Thanks for stopping by! Get The Way of Cats, delivered, by asking for my RSS feed. Get my free cat advice newsletter by signing up here and get the FREE eBook, Ten Cat Tricks (Every Human Should Know.)A couple of months ago, I gave poor Reverend Jim a frightening experience. He was apparently sleeping under the tub in the bathroom when I dashed in there, shut the door, and took a quick shower. When I got out, he was planted on the bathmat, eyes as wide as dinner plates, obviously horrified that I had taken off all my fur and gotten under running water.
Reverend Jim was not in any real danger. Except… in his mind. He suffered some disturbing thoughts.
This incident shows how our cats can develop real fears; of imaginary things.
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We understand when thunder, fireworks, or masses of snow rumbling off the roof frightens our cats. Heck, those can frighten me, and I understand what is happening. But it’s a lot more difficult to figure out what has spooked our cat when it is their own imagination. A cat’s own intelligence actually works against them at such times.
Cats have an instinctive bias to expect the worst.
This is certainly a survival skill; staying out of danger is vitally important to a lone hunter. But this can also make a cat prone to brood and become fearful; unless we can break their focus.
If we don’t know what spooked our cat, we cannot reassure with specifics. But that doesn’t mean we can’t reassure in general. Tell our cat it’s okay now, (and it probably is.)
I’ve had cats who expressed anxiety, were soothed, and had forgotten about it by the time I found the fallen can in the pantry.
It’s not quite like children watching a movie that is too scary for them, but it’s kind of like that. Cats can develop some challenging conceptual thoughts, and it can create anxiety, as when RJ was trapped in the same room as the running shower. It wasn’t like it was chasing him around the room, but for the first time, RJ probably wondered if it could.
When I realized circumstances had traumatized RJ, I expressed my sorrow as I hastily opened the door and let him scamper out. I told him it wasn’t anything that would hurt him, that I was sorry he got stuck in there, that I always announced I was taking a shower, so he should be okay.
Once RJ realized he was not trapped in the bathroom, and even more importantly, that the shower was not going to come after him, he bounced back in a few days.
He’s decided not to sleep under the bathtub anymore.
But I check there now, just in case.
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I have taken up calling out “warning” in a particular sing-song way when I’m about to do something noisy and cat-irritating (usually vacuuming). “Warning! Warning! All feline personnel to noise shelters! Warning!” Even though I do it well before the horrible noise, they still take off at high speed.
Somehow, I’ve managed to teach my cats a “safety signal”, by telling them they are “OK, Safe, You’re Safe”, while also waving my left hand side-to-side, windshield wiper style. They calm down immediately in the face of the scary noisy thing, be it the sudden appearance of the dreaded trip-to-the-vet carrier (the cat who’s going to the vet does NOT get the safety signal), the vacuum, or my husband’s clomping shoes running down the stairs. It really works, and the oldest cat pretty much taught it to the youngest one by her example, so we didn’t have to.