After 13 years, my cat has only recently discovered that there isn’t a door in my house he can’t scratch on that won’t produce a sound sufficiently high pitched and loud enough to wake me from even the deepest slumber. And keep me awake. I haven’t slept through the night in weeks. It’s like having a newborn, only without the diapers or the prospect of being taken care of in return in my old age.
Last night he woke me four times: Twice to go outside, and twice to come in. And of course, each time he came in, he eventually jumped into bed with me and proceeded to methodically walk back and forth across my body until he could find a comfy nook to curl up in and fall to sleep. Comfy for him.
The thought occurred to me that I could seal him in a burlap sack and dump him into the lake, but I suppose that would be wrong. So if any cat experts have any less drastic suggestions, I’d appreciate it.
@49, no, you just have to play with your indoor cat and make more of an effort to make sure he’s got stuff to do when you’re not there. Takes a little more effort, but if you’re not willing to do it, don’t get a cat. They have ecological effects, too, such as killing birds and shitting all over the place, like people’s gardens and parking strips, which has a negative impact on water quality, much like dog shit. Part of my yard is basically a litter box because of all the neighborhood cats that go there to shit. Thanks, outdoor cat owners!
if the vet gives it a clean bill of health you need to go with a proven strategy – ignore the beast.
if you react to its noise at night you are just giving it positive reinforcement. No reaction from you = no fun for the cat.
I leave my bedroom door open and he doesn’t go outside otherwise I’d have the same problem. As for the sleeping, you just have to be just as inconsiderate a bed buddy as your cat.
That cat has trained you well. Cause that is what happened.
A tip that I use is I hiss at the cat- like another cat would. He understands this (finally I am speaking his language!) and stops what he is doing.
As far as walking all over you, apparently you really like it or you would give him a sweep of your arm and knock him off the bed. After a few times he’ll understand when you don’t want to be disturbed.
If you’re talking about your bedroom door, leave it closed and put a Scat Mat right outside it. The cat won’t be able to scratch, but he might start meowing. Have you considered earplugs?
42 has it right. I love cats, they are very delicious.
I will loan you my dog. My dog likes to sleep at night and will put up with no bullshit from a cat. This of course assumes that your cat survives the introduction to my dog.
Cienna likes to strangle kittens to relieve frustration when ever abortion (aka Murder-On-Demand…) is threatened.
perhaps she could help you out
I’ve always had indoor cats, and they sleep through the night. They know feeding time is after the alarm wakes Daddy up.
My guess is that your cat is a spoiled child and needs to stay inside.
@47/@49:
A few things to note. 1) I’ve moved around a bit for work/school and so forth in the time I’ve had my cat. EVERY SINGLE VETERINARIAN I’ve had has told me, without fail, that it’s much better for cats to live their lives indoors because of the associated health risks they encounter from being outside on a regular basis. I do actually take the time and play with my cat, give him toys and plenty of things to stimulate his mind. Thanks for asking. 2) The cat we adopted was, unfortunately, declawed by his previous owner. Believe it or not, I’m not such a sick bastard that I’d send a defenseless cat outside on a regular basis so that he can “be one with nature” or whatever it is you think a small feline that has been domesticated over thousands of years apparently gains from being exposed to 21st century predators. 3) I didn’t realize you were the cat whisperer, and could tell me what my animals specific needs were. I just assumed that since he purred every time I pet him and layed on my lap whenever I sat on the couch scratching his belly, he was content with the situation he was placed in. I’d love to hear your insights on how much he hates me for having him neutered before adopting him, because the experience left him incomplete.
When I was a kid I had a cat that would wake me up in the night with meowing. If I didn’t let him out he’d shit on my bed the next day.
If he’d been out at night and it was raining in the morning, he’d stand in a dry patch in the woods meowing until I came and carried him back to the house. Or he’d shit on my bed.
Cats are assholes, but honestly I’m into it.
You’ve totally been trained. Stop responding during the night and keep your bedroom door shut.
60 you asshole. i’m responding to others who are pretending to be cat whispers themselves and telling people like me how to care for my cat.
you keep your cat indoors, i’ll let mine outside. i’m fine with that. there are just others like you who insist on lecturing me. every once in a while, i get sick of it and lecture back.
and for CHRISSAKES i know what the vets say and what people like you think. please don’t tell me one more time. THE VETS ARE NOT CONCERNED WITH MENTAL HEALTH. oh btw, they are also fighting an epidemic of diabetes and obesity in cats. hmmm, wonder how that happened?
your cat will live longer, but my cat will live happier.
oh and yeah, declawed cats unfortunately have been mutilated into not having defenses and should not be allowed to roam. however, they should be allowed outside in a safe enclosure. are you doing that? i hope so.
btw GOLDY
why did you post this? you knew that the “keep the cat indoors” crowd would just chime in and lecture you. it’s like posting about vegetarianism or monogamy or the blue angels. predictable hijacking will occur.
