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Cat conducting psychological warfare [Update]
Aoi Tsuki
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This is Maka.
Most of the time, she's lovey-sleepy, or playful and fun, great to have around. When it's time for her and her sister to eat, though, she is a fucking nightmare, and always has been, since we got her about a year ago.
We feed each of the two cats a small scoop at 10 a.m. and then another at 10 p.m. - a bit under a cup, total, for each - and it's the morning that's the problem. As early as 6:30 a.m., whenever she decides she wants to be fed now, Maka begins scratching the loose paint off our doorframes (lol shitty apartment), sharpening her claws on the rug, tearing up the stack of Lego boxes we used to keep under the bed (now shut in the closet), pulling books off the bottom shelf by the dust jackets and noisily chewing on them, knocking shit over on the table, knocking shit over in the bathroom, walking across the nightstand--if it's loud and/or annoying enough to wake you up, she'll do it until you get out of bed.
She does not want attention. She doesn't have any medical problems, and she's not underfed. All she wants is for someone to get up, because it means someone is awake to eventually feed her, even if she knows that'll be hours away. And no, we never feed her upon getting driven out of bed. We punish her. But she shrugs off discipline like bullets to a Terminator: she doesn't mind being yelled at, hissed at, sprayed, scruffed, shot with Nerf darts, chased around the apartment being screamed at and shot with Nerf darts, or ignored for two or three sleepless hours on end. She just keeps at it till you're up, and it's gotten earlier and earlier, to completely intolerable levels.
The best solution we've come up with is for me to hop up at 6 or 7:30 or whenever she's screwing around, grab her, and lock her in the other bathroom, which has a functioning door (unlike our bedroom--it's two half-doors that bolt at the top, not even remotely cat-proof). Then we let her out of there and feed her when we're good and ready to start the day. But she doesn't mind being locked up, either. She just thinks it's a new part of the routine, to the point where she'll head over to the bathroom as soon as I approach.
Meanwhile, my husband is one of those people who can't go back to sleep after being woken up - which she does to us every single day - and has wracked up so much sleep debt that he's having trouble driving safely to work, and is being deprived of the patience needed to tutor kids all day. It's like being a parent, except Maka's not a baby, she's a goddamn cat. This is just fucking ridiculous.
Our last-ditch idea is to lock her in the bathroom with water and another litter box (the primary one is in our master bathroom) as soon as we go to bed, and let her spend eight to ten hours a day in the one place she can't do any damage. (The other bedroom has the guinea pigs, scratchable carpet, and a chewable record collection in it, so that's no good.) I've been told by friends that that's cruel, but I don't care anymore. Do you guys have any other ideas? Or should I tell my friends to piss off because my husband's health is kind of important?
tl;dr Smart, persistent, discipline-proof kitty is driving us insane. Tried everything. Solitary confinement?
Most of the time, she's lovey-sleepy, or playful and fun, great to have around. When it's time for her and her sister to eat, though, she is a fucking nightmare, and always has been, since we got her about a year ago.
We feed each of the two cats a small scoop at 10 a.m. and then another at 10 p.m. - a bit under a cup, total, for each - and it's the morning that's the problem. As early as 6:30 a.m., whenever she decides she wants to be fed now, Maka begins scratching the loose paint off our doorframes (lol shitty apartment), sharpening her claws on the rug, tearing up the stack of Lego boxes we used to keep under the bed (now shut in the closet), pulling books off the bottom shelf by the dust jackets and noisily chewing on them, knocking shit over on the table, knocking shit over in the bathroom, walking across the nightstand--if it's loud and/or annoying enough to wake you up, she'll do it until you get out of bed.
She does not want attention. She doesn't have any medical problems, and she's not underfed. All she wants is for someone to get up, because it means someone is awake to eventually feed her, even if she knows that'll be hours away. And no, we never feed her upon getting driven out of bed. We punish her. But she shrugs off discipline like bullets to a Terminator: she doesn't mind being yelled at, hissed at, sprayed, scruffed, shot with Nerf darts, chased around the apartment being screamed at and shot with Nerf darts, or ignored for two or three sleepless hours on end. She just keeps at it till you're up, and it's gotten earlier and earlier, to completely intolerable levels.
