This didn’t come up with RJ. He has a sturdy, tank-like build, and for his first few months with us, he was occupied with seeing how many toys he could attack at once. But Olwyn is a leggy lightning bolt.
As Mr WereBear found out, when he saw her in the hallway… and still almost sat on her.
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If we have a kitten with this amazing ability, we must exercise extra care throughout our house. They can be somewhere else, then under our descending foot; all in the twinkling of an eye.
Kittens have high energy and low body mass. This is how they bend physics to their will. For both our safety, we should take the following precautions:
The Kitten Shuffle. When hurrying down a dark hallway, or answering the phone, or trying to get a drippy mess from the sink to the garbage can; this is when the kitten will strike.
We might not realize that just moving fast is going to trip the kitten’s predator/play switch, always at the ready. So it’s when we are moving the fastest that the kitten will find us the most fascinating.
Try to mosey instead of walk, keeping our feet close to the floor, and have a hand out for extra support if needed. Also, try to keep the hard shoes out of the house and wear slippers or moccasins. Not only will they do less damage if an incident occurs, such shoes better allow our foot to sense an object before we squish it.
The Kitten Quarantine. When we are cooking or mopping or doing home repair, do everyone a favor and get the kitten out of the way, first. Toss a few toys in the bathroom, or set up a separate room, depending on how long this task is going to take.
If we deputize someone to watch over the kitten, they should still do it in a room with the door closed. Kitchen activity is probably the most tempting, but anything we do is likely to make the kitten interested. If what we are doing requires us to move around quickly, then we should just not have to think about the kitten.
The Kitten Warning. Mr WereBear, having worked with Navy personnel, has taught the cats that when he says, “Make a hole!” it means he is coming through quickly, and they should scatter. While we can’t expect the kitten to catch on immediately, we can start teaching them that calling out “Coming though!” or “Gangway!” is a warning they should heed. As they learn, we can move faster and faster.
Because, to the kitten, one minute we are standing at the sink and they are getting ready to rub their head on our leg, (even from across the room,) and the next minute we are dashing for the stove or the refrigerator. They are too young to know the sequence of events; to them, we give no clues about when we will dash for the phone or the door. They don’t know what the ringing means.
Giving our kitten something to cue them we are about to spring into activity will teach them when to get out of the way.
Like so many kitten challenges, this unique ability is one the kitten will grow out of. While they always will have a tendency to be underfoot, as this post explains, Kitten Teleportation will not last.
Like all kitten moments, we must remember to savor it while it does.
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Oh this is so true. Try having four kittens to get around. I have learned that walk with the feet close to the ground very well. Great information.
Margaret Elmendorf´s last blog ..Does your Puppy or Dog chew??
I’m on my third kitten experience with this. First kitty’s Kill Kill’s second nickname (after Killsy) was Underfootnik, as she always was!
That horrible cry when a cat gets a tail stepped on is no fun for anyone. I learned to shuffle my feet, but after a while, she’d sometimes emit a short yell like I’d stepped on her, but when I looked down from the bags of groceries, she seemed fine. Huh, that’s odd.
Then one day she did it when I was looking at her. I hadn’t stepped on her at all. She was lying in between my feet, and went back to purring. I realized that she wasn’t saying “OW! You stepped on me!” she was warning me “Hey, be careful, you’re close enough that you could step on me!”
I’d always heard that “animals have no sense of time; they live in an eternal Now.” But here she was, demonstrating a knowledge she’d learned that “what happened in the past could happen again now, and affect my future.” She understood Cause and Effect. I realized then that the Common Wisdom was completely wrong, and that “dumb animals” are far smarter than what we “higher animals” suspect.
She was only 10 weeks old. And her new nickname became “The Einstein Cat.”
I love Killsy stories. She’s one smart kitty.
Monkey McUnderfoot can go from nap to beating you up the stairs…..and he just turned 3..
…its fun to play ‘i can get there first’….just start walking and then change direction…whoosh…and he is left wondering where you are
here is a toy idea that my cats love…bend in the edges of a pipe cleaner [because of sharp edges], coil it around your finger, throw it…Monkey and Vidalia will fetch, Pickle will just bat it around …great fun for all