Onion, I adore you.
The box, man, the box will shut him up. We have a large tabby cat who thinks he owns us, a notion we allow during hours we are awake (he’s allowed out for an hour in the morning while we’re getting ready for work). However, when the lights go out, he leaves us alone. Why? because when he started up this nightime bullshit my husband put him in his carrier box and put the box in the kitchen where we couldn’t hear him rattle the bars. His box is quite large so he’s not uncomfortable. Maybe some cats don’t respond to punishment, our cat does. After a night in the box, within sight and sound and smell of his food and water, plus the added humiliation of being watched by his baby sisters who roam free, he stops bugging us at night. This isn’t to say that months won’t go by and he’ll start up again for no good reason and we repeat the box punishment and he stops.
Cats are as different as people and each responds different. Try different aversion methods until something works.
Oven mits and ductape, just don’t apply the ductape to any furry areas.
@36, do you know the average lifespan of a cat nowadays? Into their 20’s. Dogs are different, and usually the bigger the dog, the shorter the lifespan (exept for a lot of the inbred or designer types, which tend to have shorter lifespans because of health issues that came with the breeding bullshit).
As to the sticky stuff, it’s true cats hate sticky stuff on their paws, but I have an older house that tends to have cluster fly issues, and I don’t want to use poison sprays, etc, around my cats, so I use flytape when there’s a problem, but I have one cat that, no matter where I hang it (from the high ceilings, in the middle of the room), he somehow manages to get it all wrapped around his tail! And of course he has long hair. He sees me coming with the olive oil, and RUNS. Like I enjoy the ordeal any more than he does!
Oh, as for the ‘keep ’em indoors’ crowd, I have to agree, mostly because I had an asshole neighbour who would not only purposely run down any cats he saw in the area, but trained his dog to be a cat killer (class C felony in this state, but, when someone is butt-buddies with the pigs, try and get anything done about it!). Now that both neighbour and dog are dead, I let them out during the day sometimes, if it’s nice, so they can bask in the sun, but they come in at night (raccoons, possums, coyotes, dogs, bears, sometimes cougars…roam our area at night).
@70 – I used to live down the road from a kid who may or may not have dissected the neighbors’ cat and strewn it all over the yard. Suddenly, every cat in the neighborhood was an indoor cat.
@63-65 “i’m responding to others who are pretending to be cat whispers themselves and telling people like me how to care for my cat.”
Fair enough…although when you direct a response to “32 and the rest of 32’s buddies” and I’m #32, I’m inclined to think that you’re actually responding to me.
“i know what the vets say and what people like you think. please don’t tell me one more time. THE VETS ARE NOT CONCERNED WITH MENTAL HEALTH”
Clearly my vets and their respective happy, healthy cats aren’t concerned with the mental health of my cat in the slightest. Why else would they specialize in cats? Also, by insinuating that your cats need to be outdoors to stimulate their mental health, you are essentially saying that you know what’s best for my cat.
But let’s not split hairs. You’re obviously set in your ways about this, so I’ll stop arguing with you about this point. If you feel the need to respond with another 4 posts to satisfy yourself that you’ve had the last word, by all means, do so. All I’m saying is: Indoor cats live longer, and any attempts at discerning the overall happiness of your cat based on whether or not you let him stalk insects in the yard is projecting at best, and projecting is not a valuable metric for determining the health of an animal.
Whenever your cat does something you don’t like, tap him on the nose with your index finger.
They hate that and will stop whatever, because it’s similar to the way mother cats discipline their kittens what’s wrong and right.
A tap on the nose with her paw.
Doesn’t have to be painful, shouldn’t be painful: a tap from your index finger on it’s nose works.
I combined the tap with a loud, “NO!” and now my cat also understands the “No!” alone.
Had a cat sitter who was impressed that I have a cat who understands the word “No!” even when he used it.
Also: get a litter box.
@74- That’s terrible. This is a Catwoman to meow about: http://www.batmanmovieonline.com/gallery…
Cats are particularly prone to be duped by Post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy. If a behavior is followed by an undesirable stimuli a few time, the cat will discontinue the behavior. The trick is to make sure the cat doesn’t see you as the cause of the negative stimuli. If the cat sees you squirting it, they’ll just think you’re being a jerk. If the cat does something and then something surprising and unpleasant happens out of the blue, the cat will assume their behavior is the cause for the undesirable effect. The specifics don’t matter as much, so long as the illusion is convincing.
You have a brain that is about 50 times heavier than the cat’s. The cat’s advantage is that humans are more social animals, and are more willing to sacrifice for members of their group. The cat likes you, but really doesn’t get that it’s making you unhappy. Be more like the cat. The cat has applied its brain-power to achieving its desires. If you did the same, it would be no contest.
