The most important thing you can ever learn about your cat….
I was speaking to a friend fairly recently (who I met through my love of cats, naturally…) and we were discussing her little minx of a kitten cat who was at that time busily batting a toy around so it repeatedly hit her human.
I’d helped with a bit of advice to bring the little lady out of her shell, and was genuinely pleased when her human said “You know the most invaluable piece of information you gave us? To accept our cats’ personality readily, and recognise her as an individual.”
It’s something too easy to forget. There are portrayals of cats in so many things acting a certain way that sub-consciously you assume that’s how they’ll all act. There’s the “lap cat”, content to curl up and while away the hours with you while you read a good book, or the “lad about town”, a cocky tom who rules the neighbourhood and is all strut.
While it’s true that most personalities portrayed of cats are likely to be present in the feline population, the worst thing a human carer can do is try and get a cat to conform to the personality of their choosing. They’re very likely to end up disappointed.
The thing to remember when taking a cat on as part of your family is this; that their unique being is the thing that makes them wonderful. Not the way they conform to a preconceived notion of feline behaviour; them being who they are.
In my group, I have five wildly varying personalities – as stated in the first blog. Darwin is outstanding at “misbehaving”; he happily creeps in through people’s windows to steal their scouring pads, and brings them home looking fit to burst with the amount of pride he’s feeling at his achievement. He also, on arrival, decided one of the best games in the world was to shred things…toilet rolls, womens sanitary products….anything bathroom related that small, sharp claws could shred, he destroyed.
At first, I wasn’t really sure quite how to broach this matter. After all, he is definitely one of the most mischievous cats I’ve ever encountered. It resulted in me “Darwin proofing” the bathroom and buying a travel soap container to store my own scourer in. And he makes me laugh, daily. The naughty, cheeky little scamp is a tiny, furry clown.
Some of the things he does are certainly not “textbook” cat behaviour. Nor, for that matter, are some of the things my other four get up to. But they are who they are. Wonderful, adorable, sometimes inexplicable them.
Once that’s embraced, you’re well on the way to your cat taking an awful lot of space up in your heart.
Darwins mugshot. (Courtesy of Luci Mahon photography)
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