Purr-sonal Preferences

Most people (persons, if you prefer) have personal preferences ~ in cars, food, clothes, and abodes.

Some drive Porsches and live in McMansions.

Others (e.g., motivational speakers and freelance writers) tend to live in vans down by the river, and take public transportation to and from their day jobs.

Cats, in contrast, have purr-sonal preferences, which, despite a rather limited vocabulary, they convey purr-fectly to their resident purr-sons through means of distinctly different feline utterances which their purr-sons eventually decipher through trial and error.

Our cat, Tigger, has purr-sonal preferences that are absolutely legendary among his furry feline friends.

How do I know?  I’ve heard the little guy bragging.

Here’s an example of one of his purr-fectly ludicrous predilections:

We have two sets of French doors leading to the deck behind our villa.

The doors are side by side, separated by about twelve inches of wall.  Other than their respective locations, the doors are identical in both form and function.

Due to the furniture placement, we (the purr-sons) tend to use the left door for ingress and egress to and from the deck.

Not our finicky feline, Tigger.  Nope.

We head outside and, rather than following us out the left-hand door, he walks out of his way to head over to the right hand door, where he sits down like a donkey on break and waits, rather impatiently, for us to close the left door and open the right door for him to walk through.

Which, like all well-trained purr-sons, we do ~ convincing him once again that we are his purr-sonal minions . . . placed on Earth to do his bidding and satisfy his every whim.

Why does he prefer the right door to the left?

No reason ~ well, no rational reason discernible to the naked eye.  It’s just his purr-sonal preference.

Have we spoiled him over the years?

Absolutely!  But that is not the sole and only cause of his finicky feline behavior.

Our mistake?  Educating the little tyke about the cats in Cleopatra’s day who were worshiped as Gods.  Once Tigger heard tales of his Egyptian ancestors, he began purr-fecting his plans to rule over his purr-sons with precision.

First, he refused to drink water out of the water dish which we cleaned and refilled with fresh water every day:

* Purr-haps the color of the bowl (white) didn’t suit his sensibilities.
* Purr-haps its curvature fell short of his expectations.
* Purr-haps the make, model or year didn’t precisely suit his desires.

No matter.

When Tigger is thirsty, he sits in the middle of the kitchen floor and cries until  one of his purr-sons shows up to fill a teeny-tiny plastic bowl with water and hold it while he drinks slowly (think M-O-L-A-S-S-E-S) until his thirst is sated, or our arms grow numb with fatigue, whichever comes first.

Likewise, with his food.

He refuses to eat the canned cat food we purr-chase for him.  Instead, he licks off the gravy and then cries for more . . . gravy, that is, not food.  Purr-haps he is a budding vegetarian, who will eat gravy, but not actual morsels of meat.

Who knows?

Tigger loves to chase the ubiquitous lizards that proliferate in FL, and is quite keen on catching them.  Once caught, he loses interest . . . probably because they are not served with gravy.

His purr-sonal preference is dry food . . . eaten out of our hands, not from his already filled bowl on the kitchen floor.

Occasionally, IF (a big IF) he is in a benevolent mood, he will eat directly from his bowl  ~ as long as we sprinkle fresh dry food on top of the fresh food already in the bowl.

We’ve had cats before and never have they stepped into the God-like role that Tigger has assumed and purr-fected.

It almost makes me wish we had a dog . . . but not quite.

Quote:  To err is human . . . to purr is  feline. ~ Stuart McMillan