Cat Music, and Music Cats

The tomcats in Diane Duane's (excellent) cat-wizard novels are portrayed as quite thoroughly fascinated by song (given that this is what they view their caterwauling-at-the-ladies as being). Real-life cats also of course sometimes communicate vocally, though of course personality and circumstance will strongly influence how much and in what ways they will engage this particular channel.

That said, I've definitely noticed varying responses to human-made music on the part of my feline housemates. Cora, Nikki, and Shadow mostly seem indifferent, though it could just be I've not played anything they've had strong feelings about one way or another yet. I've talked to several humans who have described their cats seeming to despise most instances of "human caterwauling".

Brodie, on the other hand, seems to love music. If I am playing something he likes he will hop into my chair, curl up in my lap, purr loudly, and even drool on my arm until the song is over.

I have no clue what this is about, especially as it clearly isn't a feline universal. He seems very relaxed when "his" songs are on, so maybe something about it reminds him of happy warm snuggly kittenhood days?

As for Brodie's taste in auditory entertainment, that tends to run toward the "folky female vocalist" band of the musical spectrum. Bonus points if said vocalists have the ability to cover a large octave range. Far and away his favorite artist right now is Joanna Newsom, especially the song On A Good Day. He also enjoys Joni Mitchell. (And he even likes it when I sing along with what's playing, though I will not be posting a video of that!)

Brodie Eating Update

Good news! Brodie has been eating normally in the kitchen for the past few days, with only minimal staring at the front door. Some of this is probably due to post-Halloween anxiety wearing off, but I have also determined a few other factors coming into play and hence been able to adjust some variables.

One is that the youngstercats are probably pretty close to being full adult size at this point. This is somewhat related to what Matt was saying about the cats (and specifically Brodie) eating when they are hungry. Of course it is still important for cats to eat a proper amount of food (for their age, size, activity level, etc.) daily and cause for concern if a given cat refuses to eat at all for more than 24-36 hours. But for them to want food at less frequent intervals as they get older is pretty normal.

I've actually discovered recently, by way of offering dinner 1-2 hours later than I had been previously, that Brodie knows how to ask for food. His technique is to come up to me (especially if I am standing in the kitchen), gently brush my legs with his tail, and then jump up onto the mini cat-tree thing by the kitchen window and meow. Apparently there is a point at which he gets peckish enough to be more interested in his plate than in whatever is going /on outside the front door.

Shadow and Cora would have been fine keeping the old, earlier dinnertime (both of them have always been a tad more active than Brodie) but they've been good sports about switching, and the transition has been smoothed by my offering them some of their daily treat allotment before the meal proper. This way I get the logistical tidiness of being able to feed all 3 cats at once and nobody is in a position to be wondering why their sibling is getting food when they're not, etc.

Of course if I absolutely had to I am sure I could work out a way to feed folks at different times, and I am sure the cats would adjust fine to that given the opportunity, but I appreciate being able to just have a scheduled mealtime as that condenses the monitor-and-cleanup stuff into one small interval.

The other thing I've come to note is that Brodie seems to appreciate it if I guard the front door on his behalf. As in, he spends a lot less time looking up while eating and startles less frequently if I sit somewhere between him and the door. My house has a rather long, tunnel-like layout in which the front door leads straight into the living room, which in turn is open to the kitchen (and the kitchen opens to the back yard). So I can sit in front of the dining table or on the couch and from there be able to see the cats eating and monitor the front door as well. Works out pretty nicely! Though I have to wonder if this task (dinnertime door-guarding) is something Nikki would be interested in taking over...Brodie likes and respects her a lot, and she is Security Cat, after all.

So, yeah, for now, looks like we are back to peaceful and logistically easy suppertimes for all the kitties here. I've been told I "tend to over-analyze" things and perhaps some of this kind of writing will strike some people as evidence of an overfocus on minutiae, but the way I see it, there's no such thing as an irrelevant detail when it comes to cats! Plus I figure Brodie can't be the only sensitive dudecat out there, and thus perhaps someone dealing with a similar thing could benefit from reading what's worked in our household.

