Yep, that's me. Rolly. Wondering where on earth I learned to use HTML? Hey, I'm
a cat, not a dummy. I watch and learn. Besides, I'm almost 8 years old. You
think I learned nothing in all that time? Get real. By the way, no "Rolly"
jokes thank you very much. I've heard them all already.
Okay, this is the part where my "owner"
(note the quote/unquote please) made me and about everybody else in this house
fill out these dumb surveys. If you want to read them, whatever...I'm off to
take a nap, okay!
So you've decided to get yourself a human being. In doing so,
you've joined the millions of other cats who have acquired these
strange and often frustrating creatures. There will be any number
of times, during the course of your association with humans,
when you will wonder why you have bothered to grace them with
your presence.
What's so great about humans, anyway?
Why not just hang around with other cats?
Our greatest philosophers have struggled with this question for
centuries, but the answer is actually rather simple:
THEY HAVE OPPOSABLE THUMBS.
Which makes them the perfect tools for such tasks as
opening doors, getting the lids off of cat food cans,
changing television stations and other activities that we,
despite our other obvious advantages, find difficult to do
ourselves. True, chimps, orangutans and lemurs also have
opposable thumbs, but they are nowhere as easy to train.
2. How And When to Get Your Human's Attention
Humans often erroneously assume that there are other,
more important activities than taking care of your immediate
needs, such as conducting business, spending time with their
families or even sleeping.
Though this is dreadfully inconvenient, you can make this
work to your advantage by pestering your human at the moment
it is the busiest. It is usually so flustered that it will do whatever
you want it to do, just to get you out of its hair. Not coincidentally,
human teenagers follow this same practice.
Here are some tried and true methods of getting your human
to do what you want:
Sitting on paper: An oldie but a goodie. If a human has paper in
front of it, chances are good it's something they assume is more
important than you. They will often offer you a snack to lure
you away. Establish your supremacy over this wood pulp product
at every opportunity.
This practice also works well with computer keyboards, remote
controls, car keys and small children.
Waking your human at odd hours: A cat's "golden time" is
between 3:30 and 4:30 in the morning. If you paw at your human's
sleeping face during this time, you have a better than even chance
that it will get up and, in an incoherent haze, do exactly what you
want.
You may actually have to scratch deep sleepers to get their attention;
remember to vary the scratch site to keep the human from getting
suspicious.
3. Punishing Your Human Being
Sometimes, despite your best training efforts, your human
will stubbornly resist bending to your whim. In these extreme
circumstances, you may have to punish your human. Obvious
punishments, such as scratching furniture or eating household
plants, are likely to backfire; the unsophisticated humans are likely
to misinterpret the activities and then try to discipline YOU. Instead,
we offer these subtle but >nonetheless effective alternatives:
* Use the cat box during an important formal dinner.
* Stare impassively at your human while it is attempting
a romantic interlude.
* Stand over an important piece of electronic equipment
and feign a hairball attack.
* After your human has watched a particularly disturbing
horror film, stand by the hall closet and then slowly back
away, hissing and yowling.
* While your human is sleeping, lie on its face.
4. Rewarding Your Human: Should Your Gift Still Be Alive?
The cat world is divided over the etiquette of presenting humans
with the thoughtful gift of a recently disemboweled animal. Some
believe that humans prefer these gifts already dead, while others
maintain that humans enjoy a slowly expiring cricket or rodent just
as much as we do, given their jumpy and playful movements in
picking the creatures up after they've been presented.
After much consideration of the human psyche, we recommend
the following: cold blooded animals (large insects, frogs, lizards,
garden snakes and the occasional earthworm) should be presented
dead, while warm blooded animals (birds, rodents, your neighbor's
Pomeranian) are better still living. When you see the expression on
your human's face, you'll know it's worth it.
5. How Long Should You Keep Your Human?
You are only obligated to your human for one of your lives.
The other eight are up to you. We recommend mixing and
matching, though in the end, most humans (at least the ones
that are worth living with) are pretty much the same. But what
do you expect? They're humans, after all. Opposable thumbs
will only take you so far.