A Cat's 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 disemboweled 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.
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