This is the cat walk. Watch the purrfect co-ordination of our four legs. We walk on our toes. We move both legs on one side of the body before the legs on the other side.
But the legs on either side do not hit the ground at the same time, so that most of the time three legs are still on the ground. So our gait is both fluid and stable.
Unlike the ungainly two legged gait of humans. As a famous human writer admitted "Four legs good: two legs bad."
As for their feet.... almost useless toes on a flattened large pad. Pathetic.
- For more about ungainly humans get my book here.
Naked human feet are tempting. They have an enticing scent, a mixture of body odour, sock, and leather shoe. Sniffing them is fun. Licking them - which some cats do - is usually not very rewarding, unless you have a human who goes barefoot and picks up interesting smells from the ground.
Those little piggy toes, which can wriggle, are fun to pounce on. Particularly in the middle of the night when your human goes to use its strange water-based litter tray. Try it. The human scream is really thrilling.
The strange thing about human feet is how useless they are for humans. True, they are flat so that humans can walk on two legs (not an advantage), but most of modern human feet are too soft to walk without the protection of shoes.
Despite being soft, flat sole of the foot is very insensitive compared with our paws. Humans cannot feel the earth vibrating through the soles of their feet. Feet are useless, therefore, for warning about predators. Just occasionally there is a single hair or two on the top of the foot among the elderly. But there are no charming little tufts of fur between the toes like ours.
The toes can wriggle a bit but are relatively immobile. They can't grasp anything. They don't have claws, either retractable ones like us or ordinary claws like a dog. Their nails don't DO anything. They can't open cat food with their feet.
In a word, human feet may be tempting to play but they are otherwise useless.
* Coming shortly, my guide to human management and training...
I am blogging early because I have sent my human to do an update day at Lincoln University.
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
