Let's start at the beginning? What is a Human?

In my new role as pet behaviour counsellor, more accurately human behaviour counsellor, I feel I must start at the beginning. I invite your comments and questions, as ever. I will attempt to answer at least one question a week, interpretting human behaviour in a way which may be helpful to us cats.
This is a female of the species with her young one, a junior male. I chose a female, because probably most of us cats choose to live with the females. Males are more likely to be roaming round outside the house. Females spend more time indoor especially when they have a litter of children. While there are wonderful exceptions - males who are house husbands or just properly devoted to cats - females probably make the best choice for the cat starting out with a pet. Females are more submissive in nature, though surprisingly stubborn at times. The cat that is experienced in training and caring for humans, may well want to choose a male. Males are bigger, more challenging, yet surprisingly easy to train once feline superiority is properly established.
If we are to understand human behaviour, we need to look at the species. Like us they are warm blooded mammals. They belong to the ape family. Unlike their fellow apes, they do not have fur. On the basis of this, it has been argued that Homo sapiens is a neotonised ape, ie an ape that has stayed immature. (if apes were insects, the human would be in the larval stage, so to speak.) This relative immaturity will be obvious when we look more closely at human behaviour.
Why are humans given the taxonomic name of Homo sapiens? Why indeed? It is clear to any right thinking cat, that this is indeed a misnomer of the first order. But the reason for it is obvious. Human beings named themselves so. It is as if we cats sat down and decided we would be Felis sapiens. Obviously the second half of the species name would be more applicable to us than them. But, as I have said, humans named themselves. And the choice of name is one which underlines not just their innate immaturity but their innate arrogance.
It's worth pointing out that not only is the human adult in many ways immature, but this immaturity starts very young indeed. Any kitten, however bad its start in life, is startlingly mature compared with human infants. Kittens mature somewhere about 8 weeks, while humans take about 8 years to get to somewhere near the same stage. We will look more closely at this in later posts, because this too is relevant to our experiences with human behaviour.

News -- George will live on in cyberspace

At last... I have decided what to do. George will live on in cyberspace. He may have vanished from my life but his spirit of compassionate superiority toward humans lives on in my mind. He is setting himself up as a human behaviour counsellor. He will start a new blog giving advice to cats about human behaviour. This will begin end February. Questions from cats welcomed.
Celia , pp George.

Bold from the beginning

George took charge of William from the beginning. He spent many happy hours pouncing on unhappy William who was much too gentle to tell him off. He, William, had been smacked round the face by Fat Mog who simply hated having another cat. She hd put William firmly in his place from the start. But poor William just couldn't do it to George.
George enjoyed himself greatly near water. He jumped in to the lavatory pan, luckily when I was nearby to fish him out before he drowned. He tried to get into the shower with me or Ronnie on all occasions. He ventured out on the ice of the pond and fell in. I rescued him with a big fishing net. He shook himself and promptly jumped in again. This time, I rushed him into the house for warming up. He clearly felt this was a bit of a fuss. A week later, when the ice had melted, he jumped in for the third time. This time I waited to see if he could swim. He could and came safely to shore. Oddly enough, perhaps because I hadn't rescued him with the net, he never jumped in again.
Instead, he waded into puddles. He enjoyed this greatly. He liked it when I laughed, so he would do it when I was near him. But I could also look out of the window and see him - in my absence - carefully walking into the biggest puddles. He liked dripping taps, of course. And he enjoyed swishing the water in his water bowl with his paw. That habit continued all his life.
His other favourite activity was climbing. He climbed up my leg levering himself up with his claws on my jeans. I let out what was to him a very satisfactory yelp. He climbed up sofas and beds, of course. He didn't climb up curtains, perhaps because ours are not posh enough. We wouldn't have minded and so perhaps it wasn't worth the effort for him. He climbed up chests of draws, up piles of linen in the linen cupboard, up bookshelves artfully posing near serious books such as the Memoirs of Creevy, and up the hedge.
His most startling exploits were when he climbed up the huge double trunk oak tree in our garden. The first time he did this, I got a step ladder and retrieved him from one of the lower branches. This was a staid end to his adventure. A little while later on a frosty freezing day, he went for the summit, ending up about 100 yards near the top. He wasn't mewing. He just sat there watching the birds in the branches. He was in no hurry to come down as he was clearly enjoying himself. Every now and again he would look down at the garden and climb a little higher just for fun. I spent an hour ringing the RSPCA, the local tree surgeon, friends, and builders who might have long ladders. I couldn't wait for him to come down. It was too cold for such a small animal.
Luckily John Holcroft, a handsome young man on a tractor, was passing by and saw this tiny kitten up in the high branches. John climbed up to the top and with wonderful skill climbed down again with one hand on the trunk and one gripping an indignant George. George was not at all grateful. He was not pleased to be back at ground level.

