I hadn’t really thought about that, but M Night doesn’t knead either. He’s a very paws-on kitty in every other way though. He loves to hold onto me with his paws and if I move my hand away from his grip he’ll reach out for it. He also loves to touch my face with his paw when he’s happy with me.
One of my cats, Cory, will pet me. He just takes a paw and strokes my face or my arm. He isn’t trying to play, and he isn’t trying to get my attention, because he does it when I’m looking right at him. I honestly think he sees us petting him and the other cats and figured “hey, I can do that, too!”
Not my cat, but a cat I met in northeastern Minneapolis comes into the bathroom and tries to get cuddly and/or drink from the bathroom sink whenever anyone’s in there. His owner says that a friend once had to wash the cat and wipe down most of the bathroom after the cat swatted at his pee stream! The lock to that bathroom doesn’t work, either, so it ends up that the door’s open whenever anyone’s in there (because the cat pushes it open and jumps in), and closed when they aren’t.
They do.
I grew up with a cat who learned how to paw on a closed door in such a way as to make it sound like a little kid knocking. Needless to say, this often resulted in some mixture of confusion and hilarity in our household.
One of our cats at times could be very particular about who she received a good petting from. Usually at about 1am. Now, chances were that I was awake and would try to meet her attentional needs, but this was not good enough.
So she would walk up onto the wifes chest and yell at her. Now the wife is dead asleep and a vocal cat is not going to wake her up at this point in time.
Cat applies paw to side of wife’s nose. tap tap tap.
No visible reaction from the wife.
tap tap tap
Still no reaction.
TAP TAP TAP
Nope, nothing.
Invert paw. Extend claws. Hook claws inside sleeping wife’s nose.
Hey, reaction. Cool! MEOW. MEOW. MEOW.
It was pretty entertaining to watch.
My Scout does that, too.
Lucycat likes to lick my hair. She’ll walk up behind me on a couch and just sit there playing with it.
I figure she was a hairdresser in a former life.
I have to use doorstops to keep the doors open. Or Daniel the Terrible will slam them. He’ll rear up and lean both front paws against the other side of the door until it swings shut. This trick of his resulted in the cat sitter freaking out and thinking someone had been through when I was on vacation one time, and then freaking me out too. Then we figured it out.
Daniel also likes to scratch madly at the sliding closet door just to listen to it rattle in its setting until I shoo him away.
He will also try to chew on my hair and yank it out by the roots. Little big bastard. 
Smokey chases her tail, something I thought only dogs did, but I have seen other cars do it since I first noticed her doing it about two years ago. But it’s very silly to watch. She sits in Egyptian cat pose, her tail twitching a bit. She catches a glimpse of something moving behind her and tries to pounce on it and spins around and around trying to catch her tail. Unfortunately, I never seem to be near my camera when she does this.
In the morning she behaves a lot like Simon’s Cat (stopping just shy of the bit with the bat)
Tybalt, the fuzzy black land shark, has recently begun knocking over the laundry hamper in my bedroom and making a sleeping nest out of the dirty clothes inside.
Also, in keeping with the couple of bathroom-oriented stories already mentioned, whenever I go into the john to take a dump, he dashes from wherever he is in the house so he can come and curl up on my feet.
The Siamese I grew up with, Princess Catherine Anne Marie, had a litter of truly exceptional kittens. One actually got a book written about him. But the real prize was a large boy who became the owner of good friends of my parents, who named him (groan) Chum Fun.
Things I have personally witnessed Chum Fun do:
– He would open doors with doorknobs by jumping up and hooking both paws over the knob, then turning it back and forth until the door opened.
– His female human slave being a dealer in antique glass, the house was filled to the gills with it. As in every surface, even narrow ledges and windowsills. Chum Fun would thread his way through, around, under, and over the glass, no matter how narrow the surface. He never broke a single piece in his entire life.
– He preferred to get his own kibble, so his humans kept it in an earthenware jar sitting on the bottom of one of the kitchen cabinets. He would open the cabinet, reach in and scoop himself out a few pieces, and nibble away. When the jar was too empty for him to reach the kibble, he would carefully drag his food bowl across the kitchen and place it just so, then tip the jar over so the kibble would land in the bowl. He never spilled it on the floor; his aim was impeccable.
– He trained his humans to give him a fresh poached egg for breakfast every morning. Okay, that’s not a trick he did per se, but it was still admirable!
He was a wonderful cat. My mom still has pictures of him somewhere. He was, hands down, the single smartest cat I have ever known.
My cat loves footwear. When we take our shoes off inside the house at the doorway, she’ll eventually find her way to our shoes, sniff them, roll around all over them, scuttle them across the floor…she’s got a major foot fetish that one.
Now and then she’ll also have a major spazout and start running all over the house as if she was given a few cans of Red Bull, dashing this way and that, eyes wide, and will unfailingly run up to an open doorway and leap six feet straight up and cling to the frame, hang there for a few seconds, look around in surprise, then drop down and take off all over again. It’s hilarious to watch.
Yeah, Siamese are the Mensans of the cat world for sure. I had one when I was younger. He was able to hold entire conversations with us, and I swear some of his mews sounded like real words.