Brodie, The Sensitive Cat

What do I mean by "sensitive" when using such a term to refer to a cat like Brodie? Well, mainly I mean that Brodie is keenly perceptive, hyper-alert to household goings-on, liable to seem "shy" (due to hiding when strangers come around), and very attached to routines.

(In the photo below, Brodie peers through the rungs of one of the dining chairs he likes to sit on.)



He is drawn to details (as a baby he very quickly noticed the string his dangly toys were suspended from and often found them more interesting than the object at the end) and has an extremely long memory...I've often seen him digging under the sofa cushions for toys lost there weeks previously.

He is also (as I've mentioned before) exceedingly polite and highly sociable with other cats. When Shadow first arrived home (three weeks after Brodie and Cora) it was as if the two brothers had never been separated...it took Cora much longer to adjust to yet another boy in the house. And when Nikki arrived this past January, Brodie was the first to greet her, an act which mainly consisted of him following her at a courteous distance and occasionally attempting to sniff her tail.

(Photo below shows Nikki and Brodie kittyloafing together on the sofa, sharing space across a small but respectful gap)



For such a young cat Brodie definitely seems to exhibit an uncannily high degree of subtlety and restraint. His presence in the household seems to provide a sort of harmonizing influence...I always get the sense that if he were absent (perish the thought) for any length of time, things would quickly descend into inter-cat chaos due to the other three resident felines having somewhat "flashier" personalities. Brodie, in other words, is the cat who sits between two other cats who aren't getting along, and suddenly all is calm.

So, certainly Brodie's sensitivity serves him (and the intercat dynamic at work here) quite well in a variety of circumstances. However, he also has his particular challenges, and one of those has had me doing a fair bit of head-scratching recently. Basically, he's had an upsurge in dinnertime anxiety over the past week or so. His appetite seems fine, and I can't see anything wrong with his teeth or mouth (and in general he's not acting "painy"), but he's become very fixated on the front door of the house.

For the past few days he's been going up to his food dish (I feed all three younger cats at the same time, but in separate dishes spaced a few feet apart in the kitchen), sniffing and perhaps licking once or twice at the contents, but then just standing there over his dish staring at the front door with his ears pricked up in "high alert" mode. And if he so much as hears any noise outside -- a bird rustling in the bushes, or a dog walking by -- he will run off and hide in another room.

Meanwhile, Shadow and Cora will have finished their food, and of course one of them (usually Shadow) will see Brodie's abandoned plate as open for the taking. This means I can't just leave it out for Brodie to come back to in his own time...Shadow would eat all day if I gave him the opportunity.

I've also had no real success trying to feed Brodie in a separate room with the door shut...I tried this thinking it might give him a greater sense of security if he couldn't see the front door, but all that did was confuse him because he's used to eating in the kitchen (plus he seemed alarmed at having been taken alone into another room in the first place).

Matt (the SO) thinks I'm worrying too much about this and that Brodie will eat when he's hungry enough. This could very well be true but at the same time Brodie is a large cat and I know that puts him at higher risk of hepatic lipidosis if he goes more than 24 hours without eating, or a week (give or take a few days) eating much less than he should for his size.

All that said, I actually do have a theory as to why the sudden obsession with the front door: Halloween. I tried to feed all the kitties before any trick-or-treaters showed up, and Cora and Shadow ate...but Brodie seemed to be able to tell something was "up", and refused. I had just put some decorations on the front windows and I think those made him nervous just because they looked different than what he was used to. Then we had a lot of trick-or-treaters, which meant people were coming repeatedly to the front door, ringing the bell, talking loudly, etc.

I left several closets open so Brodie could cave up in them if he wanted to, but I can imagine all that activity at the front of the house must have been like his worst nightmare. :/ And it makes sense that he'd still be worried it might happen again a week later. Hopefully this "thing" resolves soon, at any rate...in the meantime I will just make sure and offer him several kinds of food (in different rooms, so maybe he'll get used to eating places other than the kitchen) so that he's likely to eat enough each day.

