Well, my recently dead cat Banzai used to catch mice or birds and bring them in and happily put them either on my pillow, or on the floor by the bed. Nothing like rolling over in the morning nose to nose with a dead mouse, or getting up, and feeling/hearing that soft wet crunch as you stand up. I started grabbing him when he was running around with a kill and drop him into the dry bathtub. He quickly got the idea that is where you take prey. We have woken up to a pissed off squirrel in the tub… Odd thing is he taught our newest cat Jezebel to do the same. She catches mice but isnt familiar with the fact they ned to be killed, so we come in to find liing mice in the tub. She also adores playing with the little squishy yellow earplugs, treating them just like prey. She is very cute running around with one in her mouth doing the ‘i have a fresh kill’ chirrrrup that part siamese have=)
Banz also liked drinking out of faucets in the sink or tub, and was an inveterate ‘russian hat’ he would sleep curled up around mrAru’s head on his pillow=)
Jezebel we also call our moving punctuation mark, as she is pretty much all white, except for her tail which looks like it was dipped in ink, and a black dot of fur around her bumhole…when she was first home, she was skittering away with her tail pointed straight up and looked just like an exclamation point running away=) !
Our late cat **Cricket ** (who passed on at the ripe old age of 19) liked to watch TV. Specifically, nature shows involving birds or small mammals. One time I was watching a bird show on TV with her–both of us sitting on the sofa not to far from the TV set–when a bird flew across the screen. She flew over the TV set to try to catch the bird as it came out the back of the TV, then looked very embarassed when no bird emerged.
She also liked to unroll string balls. We’d wrap a few feet of string into a ball and drop in the middle of the floor. She would whack the ball around until it was completely unwound, then come and yell at us to wind it back up again.
Our current cats:
**Paka ** (Swahili for ‘cat’ according to our 13yo daughter) has a favorite pasttime of chasing and fetching a smallish plastic toy jack (the kind that comes with a bouncing ball). We adopted him as a stray, and he spent a lot of time in our basement prowling through our kids’ toys before we got him fixed and de-clawed. He found three of these jacks among the toys down there, and adopted them as his own. He will bring a jack to us, and drop it at our feet for us to throw for him. One time, I ignored him when he did this, so he picked up the jack in his mouth, jumped into my lap, and meowed in my face–still holding the jack firmly between his teeth.
**Minou ** (French for ‘kitty’) is very shy, but has a particular fetish for socks, especially black ones. DH wears pretty much only black socks, and our sock sorting technique is basically just to sort socks into baskets depending on who they belong to, then the appropriate person can choose to pair them however and whenever they wish. Minou discovered our sock baskets fairly soon after we adopted her from the Humane Society, and we regularly find stray black socks in the living room when we come home in the afternoon. (DH started actually putting his into drawers so they don’t become Minou fodder, but I’ve graciously donated all of my never-worn-anymore black knee highs to the cause.) One day, though, we came home to find a pair of my black pantyhose in the living room. Minou had apparently persisted with her fetish enough to drag the entire length of hose out of the basket and up the stairs.
Both of them are fiends for toilets. Whenever they hear a toilet flush, they come running as fast as they can to watch whatever is in there swirl around and disappear. :dubious:
Our late cat Cricket jumped into the tub with me the first time she caught me taking a bath. DH and I usually took showers, and she liked licking the water off the walls and the tub after a shower. When she saw me in the bathtub, without the shower on, I guess she thought it would be a shortcut to getting the water on the walls. She jumped straight from the floor, over the side of the tub, and into the water. Then jumped out again faster than she had jumped in, because she hated being wet, and ran all over the apartment yelling until DH caught her and dried her off with a towel.
Persophone eats the pineapple chunks off the Hawaiian pizza, licks off all the tomato sauce and leaves the ham. She also loves to take baths, and will hop into the tub with you if you don’t shut the bathroom door.
Gabby will curl up on my chest if I’m laying just right. She will then proceed to do one or all of the following things: Headbutt me, lick the tip of my nose, snuggle up against me, paw my face (indicating that she needs a head scritchel), or repay the scritchel’s I’ve given her by doing the same to my neck. She keeps her claws in, so she doesn’t scratch me, but she hasn’t quite figured out that the amount of pressure she applies to my neck makes it very difficult for me to breathe! :eek:
She also gets mad at me if I’ve “been seeing other cats” and will spend a great deal of her time giving me dirty looks.
She follows me around the house (except for when I go to the bathroom), likes to sleep on the kitchen floor in front of the sink (though last week it was the fridge), cares not for catnip, or cat toys, but if you value your life, do not get between her and a dairy product!
I had a cat named Alex that loved to play “Bloody Knuckles”. She would sit next to me and raise one paw, holding it out slightly, until I held my fist out to touch it. She’d attempt to hit my fist, usually successful on the first try, and then it was my turn. You should have seen us together, taking turns saying “ow!” and shaking our injured hand/paw! I’ve tried to teach this trick to subsequent cats, but most of them tire of it quickly and refuse to play again. Alex was the only one who would seek me out to initiate a game.
When I got home from work I would say to Thai-Thai (Siamese, you know), “You want to go for a walk?” and I would then take him for a walk around the apartment complex. He “heeled” most of the time as he had imprinted on me from age 6 weeks. After a while, if I didn’t ask or take him soon enough, he would jump up onto the doorknob and hang there until I went out with him. I sometimes let him roam outside without me and one day he did not return.
Fred (a female cat) likes ice in her water bowl. A piece accidently fell into her bowl one day. She scooped it up with her paw and started licking it. Now, when we refill her water bowl, she’ll sit back and stare at us until we add ice.
When the other cat is eating, she’ll go up to her and use her paw to stroke the eating cat’s neck and back.
When she decides the stop and lie down, she sort of flops down and rolls over on her back . I’ll often find her laying spread-eagle asleep.
She also loves boxes. I had a shipment from Amazon recently and in came in a box smaller than a shoebox. She immediately had to get into it despite the fact that she was almost twice its size.
