Do your cats have jobs in your house? In our house, Albert, Nadia, and Isabelle all have their specific roles. Albert must greet anyone who enters the house--and if anyone comes in who is not approved, he must guard the girls against these intruders. Nadia must be on the look out for food scraps on any plates that were left unattended--such as a plate that a human is eating from actively. Isabelle will quickly and methodically dispatch any mice, flying creatures, and any other prey that dares enter the house.
The one job that they all share is keeping their humans asleep, both at night, and when given the opportunity, during the day. They take turns on this sacred job, and they all have different strategies. Albert is a fan of the co-sleeping method. This 26lb Maine Coon gets right up next to you and his thunderous purrs relaxes a human into a deep coma-like sleep.
Isabelle does what can only be described as kitty acupuncture. Unlike Albert, she is very light on her feet, and she comes up to an already sleeping human and very gently kneads them in specific spots, apparently hitting appropriate pressure points to keep the human sleeping soundly.
Nadia, the youngest of our crew, can be a bit of a bull in a china shop. She wants to use a combination of Albert and Isabelle's approach. Nadia jumps straight onto your torso, and kneads you right near your neck. She figures if she can hit the right spot, she may knock you out--and that would certainly count as putting you to sleep. Then, she wants to nuzzle onto your neck, ideally blocking your windpipe, and co-sleep with you, purring loudly into your ear.
As you can imagine, Nadia's methodology most often results in waking a human up rather than putting them to sleep. Albert, the king of our house, becomes outraged whenever Nadia wakes a human up. He immediately comes over to her and starts meowing until she gets off of the human. They both then scurry back to the bathroom, and Nadia isn't allowed to come out for quite some time, lest she be punished further by Albert. If a human, not knowing that Nadia is in time out, calls her or comes into the bathroom to pick her up to take her back out to the living room, she is required to scurry back to the bathroom and stare at the bath tub until Albert says she can come out, or the humans are persistent in calling her out of the bathroom.
What rules do your cats have in your house? We'd love to hear your stories and may even feature them in our blog! Submit a story to the Kitty Town Chronicles here!