Showing posts with label cat territory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cat territory. Show all posts

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Cat Question: What if my humans move house?

Dear George
My primary care giver has been talking about "moving house". This has been going on ages now and they may not get round to it but I'm not sure I approve. I have everything I want here, although the large garden which is mentioned sounds good. What do you think?
I would rather not dump them as I am not going back to the streets and like the regular meals, cat flap, litter tray at this cold tie of year and sit down cuddles/ treats on the sofa. Plus I got tuna for breakfast and a new toy recently - a flat mouse shaped leather tag on a leather string, it came with a "work/documents" file which is useless for playing with so the human got that, I think my end of the deal is best. The flat mouse is good though, and smells nice and animal like, so the humans are worth holding onto.
Smudge


ANSWER:
The human obsession with moving house shows their complete inability to grasp the meaning of territory. "Territory is security" is a well known saying among wise cats. We need core territory, a place to eat, sleep and if necessary hide. We also need the home hunting range. We know the home range intimately - the patch of ivy near the garden shed where a family of wood mice hang out, the box shrub that smells like cat pee so we mark on it, the garden wall next door where we can sit and terrorize next door's smaller cat, the frightening front steps near the pavement where passing dogs leave THEIR marks. We know it. We love it. We feel happy in it.
Moving house just ruins everything for us.
Consider your options. Is there a friendly neighbour you could move in on? Is this the time to develop a huge and very visible series of panic attacks? Run from even the slightest noise, hide under the bed, make strange wailing noises? This might persuade your humans that you are going through a nervous breakdown and should not be moved. Also pee on the property pages of the newspapers NOW. Show them what you think of the idea. When they are consulting websites like Prime Location jump on the keyboard with all four paws to make them disappear.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

I am curious about next door.


There has been a total black out of news from next door. Miss Ruby Fou (see a communication from her in a July blog), if she was there, has not been seen at the window nor has she ventured out. The cat flap remains firmly closed. Steffi and Paul no longer invite William and I in for a little snack or even some interesting conversation. Only some oriental smells have drifting out. Tantalising and very irritating indeed. This was our territory once. Now we are locked out.
So when the boiler went wrong next door, I took the opportunity to go in with Nigel Gardiner and take a look round. Nigel Gardiner and Son (Matthew actually) of Witney have put in a new boiler for us and I am familiar with his tall figure and his competant assessment of boilers. Nice man. Fond of cats and respectful of them too. To please him I had a look at the boiler. Lots of wires and stuff. No mice so not very interesting for cats but we cats like to have a look anyway. Nigel seemed to know what he was doing with the wires. William went in too but had less curiosity. He went straight to the plate of dried food that Miss Ruby Fou had left uneaten in the kitchen and ate the lot.
I checked the whole joint upstairs and downstairs. There was definitely a Siamese smell - upstairs on the double bed, downstairs in the kitchen area, and the litter tray had been used - though cleaned by Steffi before she and Paul and Miss Fou had left for London. Yes, Miss Fou has taken up residence at weekends. She is definitely now a neighbour at weekends.
How do I feel about it? I am not sure. She seems rather standoffish. Why not let us in? What is going on in the Paul and Steffi household? Is Miss Fou being held captive? Or is she too snobbish to mix with us?

Friday, June 29, 2007

Boundaries, collars and the famous Mr Lee


Since we got out of gaol, William and I have been checking our boundaries, updating our marks by rubbing our chins against tings, scratching tree trunks, and putting well aimed urine sprays at key points. Boundaries are everything to a cat. With them, we feel safe. Without them, we get very anxious indeed.
Celia is too stupid to know where most of them are. Humans are sense challenged in many ways. They can see but they can't smell anything. All our chin rubs go unnoticed and even our spray marks in the open air aren't strong enough for her. She does notice the scratch marks on the tree trunks. And even though she is visually competant, she loses sight of us very easily. Most of the day she doesn't know where we are. Which is how we like it.
Some humans are crafty. There's a cheeky human who has attached a camera to his cat's collar. Mr Lee is the cat and his privacy has been completely invaded. The camera takes regular photographs showing his every movement - when he sits under the car, his meetings with neighbouring cats, his excursions in the forest, his boundary walks. It's all on www.mr-lee-catcam.de I asked Mr Lee's permission to post his photo on this entry. Here he is. Of course, it's shocking that he allowed his human to photograph his life but it's interesting too.
I wouldn't let Celia put a collar on me. Neither would William. We don't approve of collars ever since we met a thin wounded stray with her paw caught in her collar. And it's a question of pride. Dogs wear collars as sign of their inferiority to humans (if you can believe any species could be inferior to homo sapiens). As cats are superior to humans, a collar would not be appropriate - though I'd quite like to see Celia and Ronnie in one. They'd look sweet.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

