We might ask our growing teenagers the same thing. It’s for the same reason. Eventually, the cat’s mind catches up with their body.
But it can take a while. Or, maybe, never.
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That’s because cats really don’t mind overflowing their container. They liked it when it was big and roomy, and they like it now that’s it snug and sturdy.
The size might not have had much to do with why they liked it in the first place.
Cats judge their containers by different criteria, such as:
Sturdiness. Cats are very flexible, and enjoy a certain amount of support from their sleeping containers. A cat can relax if they are not going to sprawl over, or off, their support.
Familiarity. This means a lot to cats. The mental comfort of a known quantity outweighs the snug feeling by quite a bit.
Previous performance. Cats judge objects as static; which they are. Forgetting that the cat themselves is not an unchanging object. So if a cat could fit in it once, they believe they can fit in it again.
Sentiment. We can think of it as the way cats hang onto their past, the same way we hang on to things of sentimental value. Maybe it doesn’t fit the same way it used to, but we still love it.
Any sensible cat is not going to abandon a space with a history of good times.
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My boy DJ prefers sleeping on the floor, while Byron likes to sleep on top of several boxes. Beer boxes, as I’m a manager in a liquor store. Old boxes that have been here forever, even if they’re starting to come apart. And, umm, he’s previously barfed on them. He’ll accept new boxes warily, but he prefers the older ones.
Killsy is the Queen of Boxylvania. She simply must have a new beer box every 3 months! I’ve tried giving her low, wide boxes that fit her better, such as Guinness or Red Stripe, but she’ll have none of that. She prefers the narrower and crampier ones. She had a particular love for a Heineken 7oz bottle one, even though it was nearly half the size of her regular sleeping quarters. Despite her love of it, I had to remove it. Note the color of her box, and of her forehead.
Our Sophie used to crawl into a tissue box when she was a tiny kitten. Now, 14 years later, she still does that. So in our house of allergy suffers, every box of tissues anywhere, is burst and overflowing within an hour of being opened.
Great picture, Bill. How nice that your kitty is color coordinated with both white and green!
Wonderful post!!
But how do you account for cats who like to sleep in containers which are too small for them and which are newly arrived in the household? There’s no history to attract them to the too-small object. Last Christmas I bought my mother a small, shallow wicker basket full of luxury groceries as a Christmas “hamper”. She gave me back the empty wicker basket and, as soon as it arrived in the house, Humphrey turned it into his favourite – if rather cramped – sleeping place. He is asleep there as I write this.
My theory is that their idea of “where they fit” is formed very early; and not updated too often