It's a cat's life

Our cats really have it made. Being home for several days during the holidays you get to see the extraordinary activity level of the typical domestic cat first hand. Yes, if ever one of those cat-cams were afixed to our kitty-girls, the resulting video would only be slightly more exciting than one obtained from a 3-toed sloth. First, be it noted that both cats sleep on our bed, mostly, confining the smaller of us to much less than half the bed, and on occasion actually claiming the entire half for themselves. Now breakfast is certainly the most important meal of the day, and it must be served no later than 7:30 am because by 8 a cat could starve to death. Therefore as the critical must-feed time approaches greater and greater efforts must be employed to roust one of the two slugs whose primary function in life is to feed the cats. On regular work days this is no problem, but the concept of sleeping in, even on New Year's Day, is lost on cats, and a paw in the face is hard to ignore. Rousting the feeders is a duty undertaken by the senior member of our duo while the other waits serenely. The cats do perform a nice singing and dancing duet while you prepare their breakfasts, and then they and their breakfast both disappear even before you get your first cup of coffee. Both will be found back up on their bed, or some other piece of cat furniture, for their uninterrupted morning nap. It's a rough job, but someone has to do it. Later on there will be some long sessions of wildlife watching. And then when the feeders are at home, two or three hours of regularly reminding anyone in the kitchen that dinner time is rapidly approaching, or actually their grave concern that the clocks are in error and it is much later than you think. After dinner is the younger cat's chief period of activity, while the older cat wedges herself between TPP's let and the arm of his chair until eventually it's bedtime.  What a tough life these cats have. 

Cat behavior - instinct and learned

Cats have it pretty good around the Phactor household.  Kibble twice a day, lots of places to sleep, lots of nice windows, humans to provide some rubbing and petting when it's wanted.  What a deal.  Cats have a lot of hard-wired behaviors, things they do instinctively.  The younger of our two cats gets to venture outside at the end of a long leash, and she's amazingly good at stalking.  She drops and belly crawls forward, then freezes when the animal looks back, she uses the terrain for cover, and sometimes she gets surprisingly close for a cat on a cord.  Both like to play with things sort of hidden, grabbing for toys and the like, and not too gently either (fingers are not toys).  Both like to play with fuzzy toys, and the younger one plays really rough, a toy terror.  Both are fully armed with claws.  So last night and this morning some interesting sport arrived in the personage of a mouse in the house.  Oh, so very interesting. With the game so lop-sided, two large carnivores against one small prey animal, you figure this game isn't going to last long.  The older cat cornered the mouse behind a round garbage bin, and she moved as if she knew what she was doing.  But then the mouse made what looked like a fatal error and scooted for a safer place running right in front of the cat, right under her nose.  And she froze.  No grabbing it, no snapping at it, no pouncing!  What gives?  It was just as if she didn't know what to do.  The younger cat has reacted similarly.  After a stealthy stalk, she came nose to nose with her "prey", a youngish squirrel.  And she did nothing.  The game was over.  This makes you think that the stalking, the interest in the movement, and everything right up to the moment of truth in hunting is pretty instinctual, but neither of them knows how to kill their prey.  It's like their kitty brain gets up to the end of the hardwired behavior, and then their brain says, "Now what?"  So the mouse continues to roam the house.  Maybe it'll get chased to death, the cats like that part of the game, but it won't be dispatched by either of our cats actually attacking it to kill it.  The mother barn cats of my youth used to bring back almost dead mice for their kittens to "play" with, and it makes you think that the kittens had to learn how to kill their prey, an experience our pampered pets lack.  Or they just didn't want to sully the taste of kibble with mouse.     

Largest scratching post ever

This couch is actually a piece of functional art by France's Mathieu Mercier as shown at Galerie Mehdi Chouarkri.  The idea is simple, you get the bracket and then set whatever you want upon it.  As shown here with 2 roles of tangerine carpet, you get a couch.  A reviewer says, "I'm convinced that the more unsellably hideous the carpet, the better it would look on Mercier's bench, providing an endless demand for textile designers' mistakes", a sort of back-handed green washing.  But it's hard to argue with the main contention; try to imagine this color carpet looking good on any floor in any room.  However, without even reading one tiddle of the piece, TPP's first thought upon looking at this is that someone has made the biggest cat scratching post and piece of feline lounge furniture ever, no question, no doubt.  It's hard enough to try to convince the kitty girls that not everything, especially the living room couch, is a scratching post, but this would be a total non-starter in terms of cat discipline.  Actually the two cats presently possessing our house are pretty good girls.  Mostly they use the carpets (wake-up, yawn, stretch, scratch), and that's exactly why they would just totally, absolutely adore this couch.  And cat color vision is skewed to the other end of the spectrum, so this jarring tangerine would be perceived as a mid-shade of gray. 

Helpful cats

People without cats just don't know how helpful cats can be around the house.  How can beds get made, clothes folded, doors closed (or opened), or shoes tied without their helpful paws being involved?  So with the holidays approaching, and perhaps to show how helpful they could possibly be, like a kid trying hard to be extra good, our older, larger cat fixed her own breakfast.  And like a little kid fixing their own breakfast, there was some spillage, and this also meant that no portion control was being exercised by a kitty with a persistent weight problem.  Of course the Phactor enabled this self-help exercise by failing to secure the kibble in a cupboard.  It has been several years since our loveable "bad cat" died, the one who exploited every single available opportunity to break the rules to the point of being extraordinarily reliable.  And you think, well, we miss him, but now we're living with such good cats, but actually there may not be any such thing.  Even the best of cats cannot resist the temptation to break the rules when opportunity presents itself.  Something about cat situational ethics makes it so.  Or is it because she's black?

