Any delay, and dramatic starvation begins. The wailing! The urgency! The drama!
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
The connection between dinner and the survival imperative will awaken any cat’s Inner Lawrence Olivier. But we can expand on this tendency, and encourage our cat to act out more of their wishes. This shortens our distance between two points; our wish to give them the best care, and figuring out what they want and need.
For cats, wants and needs are the same thing.
This is why I say “every cat comes with their own instruction manual.” If they aren’t happy, our cats are eager to let us know how we can change that.
It’s not just practical. It’s also fun. When we have open communication with our cats, we get to play games and get each other’s jokes.
What encourages any actor? The audience.
When we become a respectful and responsive audience, our cat will try harder to get their point across. Here’s some tips for doing just that:
Focus on them. Cats stare at us. We can return the favor. Try not to fix them with a blank faced stare; this can be misconstrued. Put a smile on our face and study them. Follow the stripes on a tabby, or admire their cute paws or beautiful eyes. When we make eye contact, slowly close and open our eyes.
This show of interest will intrigue our cat, who will love the attention. When we are doing it right, we will get a stretched paw, flickering ears, or a verbal inquiry. Say their name in a loving tone to keep the dialogue active.
Mimic them. If our interest makes our cat get up and stretch, so should we. If our cat walks around, we can follow them, saying Show me! If our cat drifts near their toys or treats, see if we can’t get our cat to more assertively let us know what they want.
Don’t frustrate them, especially if we are both new to this game. RJ will run around when I say Show me! but he has not learned to go right to the things he wants. So if our cat seems curious, but aimless, drift to the toybox and get a reward going, just for the interaction.
End big. That’s an important rule in show biz. We should make sure our game ends with something that our cat will remember, and want to initiate again.
An incident of toys, treats, or affection are great ways to keep our cat wondering how that happened, and what they can do to make it happen again.
Don’t worry about them catching on.
Mostly, that’s what they do.
See more posts about training with drama.
Got here from a Link or Search?
There’s more ways to care for our cat with The Way of Cats than the article you are reading now. See all of my posts on CAT CARE.
just read your blog (several posts, actually!) and so glad to find it. i am learning so much about cats from this. i consider myself somewhat a ‘new’ owner to cats even though i did own a cat that lived over 17 yrs (but i felt i wasnt a ‘good’ owner). thank u so much for continuing to update your blog with such refreshing and informative posts.
These are great tips for people to connect with their cat! So many times we get busy with our lives and forget to take time each day with our pets. We are all they have!
I really liked the part about looking into their eyes. We have a cat at home who will make a move for your lap as soon as you look him in the eye! It’s become a joke around here
.-= Carrie@MaineCoonCatNation´s last blog ..Rudy the Maine Coon =-.
It always amazes me how great a cat’s talent for drama is. Mine likes to pretend even 5 minutes late for dinner means he is dying and yet I can also see not greater proof of their intelligence.
I mean you have to be intelligent to know that you need to act, let alone pretend.
Annie is our own little Meryl Streep. Even if we just accidentally startle her while we’re playing with the feather toy, it’s THE END OF THE WORLD and I KNEW I SHOULDN’T HAVE TRUSTED YOU!
She is, very slowly, learning not to overreact, but we definitely have to be more careful with her than we are with the other cats. The plus side is, if she does do something bad like jump up on the stove (she’s a cat, after all), all we have to do is say her name disapprovingly and she’ll jump down to glare at us from the floor (“you never let me have any fun”).
Now I feel a little bit bad about making fun of Annie’s drama queen ways, because the poor girl did have a (slightly) traumatic experience today. She ended up getting locked in the bedroom all day because I left the house before G did and he didn’t know that she was in there. Now she flinches away every time he so much as looks at her, but the scars must not go too deep, because she’s still demanding that I rub her belly.
Oh, poor Annie! G didn’t mean to lock her in there… and that is what he must tell her. Her biggest worry was that this was done on purpose.
See my post on how to let the cat, let go.
He did apologize, actually, but she’s not quite ready to forgive. We’ll see what happens tonight since I made sure before I left the house this morning that she was not locked in.
She gets freaky about physical contact very easily — pretty much the only time we can pick her up is when we’re putting her in her carrier — so the problem may be that he got more physical with his apology than she’s comfortable with since of course he wanted to pet her a little to reassure her.
But she’s also a natural born drama queen, so she’s gonna milk it for a while.