We have a siamese cat who is very vocal. In particular, he likes to meow and meow and meow between the hours of 12 AM to 3 AM. If we let him out, he’ll go to a window by my mom’s room and meow and meow until she lets him in.
I don’t have a problem with him meowing or scratching at the doors at night- I sleep through most of it. But my mom, wtih the door shut and earplugs on, is disturbed by it. Here’s the annoying thing about it though- When the cat is making nosie, she screams at him, through her room. While I am not awakened by the cat’s meowing, I am awakened by the sound of my mother screaming.
The first time it happened, I panicked, because I thought something was wrong with her. THen I find out she was just yelling at the damn cat :smack: Her room is fairly close to mine, and she can let out a pretty good yell. I’m desperate for sleep just as much as she is; if she just DIDNT FUCKING SCREAM AT THE CAT maybe I could get some sleep! :mad:
I generally try to ‘wear out’ the cat by playing with him for 20 minutes before I go to bed. If I chase him around enough, he’ll get tired, curl up in a ball and go to sleep. But 3 hours later, he wakes up and is hyper again, and I guess he can’t understand why none of us will come out of our rooms to play with him from 10 PM to 6 AM :rolleyes:
Siamese cats are just naturally “talkative”.
Get a laser pointer, and get kitty to chase the little red dot. Let her chase it until she is tired and sleepy.
Can you confine the cat to, say, the laundry or something at night? When our Burmese was a kitten, we used to lock her up every night with her litter tray, a bowl of water, some dry food, a place to sleep and some toys and after a while it got to a point where she’d decide it was bedtime and hassle us to lock her in for the night. Once she got older she became less hyperactive so we don’t need to lock her up anymore and she’s now happy to sleep in our room.
We could, but Buster the cat has a rather potent tactic. When he wants something, or wants to play, he’ll meow at our doors. Now, he has not guarantee he will wake any of us up, but he has all night, so he’ll just wear each member of the household down until one of them cracks (usually my mom). If we shut him in the laundry, he would meow non-stop ALL NIGHT. I could probably sleep through it, but like I said, when my mom gets woken up by the cat, she likes to scream. LOUDLY.
I think the better solution here is to shut my mom in the laundry, and let Buster move into her old room :mad:
I can’t believe the zero sympathy you have for your poor mother. Are you so self-centered that you think your own sleep is all that matters? Makes no difference whose cat it is. :mad:
Well, yeah, that’s the first thing I thought, too. Talk about a set of priorities that’s way out of whack.
However, since I’m guessing the cat’s not going anywhere and neither is mom, I’d probably see about investing in some industrial-type earplugs for her.
Apparently she shows no sympathy for her son when she screams and wakes him up, either, so it looks like both sides are even in this case. They should shut the cat in the laundry and see if his mom (with earplugs in and door shut) still hears it.
Well, there’s no reason that I should get woken up just because the cat is meowing. She doesn’t have to scream at Buster when he’s meowing, after all that doesn’t do anything. By the way, she does wear earplugs, she’s just a very light sleeper. I would be more sympathetic for her if she didn’t scream at the top of her lungs at 2 in the morning, startling me awake.
Imagine if you got woken up nearly every night by a member of your household screaming at a pet. Wouldn’t you be the least bit bothered about being unable to get af full night’s sleep?
I’d honestly be more concerned for the family members not getting their sleep. See, I tend to actually care when others can’t sleep. If I was your mom and you bitched at me for not being able to sleep because the cat is keeping me up, I’d tell you to piss off and find your own place to live, if you don’t like it. You’re 24 years old, for Chrissakes.
Just because YOU can’t get a full night’s sleep, why should I suffer?
Are you for real? Your mother is screaming because the damn cat is keeping her up every night! As the owner of the cat, it is YOUR responsibility to ensure that he is not disturbing other people, be it the neighbors or the other members of your household. You’re putting your CAT ahead of your MOTHER? Can’t you see that your priorities are out of whack?
I’m as big of an animal lover as they come, but let me tell you something. If Buddy the Beagle kept anyone in my house up all night with his incessant howling, his ass would be in the basement or out the fucking door.
I scanned through the thread a couple times, and can’t figure out where he said he’s the owner; did I miss it? In the OP, he uses the phrase “We own” when referring to it.
I still think it’s unacceptable to wake up everyone else in the house just because you’ve been awakened, and especially if your screaming does nothing to fix your problem.
It typically takes a lot more than 20 minutes of play to make a cat tired enough to sleep through the night. They’re nocturnal, after all, and are used to short bursts of energy followed by catnaps.
I’d suggest playing longer and harder and more frequently with the cat, so that he’ll sleep longer. Then I’d lock him in your room. You can obviously sleep through the yowling, so it’s no hardship on you to have him in there, and the further away from your mom’s room he is, the less likely she is to be woken up.
If she can still hear him, locked in another room, with all the doors shut and earplugs in, while she’s supposedly in a sound sleep, she probably has some sort of sleep disorder and should see a doctor. If she’s coming into your room to scream at the cat, she has anger management issues and should see a therapist. I personally find it a bit disturbing that she’s screaming at the cat loudly enough to wake up the whole house in the middle of the night, anyway.
Of course, all this ignores the fact that by getting up to let the cat in and out, she’s just reinforcing the behavior. He yowls at her door or window because it gets him what he wants. You generally can’t train cats to do tricks and such like you can dogs, but they are trainable, and she’s basically training the cat to come to her when he wants something in the middle of the night. Rather, the cat’s training her to get up and pay attention to him when he yowls. Maggie-moo had Dr.J trained like that. She’d squawk and bat at him, and he’d trot into the kitchen and put a few kernels in her bowl, just like Pavlov’s dog. (It would have been really funny to watch, except that I had been going nuts trying to figure out why her diet wasn’t working.)
:eek: You are so right! I assumed that Incubus was the owner of the house and his mom was living with him. Why I assumed that I have no idea. It’s undoubtedly the other way around; He’s living in his mom’s house and she is the cat owner. Upon re-read, that makes a lot more sense because the cat was going to his mom’s window to be let in.
A thousand apologies, Incubus. Allow me to direct my rant away from you and back at your mother for letting a damn cat ruin her, her son’s, and probably even her neighbors’ good night sleep. Shame on her.
Yeah, I live with my mom. I don’t want to get into the details of it because I’m sick and tired of having to justify my living arrangement when it truth it is generally satisfactory for all parties involved. The official owner of the cat is…well he’s kind of a member of the household, and everybody pitches in to take care of him. I try to do my part by attempting to tire him out. However, I just think it is kind of unfair that my mom can’t find some other way to deal with his meowing other than screaming.
The Pit thread is a volatile place, and I don’t post here for sympathy, I post to rant. ‘Why don’t you just move out’ is a cop-out and an unrealistic solution to a rather mundane issue here.
Tell your mother to get a spray water bottle (like the sort you use to mist houseplants with) ensuring it’s got a ‘squirt’ option.
If she fills it up every night and greets the yowling cat with a ‘No!’ backed up by a squirt of water, it’s not only theraputic for her, but the cat should learn fairly quickly that there’s no joy to be found in playing for attention in the wee small hours.
I used this tactic on my cats when they’d scratch at the screen windows to try and get in, instead of using the cat flap. They learned after about a half-dozen squirts or less, but in the case of a heavily ingrained habit it might take longer.