Cat`s Guide to Humans

[LennonCook]

Cats Guide to Humans
1. 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.

2. 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's something they assume is more important than you. They 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 neighbor's Pomeranian) are better still living. When you see the expression on your human's face, you'll know it's worth it.

5. How Long Should You Keep Your Human?

You are only obligated to your human for 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 only take you so far.

[RevRuby]

dexter would like to add that randomly attacking humans is a good way to instill fear in adults and children, although he keeps landing himself in the bathtub with faucet running for attacking the children. he still maintains it is good practice to attack and remind us that we do not have claws.

[Wurm]

That was the funniest thing I have read in a couple of days... THANKS!!

[Kaltia]

I have just shown this to my pet siamese and he throughly agreed. he then sent me to get him some food and clean his bean-bag before brushing him gently for a few hours.

[shadow dragon]

and why cats do not openly rule the planet is beyond me.....oh yea dogs,thats why

[Sazerac]

Cloudy needs to read this. That describes her cat Merlie to a "T"...the other day when we were going to multiplay Icewind Dale, she kept having to move him off the keyboard because he was demanding treats! [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]

-Sazerac

[T/-/alali]

Thats why dogs are my favorites (no offence choc)

LOL, So Merlie and Boo have both read the maunal! Somewhere around here I actually have a photograph of Boo sitting on my mouse, me with arms crossed waiting for him to move in the background...he won LOL!

Boo has also taught Captain Marmalade and E.V. "the power of the pout". E.V. even takes it as far as adding squinting, "about to cry" eyes in order to get fresh meat off of our dinner plates. Luckily that is one tactic that they grow out of (if the human is at all lucky).

Thanks for the post LennonCook! I'm going to print it out and read it to them to let them know I am on to their schemes and see which ones get scared and change LOL.

[ 10-11-2002, 04:41 PM: Message edited by: Moni ]

[/)eathKiller]

hmm my cat must've accidentally gotten some other handbook instead...

Rule 1: Run up to people and trip them at all times...
Rule 2: If it moves kill it...
Rule 3: Eat and sleep, that's about it...


AAAH! O_o Not the face!

[ 10-12-2002, 02:00 AM: Message edited by: /)eathKiller ]