Advice—November 2008

Dear Sparkle,
When I was a kitten, I came to live with this human who was really great. We’d play lots of fun games, like “attack the hand” and he even taught me how to fetch my fuzzy ball. But my favorite game was at mealtime — while he was opening up my can of food, I would crawl up his pants leg, and keep going until I reached his shoulder. Well, I’ve been here a year and a half now, and for some reason he has decided he really hates it when I crawl up his pants leg. Whenever I try, he starts screaming and a couple of times, when I accidentally tore his pants or his shirt, he got really angry. What’s up with that? Doesn’t he like me anymore?
Signed,
Playful But Puzzled

Dear Playful,
This may not have occurred to you, but now that you are a full-grown cat, you weigh a little more than you did as a kitten. Actually, make that a lot more. And as you have grown in size, so have your claws. What was cute coming from a 7-ounce kitty with baby claws could actually do significant damage when done by a 15-pound cat with big-kitty claws. So while I agree that your human is something of a spoilsport, I have to admit that you are probably hurting him when you crawl up his leg, and you are destroying his wardrobe in the bargain. I know that petty concerns such as clothing mean nothing to cats, but I look at it this way: the more humans spend on clothing, the less they have left over to spend on their cats. So it would actually be in your best interests to retire your human-climbing game completely.

In all fairness, I think your human should take a large part of the blame for this unfortunate situation. He should have been thinking ahead to the day when your game wouldn’t be so fun anymore and gently discouraged it from the start. That’s one problem a lot of humans have — they don’t think things through and then they are unhappy with the outcome. It’s especially foolish when they do this with us cats. As cats, it is not our job to reason and anticipate problems. That is what humans are for! But when they slack off, they expect us to fix the situation by doing the figuring out for them! It’s just one of those quirks that we cats have to deal with when we live with humans.