Both cats and people will have less frustration when the human learns the opposite is true.
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A case in point is the common sight, in Cat Appreciator homes, of the “cat’s chair” phenomenon. This is a chair, usually in a corner of a less formal room like the den or family room, that was probably on the shabby side before it was given to the cats in the home, and is now clearly something only the cats own, and something only a cat could love.
If we can shift our gaze away from how much we’d hate one of our chairs to look like that, we can notice that there aren’t any other chairs which look like that. So if we give a cat their chair, they are far easier to convince to leave our chairs alone.
Really.
This misconception arises from underestimating a cat’s intelligence. After all, if Oprah gave us a car, would we think all of Oprah’s cars now belong to us? Would we run after her in the street, yelling that we need that car to go grocery shopping? I hope not.
Cats ask for things because they want them.
Cats want things because they need them.
In their natural state, cats would have wants and needs perfectly aligned. Their desire to have scratching posts and surveillance posts and plain old outposts would be created by their wild environment (gotta have food) and met by their wild environment (gotta have terrain.)
In our home, they don’t necessarily need such things, because we open cans and dump the contents in bowls at regular intervals. Some people with cats get frustrated and annoyed because the cat asks for things they no longer, strictly speaking, need.
But cats still want them because their instincts say so. And if that hasn’t changed during the last 10,000 years, it’s not going to change tomorrow.
Our cats ask for things because there’s something about that thing which appeals to them. The easiest way to redirect our cat is to give them their own thing. We can then tell them, No, play with your own, and they understand.
Taking them away from one of our chairs and letting them scratch on the “cat’s chair” is one of the easiest redirections possible, because all we are asking the cat to do is enjoy a different chair in a different place. A chair has all the qualities they love in a scratching post; stability, texture, location, and orientation.
If we have trouble getting our cat to use their scratching post, it is always because the post is too flimsy, too cramped, in the wrong place, or made of the wrong stuff.
So, for some people in some homes, they can simply give the cats a chair.
Then everyone is happy.
- For more about scratching training, see Scratching: Redirect the Need.
Find out how cats understand the training concept of yours and mine.
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My cat knows that he needs to ask for stuff and he also has ways of asking.
For example if he needs his litter box to be cleaned he drags the small shovle out of the toilet and into my room. If he needs to play, he brings his toy(a key chain made out of a rabbit tail which he loves) and puts it on top of me when i lay in bed. Then i throw it and he brings it back the same way. Sometimes he drops it far and i ignore it, so he will pick it up and put it properly.
Unfortunately there are no other cats arround so he believes he is human. Because we make a “sssss” sound when we sleep and he makes noise to make him stop, when he sleeps and we wake him up more than 2-3 times he hisses at us and then goes back to sleep.
HE allso finds annoying things to do to get our attention, for example he has a screeching door that he keeps pushing and then looks at us weather we are paying attention to him or no.
About scratching, he had his fav armchair that we eventually threw away, and now he goes to his scratch post or just the carpet.
The funnyest thing is that he always takes revenge if you mistreat him. For example if i push him out of my chair he’ll come back and beat me with his paw , if i take his toy he becomes upset, puts his head down and he looks like sobbing.
I had cats befoure, but i never met one that adapts human habits so well.
It sounds like he has you trained.
i think it has to do with him being taken to early, he had only 3 weeks when i adopted him. I had a lot of trouble educating him not to bite and scratch because his mother didn’t have time to do that.
and yes, we”re very well trained, he put a lot of time and effort into that.
I forgot to mention, he is half wild cat.
I had a lot of trouble educating him not to bite and scratch because his mother didn’t have time to do that.
My kitty Natasha was given to me too young (in retrospect she was probably only about 4 weeks old, not two months old), but I had Boris to train her not to bite while playing. One night, she bit him too hard while they were wrestling around and he reared up on his hind legs and boxed her ears.
It worked, too. She ended up being queen of the household, but she wasn’t a biter after that.
I worked at a cat shelter and brought in a plastic cart on wheels to help keep my stuff together while I worked my way down the rows of cages. The first day I brought it in I kept an eye on the cats and as soon as one of those who wasn’t in a cage started scratching on the cart I walked over and started scolding it in a loud voice. All the cats watched me and I looked around at all of them as I spoke. I don’t know if they understood my words but they definitely got my meaning. None of the cats tried to scratch my cart after that.