Almost Almost Friends

Unfortunately I didn't manage to get a picture of this, but yesterday Nikki actually, of her own volition, jumped up on the couch and snuggled up against Brodie! At the time Matt and I were watching "Mythbusters" and Brodie was napping with his front half on my lap and his back half sort of curled up against my leg on the sofa. And at one point Nikki proceeded to jump up onto the couch, lean down, sniff Brodie's tail (which he didn't seem to mind at all), and then wedge herself into what must have been a cozy spot between Brodie and the inner surface of the couch-arm.

She's ended up in positions that look similar with both Brodie and Shadow in the past, but those have always been due to the boys managing to sort of "sneak up" on her and generally it hasn't lasted very long. But this was the first time I'd ever seen a clearly mutually-acknowledged-and-approved snuggle occur between Nikki and any of the other cats. And the two of them stayed that way for a good 15-20 minutes (15-20 minutes during which I was trying not to move for fear of startling them -- that's why I don't have a picture, as getting up to find the camera would surely have led to Cat Scatter).

Anyway this pretty much confirms to me that Nikki might very well be willing to make friends with Brodie, and that I was right about Brodie having amazing Kitty Social Skills -- he's such an impeccably polite gentleman-cat that not even a Cat of Little Patience like Nikki can manage to stay perpetually irritated by him. Which is just all kinds of awesome. Again, I'm happy just so long as the cats are civil to each other, but this is really nice to see regardless.

The Sit-With Invitation: A Second Video

Below is Part 2 in my ongoing Respecting Your Feline Housemates video series:



I called this video "The Sit-With Invitation" because it is about the situation when one might want to invite a cat to sit with them. (A future video will concern the "Participation Invitation", which is when you-the-human invites a cat to come share in some activity or play a game or whatnot.)

Of course there ought never be any obligation for the cat to sit with you, but cats are generally very polite creatures, and hence may just appreciate some signal from you that you're available at a given moment.

Anyway, Part 2 features Brodie and Nikki (it just randomly worked out that way, but seeing as Part 1 featured Coraline and Shadow, I figure this is a nice balanced way to start out the series).

Brodie and Nikki, as you'll see if you watch the video, have very different styles and preferences.

Nikki generally doesn't mind being approached (and will sometimes, though she doesn't do it in this video, yell at me until I walk over to where she wants me!).

Brodie, on the other hand, very much prefers to be the one doing the approaching. He very much likes sitting with me but he's got a very strong "flight" reaction and will usually run away if someone walks up to him too quickly, stares, points at him, etc.

This isn't due to anything being "wrong" with him -- it's just his temperament. Frankly, part of the reason I wanted to make sure and include a video of him responding to an invitation in this series is because I know how often cats like Brodie get written off as "unfriendly" or "standoffish", when really they're just extremely sensitive to movement, etc.

Oh, and another thing I wanted to mention in the video but forgot to is the concept of "social timing" when interacting with cats. You will notice that I do a fair bit of waiting in these videos. This is in deference to something I've noticed about cats, which is that very often they don't react immediately-in-human-terms to something, but rather seem to "process" for a while before taking action.

And...I've found that it's often beneficial to (as the human half of any human-feline interactive exchange) know how to wait out the cat's "processing interval". I've seen a lot of humans, when a cat doesn't respond immediately, start doing all kinds of other things to try and get a response out of the cat. Of course particular cats vary in how they're inclined to react to this, but a lot of them seem to (again, in my observations) just get annoyed and leave, or appear to ignore the human.

And...as odd as this may sound, I am beginning to suspect this may have something to do with differences between the typical human's sense of time and the typical feline's sense of time.

Again, I can't claim to literally see inside their heads, but much of what I've seen them do in various situations suggests to me that cats don't readily distinguish between something that happened a split second ago and something that happened up to, say, five minutes ago.

In other words, it looks to me like felines have a relatively large "now" compared to the typical human's sense of "now". To them, perhaps, it just looks like we're being weird and irrational when we start waving our arms and making googly-eyes at them when they were just about to respond to our first invitationary gesture...which can compel them to figure that maybe they don't actually know WHAT the heck we want, and hence, perhaps we're better off left alone.

I can relate to this in some respects myself, as my own sense of time probably isn't human-typical, but even so I've definitely come to realize lately that cat-human interactions benefit tremendously when the human is willing to wait and sit still and not demand an immediate-in-human-terms response.