Blue eyes and black coat

George still had some of the blue eyes of a kitten when I took him home. Within weeks that blue tinge had grown into a light golden colour, better suited to his little black face.The skin inside his ears was pink, and they seemed unusually large for his face. They were ears to grow into, like baby clothes bought large to allow for longer wearing. The hair of his face, and most of his body, was medium long and stood at right angles to his body, except for the short hair of his tiny black nose. Little wisps of hair stuck out of his large pink ears and single large hairs grew from his face. His whiskers were modest, as befitted an animal of his size - the only modest thing about him. He looked not so much fluffy as sort of starey haired. Not the most beautiful of kittens except in my doating eyes.
As he grew, his hair stayed the same length and started becoming tougher. The way it grew out of his body changed. It began to grow parallel, sleeking down to become shiney in sunlight. The bottom of his feet, the thick leathery skin of his paws was a bluish black. Those paws that had, like his ears, seemed too big for his tiny kitten body began to take on adult proportions. Small, soft and starey, the little kitten was to grow into a sleek elongated cat, from sweetness to strength.
The poet Robert Southey lamented the end of kittenhood. "Kitten is in the animal world what the rosebud is in the garden; the one the most beautiful of all young creatures, the other the loveliest of all opening flowers, " he wrote. "The rose loses only something in delicacy by its development, - enough to make it a serious emblem to the pensive mind; but if a cat could remember kittenhood, as we remember our youth, it were enough to break a cat’s heart, even if it had nine times nine heart strings."
To my mind, however, the chubbiness of kittenhood has nothing to the full grown beauty of an adult cat. Besides, George was fully grown in character from the start. He was always quite certain what he wanted and he was always ready to play.

Bold George's education.

George was bold from the beginning. He squeaked his protest when Lou, his foster mother, handed him to me but settled down in my arms immediately. I placed him in the cat box and drove him home. No more kitten noises. He accepted being alone in the carrier with equanimity. And when I placed him in the crate (a kind of large cage) within the living room, investigated it thoroughly, ate some of the kitten food, used the litter tray and climbed into the bed.
Kittens have to be handled between two and seven weeks in order not to fear humans. George had been handled by Lou and indeed bottle fed by her. He had no fear of humans. In theory the fear instinct in cats is meant to appear at the age of about five or six weeks and according to the books even a kitten who has been well handled by humans may go through a period of avoiding them. By 10 weeks this fear period disappears and the well handled kitten becomes an affectionate cat.
George just cut through this theory. From being a helpless fearless kitten he moved into being a fearless affectionate adolescent without ever going through the fear of humans stage. I could pick him up and cradle him on his back - something I did a lot as I had always wanted a cradle cat. I introduced him to everybody I could think of - the postman, the delivery people, friends, neighbours. Anybody who visited the cat got George to cuddle. When I took him to the vet for a check over and vaccinations, I passed him to the receptionist, the nurse, and each person in the waiting room. He met about 24 people in the first month.
I was giving him the ideal upbringing as a pet. George was going to be a bombproof cat. He was bold. Very bold.