The pictures in that thread are gorgeous. But cats are in bowls! On countertops! In sinks! I’ve never had a cat, but if I did I wouldn’t want it on my kitchen counter. Or on the couch or on my bed, either.
I do have a dog. He’s 45 pounds of best friend, and he is not allowed on the living room furniture. Why? I don’t know, I just don’t allow it. He doesn’t sleep on my bed, either. At most, when it’s time for me to go to bed (or he thinks it’s time) he’ll jump up on the foot of the bed and hang out for awhile, then goes off to sleep in his favorite corner.
I wonder if I’d feel differently if he was a small dog. Or if he was a cat. Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind.
Yes. my cats are allowed on furniture, in beds, wherever. For some reason they do not get on my countertops - I’ve never trained them not to, and it isn’t too high to jump on, but I’ve never had a problem with it. I don’t keep food or dishes (not even bowls) out on my counters, so there isn’t a reason for them to go there.
My dog is too old to get up on the furniture/beds anymore, but there are plenty of nice soft dog beds all over the floors for him.
Pets are allowed anywhere I’d sit my stinky ass or feet. No countertops, tables or desks (I know they do it when I’m not looking and they think I can’t hear). If they climb up into a shelf or something, well, I’ll let that slide maybe.
The cats can be on the furniture, and they must know this, because they are never, ever on the furniture. Once in awhile I’ll find one on a bed, but they seem to prefer the middle of the living room floor, or the bit of sunlight in front of the door, or the bathroom, on the rug in front of the toilet, but only in the middle of the night.
No dog on the furniture though. He has a doggie bed, and a favorite spot on the stair landing.
The dog is not allowed on our bed or on the furniture. He has a nice cozy dog bed next to ours.
However, the kids allow him to sleep on their beds, so he’ll make the rounds during the night, and end up on his dog bed. I think he’s been missing our son since he went away to college, because he’ll lay on the bed and look out the window, almost like he’s wondering where Ivyboy got to.
He has been known, if we do not shut our bedroom door, to hop up on our bed when we are away. I have found sand in the bed as evidence. So we have to be sure to shut the bedroom door…when the parents are away, the pets will play.
In our house, keeping the cat off the furniture is like trying to stop gravity. You may tell gravity no, make loud noises when gravity tries to jump on the table, or squirt gravity with water, but gravity will still ignore you and do what it is naturally inclined to do. Sigh. Our only real rule has become no cats on the eating and food preparation surfaces, but even that is hard to enforce, since the prized window perch is over the kitchen sink.
My dog has done the same. I even found him curled up in the center of the bed with a chew toy he’d brought up with him once. In this house, the furniture, and dishes are for people only. Well, he has his own dishes and his own bed, but we don’t share.
Basically, our kitty is not into knocking breakables off tables and is a comforting presence on the couch or windowsills. But she’s such a beggar about food that she is strictly Not Allowed on the dinner table, even when no food is present. She seems happy with this but will perch on the coffee table near the dinner table and “draft” the yummy dinner smells eagerly.
The cats and the dog are allowed on the couch, but the dog knows that when we say “get down”, he has to get down. The cats sleep on my side of the bed, and I would happily have the dog in bed as well, but he has weird short little legs and can’t get up there. We have never had a problem with counter surfing, but if any of the little furry darlings tried to get up on the counter or the table, I’d discourage it. Not because I have a problem with it, but because people who come to our house might not think that pet hair is an appropriate condiment.
The dog is allowed on the futon in the den, and was allowed on my bed before her arthritis got bad. The living room furniture and my parent’s room was strictly off-limits.
Note that in no way did those restrictions actually keep her off the sofa when we weren’t home. I once caught her in the act and man did that dog look guilty.
He’s also learned that when someone is in the kitchen, food might get on the floor. Even if we’re just doing dishes, he’ll lick the dishes that have been placed in the dishwasher.
Of course, when I am slicing cheese or separating salami for a sandwich I have been known to throw some down on the floor for him, so *kitchen + family = fun food that’s not in my bowl *is not necessarily a wrong assumption.
The only room in my first house the cats didn’t own and control was the kitchen. Then we moved. The layout of our current house doesn’t allow for shutting off the kitchen, and I have two highly cat-allergic sisters-in-law who were raised in this house and like to come visit and see what I have done to the place.
Problem solved: The Cat Suite. The album shows views of the double garage I enclosed and converted into a happy cat zone, complete with their own sofa, recliner and crib. My office (and computer) are out here so I spend a good amount of time here. They were never big TV fans so I didn’t bother to get them a TV.
Yogi is my teddycat so he does come in the bedroom occasionally to sleep with me.
My cats like to stretch themselves on the floor across doorways. They like to stretch themselves across the second step from the top (which is also the darkest step and the one where we’re least likely to see them). One of them likes to sleep on my desk. Recently I cleaned off the desk, he jumped up there, didn’t see the usual jumble of stacks of paper and notebooks, and he left. In the middle of the night we have The Changing of the Cats, when the female cat is ready for a little nighttime action so gets off the bed and scratches at the door, and the male cat is ready to retire, so he scratches on the door from the other side. (Sometimes paws of one or another make it under the door, which is fun to watch.) Whichever cat ends up in the bedroom sleeps on the bed, or under the bed, or watches outside from the window and then leaps onto the bed.
I prefer them not to be on countertops, and they very rarely go there.
Cats and dogs are not allowed tables and countertops. The dogs aren’t allowed on the couch or chairs, but the youngest doesn’t understand this and gets up on the couch to look out the window.
All of the animals are allowed on our bed; two of our dogs sleep with us most nights.