The best solution we've come up with is for me to hop up at 6 or 7:30 or whenever she's screwing around, grab her, and lock her in the other bathroom, which has a functioning door (unlike our bedroom--it's two half-doors that bolt at the top, not even remotely cat-proof). Then we let her out of there and feed her when we're good and ready to start the day. But she doesn't mind being locked up, either. She just thinks it's a new part of the routine, to the point where she'll head over to the bathroom as soon as I approach.
Meanwhile, my husband is one of those people who can't go back to sleep after being woken up - which she does to us every single day - and has wracked up so much sleep debt that he's having trouble driving safely to work, and is being deprived of the patience needed to tutor kids all day. It's like being a parent, except Maka's not a baby, she's a goddamn cat. This is just fucking ridiculous.
Our last-ditch idea is to lock her in the bathroom with water and another litter box (the primary one is in our master bathroom) as soon as we go to bed, and let her spend eight to ten hours a day in the one place she can't do any damage. (The other bedroom has the guinea pigs, scratchable carpet, and a chewable record collection in it, so that's no good.) I've been told by friends that that's cruel, but I don't care anymore. Do you guys have any other ideas? Or should I tell my friends to piss off because my husband's health is kind of important?
tl;dr Smart, persistent, discipline-proof kitty is driving us insane. Tried everything. Solitary confinement?
Aoi Tsuki on
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It used to be 8 or 9 p.m. and then 8 a.m., when I had a 9-5 job. At the time, she would start with the noise an hour to an hour and a half before she knew we'd usually be getting up; we gradually moved up that schedule when I went back to school and my husband started his part-time job. It's a good idea in theory, but she always, always starts her routine well before we're ready to be woken up.
Several. She only rips at the carpet when she wants us up in the morning, not any other time. And if we had motion sensors, she'd either learn to avoid them, or start making noise where she couldn't be sprayed. Little wench learns fast.
What about a timed feeder?
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=cat feeder timed&rh=i:aps,k:cat feeder timed&page=1
A timed feeder might be a decent solution, actually, if they learn to disassociate us from the food. Anyone ever tried one? Both cats are incredibly quick to learn, so it'd have to be pry-proof at the very least.
To a domesticated housecat, "dawn" might be when the sun rises... or it might be when the humans get out of bed, turn on the lights, interact with her, and give her food.
By getting disgruntled at 7am and locking her in the bathroom, you're actually teaching her that 7am is waking-up time.
The best solution here, awful as it sounds, is just to lock her in the bathroom until it's time to get up. However, combine this with giving her more attention in the daytime. This will teach her to be awake on your schedule. It might take a little while, but she'll eventually mellow out.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
With most animals (this is animal training behavior/psychology that I've absorbed from my wife who is a dog trainer) you need to ignore an action for an extended period of time before the animal realizes that its actions are not having the desired effect and gives up.
Just be ready for it to get worse before it gets better... Likely with one spectacular last attempt by her, called an extinction burst.
Getting them isn't the hard part, it's the crying, oh god the crying.
I think the longest we've managed to ignore her (that is, our most consecutive days of not reacting at all from the time she starts the noise till the time our alarms go off and we naturally get up) was seven or eight days in a row. That doesn't sound like very much, and it probably isn't, but the problem is that her entire goal is to have at least one human out of bed, and we do have to get up at some point in the day. If that point takes two, three or four hours from the start of her routine, that's fine with her; she just keeps at it. Meanwhile, we're being jerked awake every few minutes of each of those hours, listening to her rip up the carpet, shove herself through the blinds to rattle them against the windowsill, tear more old paint off the doorframes, and generally wreck shit in a way she never does when we're awake. Unlike, say, a barking dog, she will always ultimately get what she wants out of the behavior (namely, someone getting out of bed at some point, any point, during the day), no matter what we do; she never gets bored or discouraged. Ever.
It's technically possible that she would get bored or discouraged if we spent enough weeks or months never, ever reacting to her noise routine in any way whatsoever, and let our alarms be the sole indication of what will make us get out of bed; the long-term result (years of having a cat who doesn't fuck with our sleep) would definitely be worth it. But in terms of accumulated sleep deprivation, the damage being done to our bedroom, and the sheer difficulty of getting her to disassociate "noise" and "people get up some time before it gets dark again," it's just not feasible.
And no, crating her (plus the crying all night) would be a bit extreme. She's not a dog, unfortunately, and she'd go insane, which is not what we want, no matter how pissed off my husband is getting at her.
