One of our cats, an eight-year-old female named Pearl, has been finicky all her life about where she wants to sleep. She used to sleep on the kingsize bed with the humans and the other cats and dogs. Then she decided she didn’t want to share, and she retreated to a back room in the house, where she slept on an old blanket on a big storage box. Then she got annoyed with the blanket for reasons unknown, and threw it off the box over and over.
Today I found that Pearl has created her own bed in a small utility room. She found a shallow cardboard box that a flat of canned cat food came in, and she lined it with an old fleece sweatshirt that was due to be laundered. The bed is under a wooden shelf, so she even has a roof. I am so proud of her.
What clever and unexpected things have your pets done lately? I’d love to see pictures, but descriptions are great, too. Tales of other people’s pets really do my heart good, and my heart is in need of some do-gooding these days.
When my cat ashes wants to play with a ball of yarn she has claimed as hers (we call it “yarn friend”) she pulls it off the shelf. If I’ve stuffed it in the back, she pulls out all the other balls till she gets to Yarn Friend. Then she wrassles it, licks it, and goes to sleep on it. Yarn Friend is a good friend to have.
Our cat taught himself to fetch. If you throw a hair elastic he’ll sprint and come back with it dangling in his mouth. He’ll then drop it at your feet and wait for you to throw it again. He signals that he’s tired of the game by dropping the elastic at the door and sitting on it.
Also on Mother’s Day he jumped on the bed with a piece of cardboard in his mouth, dropped it in front of me, and sat there watching. I turned to my fiance and was like “… did the cat just get me a Mother’s Day card?” The card was from the jeans my fiance had bought earlier that day and read “100% Cotton” but I guess it’s the thought that counts.
My lovely Charlie cat has started to seriously get my attention.
She was abandoned, nearly starved as a kitten. I got her when she was a year old. Took me almost a year to touch her. For about six months after that I was allowed to pet her just behind the ears, and only there, or she’d hiss and bite. Then she became very affectionate (just to me, she tolerates the rest of the family) and I was allowed to pet and brush her back, too - but not pick her up, she hates that. I thought that for Charlie, damaged as she had been at first, this was the best she would ever be. But then she started doing these incredibly loving things - pressing her head against my arm, rubbing her face on my arms and hands, and even if we were eye level, pressing her forehead against mine and staring into my eyes. She did what I call “leaping love bumps” - jumping up with her back feet still on the ground to rub herself against my legs. I thought it wouldn’t get better than that, but…
Just a couple of weeks ago, she was sitting between me and the keyboard (as she usually does) making vocal demads for pettin’s. Charlie’s meow is like a chain-smoker singing, rough and unlovely, but she will let you know what she wants, damn it!
I was ignoring her, cause I was working on something, so she put both paws on my shoulder and pressed her forehead against my face, purring.
I almost cried, it was so sweet. For Charlie to go from mistrustful and untouchable to this is just fantastic.
Maggie, our youngest, also plays fetch, with plastic bottle caps. She’ll trot diwn the hall carrying one in her mouth, and circle my chair a few times, then drop the cap on the floor, or sometimes in my hand. I’ll throw it down the hall, and she’ll scramble to get there before it lands, then repeat until…well, I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to get tired of it. I didn’t know cats would do that. It’s hilarious to watch.
What beautiful cat pictures, everyone! Triple AWWWW.
I don’t have pierced ears, so all my earrings are clips. When Ishtar was young, I went through a period of losing earrings (usually one of the pair) on an almost-daily basis.
One day, after this had been going on for a few months, and I’m ashamed to say as this really reflects on my nonexistent housekeeping habits, I moved an extremely heavy oak wastepaper basked under my husband’s computer desk only to find Ishtars’ treasure trove: a pile of earrings, buttons, ribbons, Christmas ornaments, gloves, socks. Once we had uncovered her treasure, that was the end of the filching.
Niblet is seven but still likes to play with a particular old well-weathered cord. She expects me to swing it over and around her so she can leap at it and wrestle it to the floor. When she feels like she wants to play, she sits on the far side of the cord, gazes at me and taps the cord with her paw. The look she gives me is one of “How much clearer can I make my needs, biped? Entertain me, now.”
That’s amazing, PinkFreud. My cat is the best jumper in the world, but she’s not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. She has no concept of even pulling a door open; if she isn’t able to push her way through, she isn’t likely to get through.
My cat Loki looks like a maneki neko, and - of course - we’ve taught him to wave! I happened across the instructions for kitten tricks, and we thought we would give it a go. First he needed food as a prompt, but now if I just wave at him and say the magic word (Wave!), he does a pretty good maneki neko impression.
So here’s the big plan:
Get a little red collar and gold bell <check>
Video it, release it on YouTube, and become a major celebrity in China and Japan
My cat Zen is pretty clever, but sometimes it’s very annoying. If she’s hungry in the morning and decides that we’re sleeping in too late, she’ll take a flying leap and land directly on a pressure point. She knows nekojutsu.
On the doorway to my husband’s home office we’ve installed a plastic “strip door” similar to what is used in industrial cold rooms. This enables the cats and dogs to come and go freely, but keeps in most of the heat (in the winter) or air conditioning (in the summer). One of our cats has never figured out how to use the strip door. It’s made of transparent, flexible flaps of vinyl. What’s so hard about it, I don’t know. Even when she sees other animals passing through, she just sits neaby and looks puzzled, as if it’s some sort of a magic trick that she can’t get the knack of.
That’s funny, and reminds me of a former cat, Jaws. Got sick of putting him out and bringing him in when he scratched on the door, so we put in a cat door, the kind with a frame and a translucent plastic flap.
To get him used to it, we pushed him outside a couple of times, and he caught on rather quickly; just pushed his way through.
Then we heard a strange sound and went to look at the cat door. There he was outside, batting the bottom of the flap until it swung out enough for him to catch with his paw. Then he just ducked under and came in.
first we said, “Stupid cat,” then then realized it took a bit of calculating to figure out that the door that flopped out had to be opened this way.
No matter how many times I went out and pushed him back in, he still always got in his own way. Probably just thought it was fun.
He was named Jaws for the obvious reason. He never scratched, but if he decided to bite you, watch out!
My parents have a cat who used to brush her tail up against a human’s leg when she wanted something. I say ‘used to’ because she had to have her tail amputated back in early December. The funny thing is: now she stands next to the human, so her tail, if she still had it, would brush up against you. It’s like she doesn’t realize that her tail is gone. Sad, but also funny.
I’ve mentioned this before. My cat (and she is MY cat, though she loves everyone) has trained my husband to cover her up with a blanket. He’ll be lying on the couch, with a sheet or blanket over himself, and she’ll come up to him, lie down on the blanket or sheet, scratch at it, and look at him. He will then cover her up.
She has more success at training him than I do! Of course, I don’t purr.
Cute kitty
