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.
|