We did try shortening the interval between their dinner and breakfast to seven or eight hours, but it resulted in both cats begging incessantly at night. That would be the preferable alternative if Maka hadn't also gotten used to it and started making noise earlier and earlier in the mornings again.
It's a cat, not a child. Get rid of it and find a pet that doesn't make you feel miserable every single day of your life.
There are so many reasons why that isn't an option, but it may solve your issue if there's that much anxiety about being fed.
Mayu (older cat) overeats AND plays with leftover dry food, scattering it so she can bat it into corners.
Something does indeed have to give. But I plan to try locking her up at night before we give up and get rid of her.
I understand the feeling, believe me. I had to do this with a cat of ours a year ago - we rescued two from a farm where the owner was going to shoot them. One of them is amazing, and the other one... yowled. We thought it was wounded or infested with parasites or something at first. After several hundred dollars in vet bills and neutering, and two solid months of this, we had to face the facts - the cat liked to yowl at 4 or 5 in the morning, very loudly and constantly, for a couple of hours or more. Nothing would dissuade it from making this noise. It woke the kids, it woke me, it woke my sick wife who needs the sleep. It was impossible to stop, and became such an unbelievably disruptive problem that I had to give it to a shelter. No one else would take it.
I hope it found a good home, but I can't worry myself over it - the first night after we got rid of the cat was such blissful sleep, the entire mood in our house turned on a dime. Our morning was transformed back into the relaxed and bustling busy teamwork we usually had.
Sometimes you just have to face that your own sanity and good health are not worth sacrificing for an animal. It sucks, but... yeah. That's how I feel at least.
Have you considered that they may be hungry more often than the two meals you're giving them? What if you gave them a "lunch" as well?
A solitary cat grazes, but when you have two or more, they can sometimes be less leisurely about eating if they believe they're in competition for food. The OP mentioned that the problem cat has a sister (who presumably isn't also keeping the OP and her husband up at night).
I'd speculate that both cats are actually having some anxiety problems which present differently in each animal depending on which one is the alpha.
Find the full broadcast of this particular episode of "My Cat from Hell" and see if there are any behavior similarities.
Even if the you go to sleep at 1am and get woken at 6:30am, that's still 5 1/2 hours of sleep for your husband. I understand that you want to sleep more than that though. So, maybe try going to bed an hour or two earlier?
Get a timed feeder. Move their feeding times to 7am/7pm or the like. Problem solved once the cat figures it out.
Also, you mention it being in your bedroom. Why doesn't shutting the door work? Also, have you tried maybe doing thrice a day feedings? Smaller amounts obviously. Might keep it from freaking out so early.
You also need quality sleep too... so if you're getting interrupted it's just as bad as sleeping none. IE, a cat that wakes up earlier and earlier needs behavioral modification, otherwise the trend will likely continue.
The cat likely is getting hungry in the middle of the night. Our cats do occasionally wake us up if they run out in the middle of the night. But chewing and scratching on shit ? I don't know that seems like a, "I'm up, so uh... you guys should be getting up too."
Putting a cat in a room isn't bad, honestly, they don't really give any fucks. Your last option is giving it away.
Throw it in the bathroom and call it a day, that's not really cruel, tossing it in a crate would be cruel. Put a small bowl of food with it at night, some water, and a litter box.
If the food and water are gone in the morning, that's probably it.
This is infinitely better than sentencing it to death at the pound. Make it a little bed in there too. Even if you do this, I'd go for the timed feeder in there so she doesn't just gorge at some random moment. That or just put a minuscule amount in as a snack for her, don't let it constitute her mid-morning feeding.
My fat cat will claw at the walls outside my room to wake me up at about 7am every morning for feeding. Luckily, that's pretty much exactly when I need to get up for classes. She's my alarm clock.
How I sometimes train my cat things: is there any time that it stops? Like even a three minute period where usually you fall back into blissful sleep, but then she starts up again? If so *GET UP* during those three minutes. Preferably after two or so. That way you are getting up (in her mind...and in reality) *Because* she is being quiet. Note that this goes *against* your natural tendencies: it can be hard. But your natural tendencies have taught her this destructive behavior in the first place, they're flawed. This is how I train my cats to keep from doing things that they have picked up on about ways they can manipulate me.