No sense of proper territory - that's humans

The trouble with humans is that they have no sense of territory. OK so they have what they think of as home, a core territory in which to sleep, scratch and lounge about without tension. But it's not home territory as we cats know it. They invite other humans right into it, to share the space and sometimes to spend the night. They even invite them to share their meals. Share? No sensible cat does that. We don't share hunting so we don't share the prey either - not if we can help it. We don't share territory either except for relatives.
Once again Celia has shown that her territorial feelings, so necessary for a decent cat, are all awray. She is going away. Not just on a one day hunting trip to London (prey being clothes, shopping, books etc) but a three day hunting trip. This time the prey is even more ridiculous - static, non-living standing stones, often in rows. They just stand there. They don't move. They are cold and inedible and what on earth is the point of them, I ask. Something in her head is very disordered indeed.
This will leave me alone with Ronnie, a good man but not a first class cat wrangler. He can't bend down to pick me up. I don't much care for being picked up, what cat does, but I like the attention. Ronnie can't pick me up and he wobbles alarmingly when I wind round his ankles or his walking stick. I am somewhat afraid I may trip him up. I still rub against him however. It's my friendly nature to do so. He will have to look after himself. I am not a dog for the disabled. He is on his own.
He can, however, throw down food. So he can feed me and William, which is his main duty. This doesn't make Celia's conduct excusable or acceptable. Her duty is to serve us cats and this weekend she is failing in it. It's a disgrace.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Free at last.... just checking territory boundaries

We are free. No more prison. No more horrible strange Persians within a whisker of us, unnaturally close for comfort. No more Gill the Cattery. Regrettably, no more cooked coley at lunchtime. (How can I convey to Celia the idea that she should cook for us, not just open yet another tin.) The relief is enormous.
Getting back home required a lot of energy. I went right round my hunting territory boundaries, past the evergreens near the pond (useful for amphibian prey), up past the unused owl box (unused by owls but now home to some pigeon prey), along the side of the ploughed field past the Dutch barn where the brambles are (good for mousing), down the track towards the old piggery (also good for mousing) then up the other side of the hedge towards the rabbit holes (best of all, a lagomorph killing ground.). All the territorial smells I had left from chinning had gone. I renewed them. I left new scented scratchings on the apple tree and the plum tree and that bit of hedge near the rabbit holes. If you don't make your boundary marks, some other cat may take over your territory. William used to stop and spray at various points but he seems to have neglected to do this lately. So far I have not bothered to spray. Maybe as I get older I will start doing this. Spraying is a useful way of leaving "George was here" marks.
The first night back I slept very close to Celia all though the night, and woke her several times for a bit of cuddling. Not that I needed reassurance, you understand. Nothing of the kind. I am just trying to rebond her so she doesn't do that to me again. If a bit of cuddling up makes her feel guilty so much the better.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

The humans next door

My friends from next door arrived for the weekend. Paul and Steffi have a proper attitude to cats and they also have a cat flap left over from when Henry lived there (more on that another day). William and I naturally pop in to see that all is well when they are absent. And we pop in for a snack when they are present. They have suitable beds and armchairs for a nap. Last week a builder was in doing something to the loft. I kept an eye on him. He also had a suitable attitude to cats. He fed me some dried food from the tin that is kept for me and William. Where does this fit in with the human selfishness I was writing about yesterday? It is simply this. Our primary servants or caretakers often want us just to eat at home with them. They want us all to themselves. Yet it's natural for us to pop in elsewhere. There are inviting cat flaps all down the street and even where there is no entry, humans can usually be persuaded to let us in if we sit at the back door looking hungry. Or on a windowsill. A sensible cat can fix three or four alternative caretakers to feed him. It's particular useful if your humans are out at work during the day. Somewhere in the street is a lonely human, with the central heating on, who would love a visit. Like Paul and Steffi. It's important for their welfare to do this kind of social work for lonely humans. I thnk Paul and Steffi are all the better for it.

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