@72- Latching onto the easiest metric to measure isn’t a very good way to evaluate anything.
Don’t tell me I’m projecting, this is pure observation: Given the choice, most cats will go out. You can call it projection if I say they “like” to go out, but then it’s clear you’re going to deny we can ascribe any emotional state to cats. Humans and cats are different, but one human is different from another as well. If we can ascribe an emotional state to a human aside from ourselves, it is not outlandish to ascribe one to cats.
My cat Rooker, does this exact same thing! I found that a spray bottle works – but you have to stay with it (or maybe that’s just my cat – I suspect she’s a tiny bit dumber than most…). She relapses every now and then, but it’s worlds better than it was!
Good luck!
Hi Goldy,
Your cat may have a health issue that is causing him to act out. He’s a bit of an older cat so he may have some sort of bladder infection or something that is causing him pain. Cats can not talk to us so they lash out when something is wrong, ie: pee on your bed when their little box is dirty.
All these other tricks are good for cats who have had problems like this from a young age, but it looks like yours is recent…and in a cat that you’ve had for years.
In short, please take him to the vet for a check up. Your cat could be trying to tell you that he’s in pain. Anthropomorphizing your cat and calling him an “asshole” is not going to help the matter. He can’t respond like a normal human, because he’s not.
You might be interested to know that Fnarf received his Credentials in Feline Husbandry from the Felix Academy in ’09.
I’ve been a cat owner for 27 years. Sorry, there’s no solution to your problem.
Get a ScatMat. Put it outside the bedroom door, turn it on, close the door. You might hear an occasional meow of surprise, but no scratching. Try not to step on it in bare feet.
Someone with a similar problem called into a radio show — the vet recommended ignoring the cat. The clip is in this segment of the show:
http://wamuanimalhouse.org/shows/2011-07…
SoftPaws look fucking creepy. Why would anyone want to deck their cat out with cheap pornstar nails?
Ignoring the bad behaviour seems to do the trick. Though clever cats will probably just kick it up a notch and start kneading your sensitive bits with their claws.
13 years? That’s a geriatric cat. You can expect more unusual behaviors. Geriatric cats get harder and harder to handle over time.
The clock is running out. Just pet him and love him while you’ve still got the opportunity, and be patient with his geezerhood. Believe me when I say you’ll miss the scratching on the doors when it stops, and a hell of a lot sooner than you think.
My cat used to do this. I attached a piece of shag carpet to the bottom part of the door. She tried to scratch it one time, failed hilariously, and never tried again. Problem solved.
The reason cats are wonderful pets is the same reason they can drive us crazy: because they are intelligent creatures. They’re not blindly loyal like a dog. A lot of dogs you can treat like shit and they’ll still love you. If you treat a cat like shit, it will treat you like shit. But it goes both ways, when a cat shows you love or wants to be with you, it’s because it likes you and wants to be around you. Kind of like other humans. Yes, they can be like having children. The rewards of having an intelligent pet also come with some trade offs. If you want a pet that will never bother you, get a python. They don’t smell, they are quiet, only need food every 2 weeks. But unlike a cat, they are relatively boring. They don’t play, the don’t care about affection, they just sleep under their rock most of the time and sometimes slither around their cage. Now practical advice, sometimes you have to be tough with them. I agree, sometimes you have to put it in the cat carrier but only in extreme circumstances. My cat sometimes whines and makes noise too in the mornings. If it’s that bad, I lock him out of the room and put earplugs in and eventually he stops whining and settles down. Also, the other person who posted about a litterbox had a good idea. Even if it’s an outdoor cat, get it a litterbox. My cat only goes out during the day every other day and he uses his litter box all the time, even after he’s been outside. I only let the cat out during the day now, he got beat up at night by a raccoon or possum once. Anyway, like a child who is also an intelligent creature, you have to be patient and compassionate. Because you’d do the same thing in the cat’s place if the roles were reversed. And if you really can’t stand cats, when it finally dies of old age, don’t get any more pets except maybe a python.
Also I’ll weigh in on the indoor vs outdoor debate. When my cat was exclusively indoor, it was not more healthy. It was overweight. When I moved to a place with a big yard, I let it out all the time and it lost a ton of weight and was healthier. But yes, it has risks too. It got beat up pretty good and I had to pay $800 in vet bills to patch him up. Believe me, after spending that kind of money I was ready to keep him inside all the time. But they’re not happy. I finally decided to split the difference. Assuming raccoons and possums are nocturnal, I only let him out during the day now. And I only let him out every other day. Seems to work out ok so far. He can handle being in a day and not go sitrcrazy. By the second day he’s restless and wants out. I understand both sides of the argument. He could be killed outside. As someone pointed out, so could we. We’re probably just as likely to die in a car wreck as a cat. There’s no easy or perfect answer. I figure if he gets killed, he’s overall had a good life. He does like to hunt sometimes and caught a big rat the other day. It makes him happy, it’s what his instincts drive him to do. Life has risks, the best we can do is mitigate them or curl up in a ball and never leave the house. I don’t blame people for keeping them in all the time or letting them out all the time. I would recommend for outdoor cats, buy pet insurance. I see QFC has a program through Kroger. Accident insurance is $7 a month.
