Cats and Their Strange Obsessions: A Study on Feline Behavior

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wolram
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One of our cats, we have four , has acquired the habit of chewing pipe lagging to bits, and the same cat
has started catching Earth worms at night and leaving them in the kitchen.
 

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My farm cats would line up their nightly catch for inspection and approval.

Later, when we had a herd of mixed families of kittens, they learned to chew a particular lamp cord. After thundering through the house as only a herd of kittens can, they'd get real quiet except for occasional YIPS when they'd get tingled.

One family was of Manx that are voiceless. The kittens would line up at the bay-window to watch the occasional housefly, practice obvious mini-roars.

Adults learned to hang on door knobs to open the door so that they could sleep on top of the door - the actual moving part.
 
Since you raised the subject of cats, I'd like to share an invention with you. I'll just paste in a copy of the e-mail that I sent to Ellen Degeneres about it last January. (She never responded, so I guess it's not as good as I thought.) Dear Ellen;

Being a fellow cat lover, with a huge audience, you are probably the best person to share this innovation with others.

It is perhaps my greatest, and definitely most annoying, invention to date. I believe it to be the best cat toy in existence. As a gift to humanity, I have decided not to patent it or seek royalties. Anyone can easily make one at home for very little cost. A brief construction guide (the only kind possible) goes as follows:

1) Place golf ball in empty bath tub.

2) Insert cat.

Unfortunately, it sounds like a tyrannosaurus rex farting in a kettle drum. Something quiet like a ping-pong ball would be easily batted out of the tub, which would defeat the purpose of confinement and prevention of loss under the furniture. (Lucy did once manage to get the trajectory and power just right to achieve escape velocity and fire it into the laundry, but she has never repeated it.)

I expect that dipping the ball into liquid latex (available at hobby shops) would quiet things down considerably, with the bonus of adding a random component to the path of the ball due to inconsistent coating.

Please pass this knowledge on to your viewers, as I would like to see my invention installed in every home with a cat.

Oh! Never mind; she just launched it into the toilet. (That was a joke. She didn't really. I just wanted to see if I could get a giggle out of you.)

Cheers;

Dan
 
Danger you have a good idea there, one of our other cats, pickle, found a bag of broad bean seeds, the first we knew about it was when she started (hunting) one in the living room, it kept her busy for ten minutes until she lost it under the furniture then she would get another one, when it came to vacuuming time we found broad bean seeds under all the chairs .
 
wolram said:
Danger you have a good idea there
Have you ever known me to have any other kind? o_O (Do not answer that...)

Seriously, though, she came up with it herself. She started climbing into the tub to keep me company while I was on the can and soon began batting the cork around. As with any of her other toys, she lost interest after a minute or so because it stopped moving. I realized that a ball, once moved, would follow the drain angle of the tub and continue rolling around until it settled into the hole. For the first 6 or 8 months, she would play with the golf ball at least 5 times a day, for anywhere from 10—50 minutes at a time. Now it's about once or twice a day for 5—10 minutes, but that's about all she can manage at a time any more because of age; she's 17. Once in a while she just abruptly stops and has a nap right there in the tub, then resumes.