But I want to know about the book and the kitten it was about.
I’m trying to remember. I know his people had a summer home on an island in Puget Sound, and he snuck aboard the ferry one day and vanished for months. His adventures in getting rejoined with his family were what the book was about, and while I can’t remember what they were, it was quite a story. I can’t remember his name, either; I’ll have to ask my mother. She probably still has a copy; she keeps all those things.
Bubba the Wonder Doof is six years old and I’ve had him since he was approximately one month old. My friend’s kids found him and decided he was perfect for me. (Before you get, er, catty, we didn’t know he was a Wonder Doof at the time.) He was young enough that I had to teach him to eat and drink. He mastered the eating very quickly (He’s still good at that) but it took him three months to master drinking from a bowl without first trying to drown himself. Sadly, he still messes that up sometimes. Bubba is…not bright.
He is, however, chock full of quirks and personality. Some of them are endearing like the Bubba Hug. When he wants petting, he climbs up so that his head and sometimes him upper body are on my shoulder (always the right shoulder) with the rest of his large self pressed against my torso. This can last a few seconds or several minutes. Sometimes he then drops himself into the crook of my left arm, very much like the position when you cradle a baby. He generously offers his belly for Extended Cat-Petting.
Less endearing is his periodic appetite for my delicious brains. I’ll be lying there, either sleeping or trying to, and he’ll suddenly leap on the bed and begin gnawing the back of my head. I am against this and it results in me chasing him around the room, spraying him with the water bottle while yelling, “IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT?”. My neighbors in the next apartment must think I’m a very cranky and kinky woman.
He also likes to sit in the freezer. He’s not checking out the food in there. He just likes to sit there. He gets very cranky about it if I want to shut the door before he’s done.
There’s also his weird jihad against toilet paper rolls. If I leave them anywhere except on the tank of the toilet, he must kill the infidel roll. I’m very proud.
This thread keeps reminding me of more weird things our cats do. Feather is a sheet killer - when I make the bed, she used to have to attack and kill the sheet as it fluttered around. She doesn’t seem to do that much any longer, though. Maybe she grew out of it.
Did I tell youse guys about Max needing to lick all the water off Jim’s head after he has a shower? Wet heads must be licked, and they must also be anchored in place with claws - a strange and painful experience, having your wet head licked by a cat.
They both looooooove the smell of a dirty, stanky dishrag. When I throw one down the stairs to get put in the washer at some point, they’ll both be rolling around on it once it’s dry. Kitty weirdos.
I’ve shaved my head a few times in my life (usually kept it about a year) and there was a certain level of regrowth between touch-ups where the hair would be about 1/2 - 3/4 inch long… and suddenly the cats wanted to groom my head. Suddenly, “mommy has fur!!”
It was very sweet, but a little strange to sit for 5-10 minutes holding still while a cat methodically licks your entire hair.
This reminds me of another Bubba quirk–he’s a washer. For the first five years or so, I was the recipient of his obsession with the cleanliness of others. It was especially strange to wake up to find a rather hefty cat holding you down while washing your face. Stranger still, I eventually got used to it and would just wake enough to mumble, “Quit it,” and roll back over.
An even weirder variation on this was when he’d decide my ear hygiene was not up to par. Bubba may be something of an idjit but he’s very thorough and determined. To add to the fun, the combination of rough cat tongue and thin skin in the human ear would sometimes result in scabs. You can imagine the look on people’s faces A) when they’d ask you why you had ear scabs and B) when you told them.
We have a kitten, about 3 months old. He was born and raised in the Humane Society (someone dropped off his pregnant mother). We adopted him about a month or so ago. He is deliriously happy to have a whole house to run around in. Best of all, though, he has a couple of humans around all the time. He loves to snuggle on us, which isn’t that odd, but he loves to snuggle up to our necks. When he’s sleepy, he wants us to hold him and pet him until he falls asleep, and then he wants to stay in our arms while he’s napping. Needless to say, he wholeheartedly approves of my husband’s habit of reclining in his chair and staring at the boob tube for hours at a time. This is just what a growing kitten needs…a place to nap undisturbed.
Of course he does the regular kitten nonsense of zooming around for no reason, ambushing and tackling everything in sight, and exploring the house several times a day. I have again grown used to the sensation of a small powderpuff tackling my knees at random intervals.
My late tom Shadow would wake me up if I slept too long by sneaking right by my side and pricking me with one of his claws. It always worked, and once I got to see out the corner of my eye how he’d raise his front paw ever so carefully, extend one claw, and very cautiously touch my bare side with it, waiting for me to react and give him food.
One saturday morning we were out of cat food and my wife told the begging Shadow: “You’ll have to get your own meal now, until we get to the store”. Shadow left silently but came back fifteen minutes later, hopping onto our bed, with a mouse in his mouth. He dropped the mouse onto my wife’s lap, looked her in the eyes and uttered a big Meaouw! How we laughed!
Damn I miss that cat.
Heh - Lynn, my husband says that they had a cat when he was growing up that loved the men in the household much more than the women, because the men would hold still and make a proper lap for extended periods of time. 