It’s a new behaviour in an old cat- it’s due to something changing.
I think 82 pretty much said it, but I’ll try another thought on the same thing. I get up to pee more in the night, and have a harder time settling back to sleep, than I did 20 years ago.
And my dad is up a lot more often than I am in the night.
It’s called aging. Get your cat checked out to make sure it’s not a medical problem. And then treat him light you would an aging human- love’im, pet’im, and try to ignore’im when you need to. See if you can arrange a situation where he can do what he needs during the night without waking you.
Me
1. Go to vet to rule out UTI
2. Get better litter boxes with several types of litter, we like the triangle shaped litterboxes that are twice as tall as usual
3. Wake the cat up as much as possible during the day, which may include scotchtaping catnip or dirt or perfume to his lower back, or putting catnip in a box
4. Goldfish or betta might be enough of a novelty to distract him, also the water’s good for your plants
5. Before bed, bodymassaging the cat with soaking wet socks so he has to lick himself dry will make him fall asleep
6. A totally awesome fake fur kitty bed that he can only curl up in at night
7. A desk lamp with a 60 watt bulb shining down on the totally awesome kittybed is sunshiny sleepy goodness
8. Totally last ditch effort: You may need to have the cat on amitriptilyne for a while if the cat has a bladder irritation that’s non-infectious and he won’t shut the hell up
Wow. Busy day. So I’ve barely had time to read this monster thread, let alone participate in it.
To be clear, it’s only kinda-sorta a new behavior. The cat has awakened me for years to go outside. The difference now is that he’s waking me up to come back inside, when he used to be happy to stay out until morning. And then, of course he wakes me again to go outside.
As for the whole indoor/outdoor cat debate, yes, I know outdoor cats tend to half the lifespan of indoor cats, but it just didn’t suit this cat. Also, he proved an excellent mouser in his younger years, ridding my garden of pesky rodents. So considering he’s managed to make it until 13, relatively healthy, I think this worked out well for him.
An update: Perhaps Wompus reads Slog, because last night he just curled up in bed with me and the dog, and didn’t move until daylight. First uninterrupted night’s sleep in god knows how long.
Cats are crepuscular angels!
STOP GETTING OUT OF BED. Eventually, your cat will realize that scratching the door (or scratching the door at night) doesn’t do crud. It took a while, but the two cats I raised in my childhood both learned that once the lights in the house were out, that was it until morning.
Oh, for indoor-outdoor: I had one cat who probably could’ve managed to live indoor-only, but the other one…
We got him from a litter. He had never been outside in his life and we planned to keep it that way. He grew up INSANE. At a few months old, he’d hide behind the couch, run out to bite my sister (God I loved that part), then run away again. He was completely bonkers. Practically the same day we started letting him outside, he mellowed. And I know it wasn’t just age because whenever there was a snowstorm and he had to stay cooped up again, he went nuts. He lived to be fourteen, which isn’t great, but if we’d kept him inside (or kept making him wear that bell), he’d have given himself a heart attack by age ten. It depends on the cat.
Bird fans: Stop telling cat owners to keep their cats inside all the time; we’ll never do it. What you MIGHT have some luck with is local fledging schedules. Provide cat owners with the specific 2-4 weeks in the spring when the local callipygean warbler chicks or whatever are leaving the nest but can’t quite fly yet (which is when they’re most vulnerable to cats) and ask them to keep the cats inside for just that part of the year.
Goldy (@95), I love the idea of a cat reading Slog. Now if only someone would draw an appropriate cartoon/caricature of it.
You might be interested to know that Jubilation T. Cornball was once a prolific and humorous commenter on Slog, until one day, while bending over to suck the limp dick of a toothless old alcoholic in the men’s room of a tacky gay bar, he slipped in a pool of santorum and hit his head on the toilet, resulting in a large amount of blood loss. He disappeared from Slog for a while, and then recently came back, apparently brain damaged, obsessed with Fnarf, and incapable of making anything other than repetitive, tedious and definitively un-humorous comments. We miss you, Jubie.
1.Put him outside at night.
2. Earplugs.
Wompus. Cool cat name. What kind of nicknames do you have for him?
@49: I’ve had my cat almost six years, and she’s never once even asked to go outside. Some animals just naturally gravitate toward indoors-only.
Just electrocute your cat. That sounds reasonable. I hope all the people suggesting that don’t actually own pets.