I can understand why a cat feels inclined to chase around a string or bat around that plastic tab thingy that comes off the milk jug.
These are all things that simulate what a ferral cat might see in the wild like a mouse, bug or whatever. So they feel the instinctive need to kill it.
But Bedsheets? Why is it every time I try to put my bed sheets on the cat has to jump under there and start attacking invisible monsters?
Seriously, I can’t think of one thing in the wild that even comes remotely close to looking like a bedsheet floating slowly down to the mattress.
If this were just a one time thing, I’d dismiss it as; I’ve got a crazy cat. But I know for a fact, lots of cat’s do this.
Heh - not sure, but I’ve had some cats that love that and some that don’t get it at all. My armchair (duvet?) theory is that the ones that love it prefer hiding and catching games - like when you dangle things over the back of a chair and they creep up and attack it, rather than something where they can see you manipulating them! I like to think these are the more intelligent ones as there’s surely some imagination going on when they’re engaging in the challenge of attacking and defending when they can’t see.
My armchair theory is that it’s about the stimulation of the play. When they play around in bedsheets, the sheet is pulling on them all over their body, so they can just go crazy. It’s about play rather than about actually catching something, and goes with my armchair theory that because we care for cats in the same way as the mother cares for her kittens (getting its food, rather than requiring it to hunt for itself), domestic cats don’t mentally grow up.
Observing my cat stalking frogs in my back yard, I would armcheorise that they instinctively stalk “small thing moving under covering”. The frogs hop around under the leaves of the shrubbery, and she watches this from above, then dives under the leaves and pounces through the foliage onto the frogs. Bedsheets simulate this.
Or that over the centuries, they have evolved to retain neonatal traits ( aka “not growing up” ) that help them get along with humans. Like playfulness.
That is close to my theory, and also analagous to the house elves only they can see - the house elves run around the room in the evenings, that is why cats get the night crazies, attacking unseen things on the floor.
Kittens play a lot, with their mothers and with their siblings, and that play helps them to learn useful things, like how to attack prey. Their prey doesn’t have to be smaller than them: it could be a rabbit the same size as a cat, if the cat moves fast enough, so it makes sense to attack their siblings as if they were prey. So your cat has learned to play under the bedsheets, even though (in reality) there’s no prey in there, or in anything like it in the wild. When you learn new things, they don’t need to have survival value: they just need to satisfy your instincts.
Ability to learn a variety of things is useful in itself: in different environments, a feral cat might survive by catching fish, land animals, or birds. But, because you can learn a variety of things, some things that you learn may not have survival value, like a cat playing with sheets or a dog catching a frisbee. As long as these learned behaviours do not have negative survival value, that’s not a problem.
This, or some variant. Kittycats and doggies of most any age retain the interest in teasing and playing.
I’ve heard it said that in addition to them selecting for that characteristic as part of being domestic critters, there is the reciprocal sense in which we selected them (or succeeded with them) in the first place because they (i.e., their ancestors) tended to be playful and there are other characteristics (being alert, paying attention to things not necessarily normally on their “radar”) that go along with playfulness that made them prime candidates. Foxes and wolves and some species of undomesticated cats are playful even as adults. And of course so are we, ourselves.
My cat takes time out from her busy schedule of sharpening her claws on all of our doorjambs to attack the evil sheets. Does your cat not know how to multitask, Sailboat?
why do some kitties like to just sit quietly between the clothes of a fully made bed, forming a lump you have to peel each layer back one by one to find?
bedspread…no kitty top blanket…no kitty comforter…no kitty top sheet…meoowwrr!! off like a shot.
They’re defending the bed against those pesky bedmice. Everyone knows that bedmice are evil, horrible things that attack innocent humans at night. When they start moving at the bottom of the bed, they must be stopped before reaching the human cozily sleeping. This becomes much easier if you lie in wait for them underneath the covers. Shame on you for exposing their hiding spot!
And if they just happen to claw your face to shreds while defending you, it’s your own fault for being a dumb human and not defending yourself from said Evil Bed Mice.
My friend’s former cat (now up up up to the heavyside layer) used to do this to the exclusion of almost all other play behavior. To the extent that my friend had a sheet of gold lamé–the cat was named Evita; formerly lived with two drag queens; the lamé came with her to her new home–that she’d pull out once a day or some and do this weird kind of shiny matador role-play with Evita. Made the cat very, very happy. (What also made her happy was listening to the soundtrack of Evita: apparently her former daddies played it all the time. My friend never played it, but she once had a neighbor who did, and Evita would sit in the window and bask in the waves of sound from the neighbors’ stereo.)