The timed-feeder thing might be a good idea, too, although I would guess at this point the disassociate may not do anything anymore...but maybe it will!
Your quality of life is the primary thing. If the cat isn't adding to that on balance, and if you can't alter or mitigate its behavior in ways that increase your quality of life vs. not having the cat at all, removing it from your house is absolutely the correct thing to do and you aren't a bad person for doing it.
Hopefully you can get some enjoyment out of the cat's presence, and find a way to get it to stop destroying your house and making you miserable every morning.
Also, I know dry food is bad and most brands are full of things of no nutritional value. However, I always have a small amount for my cat to graze on through the day as she gets hungry and the her wet food is her "treat" that she looks forward to at mealtime. It may not be the healthiest way to do it, but my cat isn't overweight and rarely annoying.
Dry food isn't bad necessarily. Wet food is optimum, but a high quality dry food is just great for a cat as long as it's getting enough water.
Or even more simple, why not just leave food out-preferably in multiple locations if you have multiple cats? Yeah, you risk weight issues, but having a fat cat is infinitely better than getting rid of her or risking your own health.
2. We could try three small meals, but I'm afraid of creating another excuse for them to beg in the middle of the day (they can be annoying as hell at dinner, but just by crying, not wrecking our apartment). It's an option, though. I'm more inclined to try the automatic feeder, preferably one they couldn't break into, for two meals a day that apparently have no connection to us being awake or not.
3. Leaving food out for grazing isn't a great idea: given the chance, they'll gorge themselves, throw up, then try to eat their puke again, simple-dog style. It also makes it impossible to keep track of who's eating most of it, and we've just gotten their fat little asses back down to healthy weights. (They eat Blue Buffalo. Good stuff.)
4. We do enjoy her, except of course for this part; she's adorable, and getting very cuddly as she grows out of kittenhood. We just got done playing Murder the Black String on the Black Couch.
Aside from that, as far as ease is concerned, an auto feeder sounds best.
Lastly, we all know cats. It may just be about attention. I know my cat is always STARVED for attention first thing in the morning. She needs her morning pets before she settles down.
And i doubt your cats are going to be able to open the feeders. Did you look at them on the link I provided?
Our cat would be super obnoxious at ridiculously early hours when he wanted to eat; we also fed him twice a day, morning and night. A couple years ago at the vet's suggestion we started incorporating wet food into his diet and he's pretty much left us alone when it comes to the mornings, unless he wants attention or we've slept in pretty late.
He now gets a small can of wet food in the morning (generally around 7-9 depending on who's home/schedules, and then again around 6PM) and another small can at night with a tiny bit of dry food. He seems to stay full a lot longer and is more satisfied with his meals and as an added bonus he stays a bit slimmer on average.
I did look at the feeders, and several reviews for the automated ones complained that their cats could get into them with little trouble (i.e. getting a paw under the white disc), so I'm not sure which to try. I'm not sure about feeding an extra meal a day, either, what with their weight - they run around all damn day and half the night, so exercise isn't the problem - and the few times we've accidentally overfed them without coordinating with each other, and Maka still begged out of habit.
I wish she was just after attention when she gets us up.
Huh. That's interesting. I think this might be the fundamental root of your problem. For whatever reason, your cat associates feeding with attention in an exclusionary way.
http://www.amazon.com/Automatic-Electronic-Programmable-Portion-Control/dp/B004SBSNB0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329435168&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Petmate-LeBistro-Portion-Automatic-Bleached/dp/B0016BVY2U/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1329435168&sr=8-2
Also, if your cats aren't clearly dominant over each other, you might consider trying free feeding again. We have two cats and free feed. For a while they were both eating like monsters, but when they noticed there was always plenty of food around, they started monitoring themselves. We did have to go through a period of overeating and then regurgitation, but just cleaned it up and didn't give them more food than normal.
You could even set it to provide a small snack meal around 7am so the cat shuts up.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Once you've done a few weeks or a month of that, then maybe re-evaluate the situation. Not only will you not be sleep deprived, which means you'll be better equipped to deal with the situation and make decisions, but the reinforcement of only being up and about during a certain time period of the day might help break her of her current habits.
And unrelated, but please consider feeding your cats a no grains high protein wet food. It's tons better for them than dry, from both a nutritional and a hydration perspective.