Cat Diary, 40

I’ve learned Come and Sit, both of them easy, but does the old woman think I am a dog?

She keeps saying “Look.”

I look everywhere she might send a kibble.

Have I told you I’ve graduated onto grain-free kibbles? That’s mornings, anyhow. She persists feeding me the lesser kibbles from lunch time onward.

Everytime I think I’ve trained the old woman to send a kibble into the direction where I’m looking she screws the lid back onto the jar and that’s that.

Here’s me looking everywhere …

We’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks, I might’ve cracked it 20% of the time and she keeps wanting me to look at her while she throws the kibble.

That’s so labour intensive. I want to be looking into the field when the kibble sails overhead and I can see where it lands.

She started to teach me Look because she kept finding kibbles where I hadn’t found them. What does she expect? That I should sniff them out??

I want to skip Look and go to Lie Down, should be easy to pick up a bunch of food mid morning.

Cat Diary 36

I’ve started learning to put my head in things to get the kibbles out. For a long time I didn’t like my whiskers to be bent backward. Now, because I know there’ll be a kibble at the end of my hunt, I can bear it.

It proves that we cats are just as good at delayed gratification as humans are, don’t you think?

The old woman craftily loads kibbles into my catnip pillow case … I swear I don’t know when … in between me looking here there and elsewhere it must be.

When I walk by the bundled up pillow case and I can smell a kibble or two, that’s when I pounce.

I can even get the kibbles out of a crumpled piece of paper now. We had a lady visiting last night. She said, “My place is much tidier than yours!”

The old woman laughed. She said, “Tthat shouldn’t be hard!“

It’s true that the whole floor is busy with activities, is that necessarily untidy?

Just having a nap here, waiting for my bedtime kibble storm. Once I’ve eaten them, it’s time for me to encourage the old woman to go to bed. She complains it’s too early, but when I bite her ankle she soon goes.

Night times I play with the toys the old woman has put on shelves. Which I can reach now, except for my bird. It lives high on a bookshelf.

The old woman says I can have it back when she’s taken its voicebox out. Apparently there’s a nasty battery in there that’d kill me if I chewed on it.

Cat Diary 33

Did I tell you I’ve been learning under? As in a kibble under a piece of paper. Too easy. Then a kibble under a little plastic dome. Not so easy.

Now it’s all about a kibble in a thing too small to get my nose into. Or my tongue.

See the kibble in that thing? It’s harder than it looks. Harder than the kibble under the little dome. That one you just shove along with your nose and eventually the kibble gets left behind and you can eat it.

The black thing took me ages to work out coz it isn’t slippery. It just sat there when I pushed it with my nose.

Did it!

Cat Diary 32

This is the fifth day training with a piece of paper. I don’t know the aim, but I aim to please. More kibbles that way.

I know there’s someting under there …

Ah! Got it. A kibble of course! Yum.

I can’t see it. She’s trying to trick me …

Well, of course I see it now. To see is to eat.

What? Where is it?

Oh! OK! Got it! Oh no, it slipped.

I’m learning ‘under’ …

Cat Diary 31

Training again, I believe. A new thing, and the old woman hopes to tempt me to touch it with a round of kibbles? Huh.

As if that’s going to work. I showed her what I thought by eating the goods and walking away, out of sight out of mind. If only humans were so normal.

But of course she can’t leave well alone. She lay out another round of kibbles and because I was peckish—it is nearly lunchtime—I soon snaffled them up.

And would you believe the old woman put the next round inside the object, whatever you call it? I had a go. She video’d me, 38 seconds worth. Will take you forever to load. Worth it for me. Got most of them out.

Tired then. Time for a nap.

Cat Diary 30

I’ve been in training. The first new habit I’m supposed to pick up is to scratch either one of the three objects she got into the house for that purpose—to be scratched!

I really don’t know why she bothers? I scratch the uprights of the couch and after she told me NO! a few too many times, I graduated onto the vinyl chairs.

Look at me, I’m thinking. This after the old woman said NO! about the couch. I want her to see my expression which says I am not pleased to hear NO! when I’m trying to get her attention.

She didn’t stop and I switched to the vinyl chairs. Too bad the vinyl is so strong I can only make holes. She said a blind woman could read these, and she’d be saying NO! just as many times.

She also said, this is the last straw. Whatever that means. She collected the three things to be scratched and lay them out …

The cardboardy thing is in the middle, it’s useless because I get my claws stuck. The thing with rope around it is just too weird for me. The thing on the left is the board the old woman found on the riverbank after a flood.

That’s the one we settled on for training. She lays it beside her on the couch. The first session she dragged a cord over it and every time I touched the cord, she’d go all gooey, slathering me with praise.

But more importantly she gave me a kibble everytime I touched the cord. After about twenty toes worth of kibbles, she said that’s enough today. We both relaxed then.

Cat Diary 29

My favourite way of gathering kibbles is from this thing that the old woman built from toy bricks.

This is already the third version. It’s getting higher and today there are three things with moving parts.

This thing with the bits looking like wings took me ages to work out how to shift and she’s just added the crossbar but I think I’ll handle it. She leaves kibbles under the crossbar, or under the grey thing.

There are three sides … the front, the back and the top and I do them in that order. The front is my favourite.

The back is harder as the kibbles are always on the tiniest ledges where I need to grapple them from with my tongue.

The top is the highest it’s been yet, but not a problem. I can still reach with all four paws on the ground.

My Duplo puzzle board is my favourite kibble hunting ground!