Going to the bathroom is a community event here . I sit on the toilet , and I have 2 Papillons at my feet , a Gordon Setter laying across the door and a cat trying to sit on my lap . Now I have the Gordie puppy joining us .
My bathroom is not large .
This will be interesting when puppy grows up , and I have 2 70 - 80 lb. dogs in addition to the others .
I may invest in an outhouse . :dubious:
I had two cats who were forbidden from entering the bedroom as there was a waterbed (remember waterbeds?) there and the cats made me nervous around it. I closed the bedroom door when I was in the room or out of the apartment, but…when I sat on the toilet and got well involved in what I was doing, Boomer and Nodoz would arrogantly stroll past the open bathroom door, heading for the bedroom. They wouldn’t even bother to sneer at me on their way!
“Hey, you two! Get right back here! Don’t pretend you don’t hear me! That room is out of bounds! Hey, I’m talking to you!”
No fools they, as long as I was sitting on the growler they knew I could do nothing but idly threaten, but as soon as they heard the flusshhhh! they knew the silly biped was about to go ballistic. As I was struggling to pull my pants up, two furry blurs would race past me, out of the bedroom and under the couch for a cooling-off period.
This went on for several years and finally became sort of a ritual. Why I never thought to close the bedroom door, or quietly get off the throne without flushing it, or setting some sort of booby trap for the cats, I don’t know. I guess we all realized there were rules of a sort to this, and we all had to observe them.
You haven’t owned a cat until it’s been in your underwear while you pottied. 
All three of my cats will follow me into our tiny bathroom. Pixel jumps onto the lid of the toilet so, if I’m in a good mood I need to lift her off, if I’m in a bad mood I just open the lid and let her fall off. Then she and Dot leap onto the tiny sink (knocking off the toothpaste as they do) and demand the faucet turned on. At that point I usually get a chance to sit down. Then Max comes in and rubs my legs for a while. It’s all very cozy.
Incidentally, we don’t lock anyone out of the room while we make whoopee. They just roll their eyes at us until it’s over.
If someone in my household makes the cardinal mistake of closing the bathroom door All The Way so it latches upon entering, our boy kitty will pound on the door and cry pitifully until either you let him in or you leave the room. If you didn’t let him in, he will follow you around the house giving you reproachful looks for about an hour.
He doesn’t even really want to be petted. He’ll take about 5 seconds of petting, and then he wants to attackticate the bathroom rug and/ or your feet and ankles, dig in the trash (which he only does if he’s keeping you company), fall into the bathtub and generally make a nuisance of himself. When he gets bored of the nuisancing, he’ll jump up and curl up in the sink for a short nap - and get out of the sink the second you leave the bathroom to go on about his business.
My cats don’t follow me into the bathroom on a regular basis. But when I had one of them at the vet for several days a few weeks ago, the other one got lonely. I took a bath one night, and she normally is fine with me closing the door. This time she was meowing frantically and bumping up against the door - like she thought I was disappearing, and she would be all alone!
Susan
Simple answer.
the cats are coming in to “stand guard”.
O Cats, they stand on guard for thee?
My cat is the bathroom supervisor. No bathing or sitting activities can be allowed unsupervised, and the door is not allowed to be shut with her on the outside. She likes to lie in the sink, drink out of the taps, and especially likes tub rubsies. Jim’s cat is not very interested in the bathroom.
Our siamese do the same thing - does yours dip it’s tail in the water too? Ours does, and I think it is because he can’t differenciate between the air temp and the water temp…
Actually, my dog is more likely to follow me in than the cat. Of course, the cat is my husband’s more than mine, whereas Bernie is my dog. She will leave as soon as I start unrolling the tissue - so I pretty much do that as soon as she gets there. I’m so mean!
If the Fuzzy Black Land Shark is in the house when I go in to take a crap, he’ll follow me in and flop down across my feet and purr and purr and purr.
They’re nuts, but that’s why we love 'em.
i broke a two-year lurk just because this thread made me laugh so hard, and i could no longer resist chiming in. 
from the day we brought Eddie home from the humane society, he seemed to panic when we went in the bathroom. stood at the door and yowled (as much as a kitten the size of my palm can yowl) until we let him in and left the door open, so he could see we were alright. we were confused, but he seemed to calm down once he was able to see us, and we chalked it up to possible kittenhood issues.
that was two years ago. every day since then, whenever i get out of the shower he looks at me with big eyes, chirrups a bit, meows with every step over to me…and starts licking the shower-water off my feet and ankles and rubbing himself against my legs, as though he’s trying to dry me off. i haven’t had the heart to tell him i don’t hate water the same way he does, and i love the attention. 
and i have not had a solo bathroom visit since. the routine is as follows:
he’s also come and quietly kept me company when i’ve had stomach bugs, though. he’s not the brightest, but he’s a sweetheart. i call him my Tom Cullen kitty.
