At this time of year it’s light at 05:00 AM so kitty wants to up and about* - or at least starts yowling that she wants something, around about too-early o’clock. Maybe I can just feed her and she’ll shut up for a while. OK try that first, but that gives me no leverage to persuade her out later when it’s time for me to get up. Warmed up breakfast seems to be foolproof temptation for getting kitty out of the house, even when it’s not sunny outside. An idea I found in a keep-your-cat-happy book is to leave morsels of kibble around the place for kitty to mooch around for. This might work if kitty had nightly access to more than a couple of rooms. She found and nibbled on last night’s treats OK but that wouldn’t have kept her busy long.
So…
Anyone else have ideas for this? As it is, the recently adopted method to keep kitty quiet is to let her into the (that is my) bedroom when the 5am yowling gets annoying enough. Then negotiating the bed sharing until human-get-up-time hours later.
There must be an easier way, how do inside only cat people deal with the early dawn heebies?
*After “up and about” of course the principle activity is sleeping
Change the time you get up to correspond with the time the cat wants you to get up. The cat is better than the alarm clock. The cat does not need good batteries during a power outage.
It help greatly to have grown up on a farm but were that your case you would have already know how easy it was to change wake up times.
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Change the time you get up to correspond with the time the cat wants you to get up.
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According to the BBC at my latitude tomorrow is: Sunrise 04:43 - Sunset 21:20. Kitty dozes through most of that, not so much an option for me. And I’m bloody well not going to bed at half past nine at night, I’m old enough to drive, buy booze and stuff. I’m not going to bed before the Mentalist is
you’re doing this all wrong!
Let her into the bed with you every night before you fall asleep. ..then you don’t have to do it at 5:00 a.m.
there ain’t nothin’ nicer than curling up with a fuzzball…
And dont try to negotiate anything. She’ll leave you as much room as she thinks you need.
(seriously—Despite all the irritation, a squirmy cat tiptoeing across your spine and then pouncing on your delicate bits is charming, in its own way…The first few nights you’ll have trouble sleeping, but do give it a try (really!). After a few nights, you’ll both get used to each other, and sleep better.
This thing has broken my sleep for years. I will definitely abolish the concept of kitty breakfast when I get the next one. What I am doing at the moment is leaving him and his brother on the screened porch all night long.
On the weekends, this doesn’t work out as well, because he still wants to keep the weekday schedule, so he’ll start tapping on the glass door. My tactic for that is to open the door, and as he dashes for the opening, soak him with the spray bottle. Then I shut the door, leaving him on the porch, and set the spray bottle on the floor where he can see it through the glass. He doesn’t usually tap again.
This is only our current arrangement; we have been fighting an ongoing battle, and soon enough, he will retaliate with a fresh ass-pain.
I have a filled bowl of dried cat kibble set out at all times. Saves a lot of time and trouble. The cats don’t bother me for food at all anymore. They still bother me for love and cuddles, but not in the early morning anymore.
We have indoor only cats and it took years to finally figure out the solution to the early morning wake up. First we got an automatic cat feeder. It took about 4 different types to find one that they weren’t able to break or circumvent (and even then they still manage to outsmart it a couple times per year) but we settled on this one and it has worked pretty well for us. The second part of the solution is simply that we sleep with the bedroom door shut and the cats have run of the rest of the house. I do sometimes miss bedtime snuggles with the cats but overall this has been the best solution for our problem so we are sticking with it.
I did that with my previous cats, but my current guy will overeat if I let him free feed. Monty was lived on the street for most of his kittenhood. From this he learned to eat as much as he could because he never knew when he’d get more. Eight years later and he hasn’t forgotten it.
motorized disco ball on the ceiling with colored lights shining on it. set these on a timer for that morning time. also hang a length of yarn so that it spins about 2 feet off the floor to the disco ball.
This is all assuming that the reason the cat wants Mama up is because he wants food. He might just want Mama! In which case, I have no answers.
But I believe there are time-release food-dispensers, for pets that can’t free-feed; it might be worth looking into. Set it up to deliver right about the time the cat might want Mama, and the distraction might work.
