room at night. After their visit was over, both cats again ignored the guest room.
If you never went into that room before, chances are when you went in to it to prep it for guests they saw it as a new and shiny universe they had to explore!
Well here’s some of my cat’s weirdness;
She can sense a can opener anywhere within 50 ft (OK that’s not unusual, but I’ve never had a cat do that before)
She drools when she’s being petted sometimes.
I’m allergic to her drool. If it drips on me I get welts and intense itching for a few minutes. I’ve had many cats before, including another drooler, and I’ve never been allergic like this.
She makes these suckling noises sometimes if I scratch her cheeks. It seriously looks like she chews a cud.
She likes licking plastic grocery bags.
She’s a black cat, which I’ve heard them and Siamese are naturally chatty cats.
She prefers grabbing, attacking and kicking clothes on the floor that I’ve worn recently. Any other clothes, not so much.
Cleo, now gone, had a thing for freshly washed hair. I would have to wrap my hair in a towel or blow dry it right away, otherwise she would try to attack my head, kneading, trying to eat my hair, and drool all over.
Bernie, also now gone, was a talker. As she aged, she would walk around the house meowing. If I called her name, she would run up to me and meow.
Lucy, the big fluff ball, has a thing for armpits. When I go to bed, I have to make sure to keep my arms down or under the blankets. Trying to sleep with a cat kneading an purring into your armpit is not easy.
The terrors are not weird, I think they’re normal as two 5 month old hairballs can be. We do joke that while their previous owner liked getting high, these two love being high. As in they have learned to climb on top of the upper cupboards, as in they like to climb the curtains and lay on the valances or rods, as in they frequently try to jump onto the ceiling fans. If we can’t find them, we look up.
My cat is also a plastic bag licker. She gets into the bathroom and starts licking the toilet paper bag - she really gets into the groove, too, with one paw up to get in on the licking action.
She’s also a sheet-killer. When I make the bed, she helps by attacking the sheets.
We’ve had a couple of cats, both female, who LOVED the taste of Bill’s armpits. They would lick, lick, lick his pits. One of them used to lick for a while, and then she’d sink her teeth in.