Saturday, February 02, 2013

The art of boxes - boxing up, fitting in and sleeping

Dear George,
I have a new box. It came crammed with goodies for Christmas, but she tells me it is really a shoe box. As you know I am on the large size. Well found. Well covered. Unkind people might even call me fat. I stood in this box for lengthy periods while my human seemed amused. There was nothing funny going on. I was seriously occupied in assessing, measuring,calculating, and eventually I fitted myself into it - to her astonishment.
I admit a bit of me sort of bulges over the side, but my legs and tail and head fit more beautifully. I stay in it for an hour or so in daylight hours and then get out and got for a little constitutional round the coffee table, followed by a snack and a short jaunt into the garden. When I return I settle back to sleep but on my folded blanket which is roughly three times bigger than the box. She offered to show me a photo of a human contortionist in a box but I declined. I am no contortionist. I am a cat. We do this sort of thing.
Yours 
Vincent.
PS. This is me in a larger box.

Dear Vincent,
This highlights the lack of flexibility and inability to use space in the human species. They have to have specially trained acrobats to get into small boxes. We just do it. Here is me in a box waving my paws at the camera. And one of my friend Tilly having a nap.
We just do it. Easy peasy.
However, for a large cat to fit into a shoe box is an achievement of which any feline would be proud. That elongated shape might fit a small kitten stretched out but it is not designed for the shape of a cat. As we can see from all these photos, cats like something nearer a square box if the fit is going to be tight. The photo of you in a large box shows how there is plenty of room - not like your shoebox.
There's something I enjoy about the confinement of a good box. It is nice to have ones legs and paws braced against the side of it. Nice too to have the top of the head against the cardboard. I have always been passionate about having the top of my head gently rubbed. The contact with the cardboard gives a pleasurable feel.
My friend Bob from Northern Ireland suggests diversifying. He finds plastic laundry binds are an agreeable fit (see photo).  If there is some nice smelling clean washing in them, that makes a soft base! Of course he uses traditional boxes too. 
But humans don't get the point of boxes at all. I have never seen my human use a box. She just throws them away.
Yours
George

4 comments:

  1. Great advice pal. You were right on again.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey, I'm a master of boxing (I can fit in any kind or size) :-)))
    Fluffy

    ReplyDelete
  3. Can anybody explain why do we have this obsession with boxes?
    Frederico

    ReplyDelete

Help for cats whose humans show behaviour problems.

This blog is devoted to the study of human behaviour. We cats, who live with this sometimes unpredictable and always feeble minded species, can benefit from seeing their behaviour in its proper scientific context. The study of feline dilemmas, training problems, and difficulties with humans, can only benefit all of us. All of us train our humans - to buy the right food, for instance, but many of us do not have knowledge of how to improve our training methods. The human species is obviously not as intelligent as the cat, but nevertheless can learn quite a lot - if properly managed. Topics of interest include the use of claw and order, purring as a human reward, rubbing your human up the right way, when to bite, spraying as a method of making our wishes known, ignoring the human, human harassment, human inattention and sheer human stupidity. I welcome your questions. Photos can be sent via my secretary's website, www.celiahaddon.com This blog has been chosen as one of the top 50 feline blogs by Online VetTechprogramms.org