Cat Factoid in Doubt

Mrs. Phactor related this cat factoid to me last night: 73% of cat owners let their cat sleep on their bed.  This is simply not true, not factually accurate.  First, even assuming that their data is correct, the statement is simple wrong.  Stated correctly this factoid should read: 73% of cats decide to sleep on their owners' beds.  What makes people think it was their decision?  Duh!  Second, our data, albeit a smaller sample size, suggests at least 84% of cats want to sleep on your bed, but rarely two at one time.  In all cases the younger of the pair prevails in occupying the bed space even when there is room for two with considerable spatial separation.  Exceptions are usually siblings.  Our number 2 cat having been dispossessed of bed space keeps a careful watch on the guest bed, and should you visit be assured that you too can have a cat sleep with you.  It's a service the cats provide.  You're welcome, and if you do not own a cat and don't actually like cats that much, it virtually assures attentive service.  During our waking hours though, the not-the-bed cat has become the adoring lap cat.  Third, almost all cat owners know that when you are not around, all cats sleep on the bed, all, especially it you are one of the 27% of cat-owning fools who think you can keep them off the bed.  They'll also sleep on the dining room table, on the kitchen chairs, in the laundry basket, on top of book shelves, on the living room furniture, on the dog, in you closet, in the clothes dryer, and indeed, anywhere they can access.  We have considered a cat cam, but why confirm what you already know especially if it's going to bother you?  About 24% of our cats haven't actually slept on the bed, but rather they slept on you while you were in bed.  One hefty lunk used to drape himself across my ankles using them rather like a chaise lounge and leaving TPP lame until the circulation was restored in the morning.  One used to wrap around Mrs. Phactors head and purr, and another use to snuggly occupy the curvature made by the backside of her legs.  This was a big cat so guess who would get pushed out of bed?  Oh, and he snored, or breathed heavily at any rate, and she loved him dearly.  And how is all this behavior explained?  The basic cat philosophy is simple to understand: all this is mine.  

Table Manners

Right now is a tough time for flowers, the late summer ebb in flowering augmented by a summer drought, and a tough time to have time to blog, so the Friday Fabulous Flower is a no go this week.  The start of a semester is always filled with crazy, and deadlines, and crazy deadlines, and students, and crazy students, and - take a breath; hold it and exhale slowly.  Reach for the calm above the storm.  So a few short cheap blogs will have to do, so how about this for table manners?  This big lug, who belongs to the F1, is a cat with nothing but the best table manners.  Notice the calm, relaxed demeanor, the ethereal wa of the napping cat, the epitome of catness.  Isn't that what tables are for?  Isn't that what naps are for.  Isn't that what cats are for?  Notice how it all comes together, a wonderful oneness.

You just don't smell like you.

Our two black and white girls get along as well as any two unrelated felines can.  But feline tranquility has encountered a bit of disruption for last couple of days. The event that led to some unidirectional "I-don't-know-you" hissing and biffing, and the resulting hurt feelings of the recipient, was an annual checkup at the vet for the younger of the two, and that included a bit of grooming that ended with a bath and blow dry leaving a very fluffy cat even fluffier, but also smelling a bit like a floozy, a cat version of cheap perfume.  Now here's the question.  Why use scented shampoo on an animal, even a cute female animal, other than to please the owner, but pity the poor kitty whose #1 companion now hisses whenever she approaches, demonstrating that cats identify individuality more by smell than sight.  So why not offer scentless shampoo for the discriminating customer?  Or would it still wash off the "this-is-me" smell briefly erasing identity?  At least this only lasts for 2-3 days, and only happens once a year, and is not quite symmetrical, which is to say that when the tables are turned, she with the sensitive nose gets a curious "who-are-you?" cautious greeting, but no hissing.  Beside she is so put out at the affront of disrupting her daily schedule replaced by a very unwelcome physical and all that comes with it that she hardly notices anything else other than her own hurt feelings. 

Spring forward; fall back

Who knows when this little mnemonic device was learned, but soon it will be rendered unnecessary by technology. My watch updates nightly from a satellite signal, so changing to CST from CDT is automatic. And my PC figures out the time change without any problems. Same with cell phones, so the Phactor is told. So why is the Phactor so out of sorts from just a one hour shift in time? Oh, that's right, cats don't have a reset button; cats aren't atomically timed, but organic feed-me timers, and no amount of explanation about the reasons for this time change have had any impact at all. So at precisely 6:30 AM CST (cat standard time) a black nose touches mine, and a black paw on my cheek is a purring means of inquiring "are you in there?" The reason for cat standard time is simple, a chunky housecat can starve to death in an hour's time. Resetting cat standard time takes about two weeks; hope we both survive that long.

Cat Seasonal Unemployment Disorder

The two felines who possess our manse are quite pleased that the operations managers they employ to provide essential services keep the windows open as much as possible so that they may use their valuable time to survey the bird and squirrel populations and generally watch the world go by. This occupation having occupied so much of their time for these past few months is now in jeopardy as the sudden turn to cooler temperatures has forced the closing of the windows, sorry, observation posts. In particular this is weighing heavy upon the junior partner as this is her first bout with seasonal unemployment, and so she moves from window to window expressing her displeasure with the entire manner in which this place is being run in a manner entirely consistent with a sense of entitlement that rivals that of the American teenager. She fails to recognize that her long dense fur is adapted to high latitude seasonality while us natives of the tropics and nearly hairless ape-descended life forms are not so well equipped. But they do both like having blankets upon the beds, and the shift to napping as a primary activity will not take too much adjustment.