I got this from my daughter, thought it was funny, and thought maybe some other cat owners would also.
It does explain certain actions of my feline landlord.
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Cats Guide to Owning a Human Being.
- Introduction: Why Do We Need Humans?
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.
- 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 assumes the paper
is more important than you. It 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.
- 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.
- 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 disembowelled
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 neighbour’s Pomeranian) are better still
living. When you see the expression on your human’s face,
you’ll know it’s worth it.
- How Long Should You Keep Your Human?
You are obligated to your human for only 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 take you only so far.
