For a couple of years in my distant youth, my brother and I roomed together. He had a cat with the nasty habit of peeing in your shoes. Nothing quite guarantees a lovely day like sticking your feet into heels soaked with cat pee as you’re trying to dash out the door for work.
I liked rooming with my brother, but I wasn’t sorry when he and his cat found new living arrangements.
In my experience, the one thing that’s worse than finding a dead mouse in your shoe is finding a not-quite-dead mouse in your shoe. :eek:
I think it has to do with your shoes being the things that most smell like you. Everything else you wear gets washed, removing your scent, but your shoes retain that wonderful aroma of stinky feet.
Despite being a klepotmenerac, the stripey cat is incredibly patient with the insane kitten.
Indeed. A very sweet video.
my general experience has been that if you keep them inside for the first year of their life, they’re content because there’s enough to explore.
after that, you can let them start exploring outdoors. by that time they’re not as good a hunters as they’d like to think they are as mine never catch anything.
(I do this for basically the same reason already mentioned - they just look and act sad, depressed. seeing them in the window looking like a shell of a cat is torture to me as well.)
the difference in their overall contentness is night and day. they come in after a long day outside and it’s like they’ve been at a job they love. they’ve got a purpose. their eyes are brighter, their coats are shinier. they just seem complete.
if they only live 1/2 as long but they’re 1000% happier during that time it’s all good.
*funny story - a ferral cat that became as much my cat as anyone’s for the 10 years until she died was a stone cold killer. she knew she always had a meal here but sometimes she just wanted to eat something wild, sometimes she’d just bring me what she killed like she did it for lack of having anything better to do, sometimes she’d toy with live birds she’d caught for the fun of recatching them. so my horrible hunter cat was obviously frustrated after trying to sneak up on multiple birds one day, especially after watching the one cat hunt and bag pray at will in front of her. so there was a blue bird, whose name was jay, that was being very aggressive to the cats that was perched on a limb not too far from the horrible hunter. I got my pellet rifle and dropped that bird about 8 feet in front of her. she ran over an grabbed it clearly thinking it was her hunting skills that let her catch it. the funny, cute, warm your heart part of it was how she paraded around and showed everyone. she was like a minature clydesdale horse, so proud of herself. she walked around with that bird for 20 minutes. I could swear she was smiling. that’s her one and only “kill”.
and anyone that has a problem with me killing that bird. . … save your breath. I don’t care. those birds are the biggest buttholes on the planet. and as happy as it made my cat, I wouldn’t trade that day for a thousand dollars
For North America, at least, it wasn’t a squirrel and blue jay paradise before Europeans came along. Small animals were eaten by foxes, bobcats, wolves, badgers, and other predators we have displaced. So I don’t feel expecially tortured that cats are filling a niche that already existed.
In the latest adventures, a couple of days ago the cats brought a nice Dearfoams bedroom slipper to the side of my bed. I told them to bring me the other one, but their grasp of English isn’t great and they thought that I said “bring me a dead squirrel.”
I don’t think that the cat is always *putting *the dead mouse in your shoe. A lot of the time the mouse is merely mortally wounded, and it’s looking for a place to hide but unfortunately dies. Your shoe is a reasonably good place to hide from the cat.
The episode of Nova I saw a few weeks ago contradicts that. According to that program, cats don’t bring mice and birds into the house to give them to their owners. They simply want to bring their prey back to their home territory. As to why your shoes? Wild ass guess – the cat is trying to hide it from scavengers and other cats, and your shoe seems like a good place to hide it.