Wow, I don’t think I ever drew in a lurker before. I love the story of the post-shower licking! Our cat licks my husband’s hand - I think he’s grooming my sweetie, or tasting him. Either way, it’s adorable.
Cats are vulnerable to falling into routines. I bet if you grab the lid and make a small move downward, but then stop lowering it, the cat will dive into the toilet bowl.
“M-E-O-W, that spells toilet!”
I would have to agree. However, it’s worse when you have a boyfriend who is SO amused by the situation that he takes a picture. :rolleyes: (No naughty bits visible.)
My kitties follow me into the bathroom when I let them, and they sit outside, sometimes waiting patiently, sometimes meowing piteously, when I don’t.
One of my cats, Savannah, is at least part Turkish Van – she likes water. We can fill the tub about 1/2 full and she’ll get in. We don’t do it often enough for her to get completely used to the sensation, but she’ll get in and play every time.
My cousin’s old cat, Kennedy, was a mean SOB. I mean, her neighbors and the local police knew this cat and stayed away. He was on kitty ritalin, and it didn’t appear to help. When my cousin’s now-husband moved in, Kennedy didn’t really like the change, and wasn’t terribly nice to Phillip. At Christmas a couple of years ago, though, my cousin was out in California with the family, and Phillip had to work and was at home with Kennedy. One of Kennedy’s favorite things was to run and jump onto the toilet lid while you were doing other things in the bathroom. Over this Christmas, one day Phillip came home and had to pee, so ran upstairs to the bathroom. Kennedy followed, and while Phillip is standing there peeing, Kennedy runs and jumps… into the toilet. Phillip finishes peeing, and has to grab a hold of the cat and wash him off.
From then on, Kennedy loooooved Phillip. It was like Phillip had marked him, and was now the alpha-male. He’d follow Phillip around.
Cats are nuts.
Well, if we’re including shower stuff … my deaf kitten Marlee always comes into the shower with us. She usually ends up zipping back out once she gets a little wet but she still comes into the shower every time. The newest kitten, Popeye, follows Marlee everywhere so he thinks the shower must be the place to be, too. However he’s become a little more leary of actually going in while the water is falling so now he just waits until I get out and licks my legs.
When I take a bath, the cats get very concerned. They keep coming in to the bathroom and looking at me but they don’t want to stay too long in a room with a huge vat of water. So they leave for a while and then come back again a few minutes later to check on me. It’s nice to know they’re so concerned.
I can handle the pacing around the edge of the tub, but the nagging can be annoying when I’m trying to read and relax. (Yes, I read in the tub, don’t you?) I love my Siamese but sometimes he talks a little too much.
JIm’s cat loves licking our hair after a shower. If I have the time, I like to lay on the bed and get a good head-grooming, complete with raucous purring.
Could be worse.
Once, long ago and far away, my mother was exceptionally pregnant with little old me. My father had (from before they married) a siamese cat who absolutely despised my mother. The feeling was mutual - my mother is quite decisively a dog person.
When my mother was 8 months or more pregnant, she took a lot of baths. It was easier for her than a shower (even though she needed assistance to get in and out of the tub) and took pressure off her ankles and back. She’d lay for hours in the tub reading.
Now, the tub is located in the master bathroom - attached to the master bedroom via a sliding door. The master bedroom door didn’t work particularly well at that point and the door would generally fail to latch.
The cat used to wait until my mother got in the tub and my father had returned downstairs to the TV. The cat would then paw open the bedroom door and slide open the bathroom door and go circle around the bathtub and yowl at my mother - being oh-so-careful to stay just out of her reach. Not much of a trick since the amount of moving around she could do was sharply limited. She’s a short woman and the tub was a very deep and long tub - she couldn’t really let go of the side with both hands at the same time for fear of sliding under the water, which she was really reluctant to do, given her limited mobility at the time.
When the cat was done yowling, he would inevitably launch his 20 pound bulk over the Evil Waters Of the Tub to land on my mother’s pregnant belly - which stuck up out of the water like a little kitty island. My mother couldn’t really sit up to dump the cat - and the tub was a little too narrow to turn on her side when she was that pregnant. So the cat would sit there purring happily and kneading her belly with his claws while giving my mother his very best shit-eating contented look until my mother’s irate shouting fetched my dad to get his damn cat. He would come up, take the cat, and lock the cat back out of the bedroom and attached bath and go back to his TV show.
After a moment, the cat would start pawing at the bedroom door and it all began again.