Cat foibles

We have, as my bio most places usually mentions, two cats.  The cats have changed over the years, but they have always been indoor cats.

Zane, the younger cat

Right now our younger cat is in disagreement with us about being 100% indoor.  We don't mind taking him out on a leash, but he is definitely the kind of cat that wants to say hello to all the birds and critters with his claws (or maybe his stomach), and he also wants to taste all the plants.  All. The. Plants.  Thanks to the landscaping decisions of the previous owners of our house, there are at least three things in our yard that will probably sicken or kill him if he nibbles them, despite my efforts at eradicating two of them.  (The third, a clump of day lilies, I can probably just dig up, but they're over our gas line, so I've been shy about prodding that bed with a shovel too much.)

Jack, the elder cat

 

The elder cat, who is glaring at me as I type this, is only mildly outdoor curious, in that he likes to look out the windows, sometimes.  If nobody is observing him.  We put the harness on him once, and he crouch-walked backwards the entire length of the house trying to get out of it.  He does not want walks; he does not want to visit the yard; he doesn't want to be seen too directly to be looking out the window at the birds.  I'm pretty sure he would also want to say hello to them with his claws, if he weren't too terrified of actually being outside to do so.

Anyway, the younger cat snuck out again today when we brought in a package and got to spend 40 glorious minutes unsupervised in the yard until my husband noticed he had made himself scarce and went out and found him under the deck.  The first time he snuck out, he was out for about four hours before we realized he'd gotten out, and that's why, in addition to being chipped, he's got a collar with our phone number and a Tile tracker.  Luckily so far the Tile has just been used to find the collar when he kicks it off, but we recently updated it to a silicon case that holds it in such a way that he stops drowning it in the water dish and killing the batteries.

Despite the younger cat being the spicier of the two, the elder one is the one that consistently tries to get me up early to give them breakfast on his schedule.  He generally does this by meowing in my face, but if I ignore him, he not infrequently enlists the younger cat to jump up on my nightstand and start knocking things down.  (The elder cat is entirely capable of jumping up and doing this himself; I think they just have different understandings of the process of waking up a human.)  If it's earlier than five a.m. or later than six a.m., I am likely, at this point, to shut the bedroom door, sans cats.  In between that point, I'm probably going to have to go to the bathroom to fall back asleep (I don't know why there's a later than cutoff that my bladder doesn't care about), so they will likely get food.  I don't think they've figured out the time frame.  They were walking it back an hour every night for a while, and now the elder cat is trying about thirty minutes before my alarm goes off.  That is generally just a nope and roll over to go back to sleep from me.

The younger one is super food motivated (he was feral for a while at some point before we got him), but not food aggressive.  The elder cat will steal treats from him.  The younger cat will take treats from the elder one, but generally it's because I have tried to sneak in a calming treat, and elder cat deemed it not food.  (I'm not sure about the efficacy of the calming treats, because the younger cat seems more hyper on them, but the younger cat also ignores 4 gabapentin before vet visits and has to be sedated for them to feel his belly and do most of the checkup.) (They're really nice! He loves them until they try to make him do something.)

Anyway, it's bedtime, which means it's time for bedtime treats, so I will wrap up here before they get too insistent that I am late in providing said treats.