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Monday, January 16, 2012

Cats are the masters of attitude

I don’t hate cats, in fact, I don’t mind them at all, but I must admit I am more of a dog person.
Perhaps it is because dogs just make sense to me – most of the time anyway.
Dogs are loyal, faithful and are great at helping you clean up the kitchen because they pounce on every crumb to hit the floor like a timber wolf on a baby bunny.
But even man’s best friend is not perfect, and hounds do have a few eccentricities that are, how shall I put this, utterly revolting.
For the life of me I cannot understand why a dog would eat its own barf. Yes, that is disgusting, but it is also true.
When Murphy the Wonder Dog was a few months old he blew his planned meal all over the backyard. He then proceeded to re-eat that meal faster than I have ever seen him eat anything in his life, like he was afraid I was going to jump in and take it all for myself.
It is one of several truly disgusting things dogs do, as all dog owners know. So I guess when it comes to the eating department, cats are the clear winners.
The only gross things they eat are birds and mice and the occasional bug, but most importantly they only eat them once.
However, despite the most repulsive dietary plan in the world, I must still give the dog my overall preference.
Cats are just strange animals.
I was walking down the hall the other day when I noticed my son’s cat sleeping smack dab in the middle of the hallway – sideways.
Why? He has the entire house to sleep in, but his little cat brain determined that blocking the hallway was the best place to catch 40 winks.
His other popular sleeping spot is in the dog’s bed. Again, the cat can sleep pretty much anywhere and he chooses to kick the dog out of his only bed.
Now that is a cat attitude. My daughter does not like cats one bit, so guess where Gilbert sleeps every chance he gets? Yup, on her bed, more exactly, on her pillow. More of that cat attitude.
Even more baffling is when I am on the computer and the cat jumps up and lays across the keyboard and looks at me as if to say, “What?”
I have never had a dog do that – ever, but the cat did it the other day.
Dogs also get the nod because when you want some companionship all you have to do is call the dog and he comes running, tail wagging, happy to hang out with you.
Sure you can call a cat, but it has about as much impact as asking a teenager to clean up his room – it’s utterly pointless.
But still we name the cat because we humans need to attach names to things, it’s in our nature. We name cats just so we won’t have to continually refer to them as ‘The Cat.’ But if you look up the word cat in ancient Greek, cattus ignorusalotus, it translates into: an animal that knows you are calling, but really doesn’t care. Or something like that anyway.
A cat will cuddle with you. But odds are it will be a few minutes before you have to go to work and only if you are wearing a colour that his hair will show up on. Then you can’t keep the menacing feline away from you – especially if you have an important meeting that day.
If you are lounging in the evening with a pair of sweatpants on the cat is harder to find than Jimmy Hoffa at a union meeting.
Cats will also go straight to the only person in the room with a cat allergy and spend as much time as possible rubbing against that person, even though everyone else in the room would be quite pleased to spend some quality time with the beast.
Does this mean cats are evil? Yes.
OK, maybe not evil, but they definitely have an attitude problem.

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