Every few nights, around 4 or 5 in the morning, one of the cats wakes us up because they want a pre-breakfast snack. Most often this is Sylvia, but Pippin recently has been going through a growth spurt and has been getting in on the act. Now, as we leave dry food out, this shouldn’t be a problem. They are free to go grab a snack whenever. However, they seem to feel it’s a more satisfactory snack if one of us (ie: me) accompanies them to their food bowl.
Typically, I am the target of their efforts, but if I’m particularly deeply asleep they will try to wake up Jonathan, which usually then wakes me up. And we have mission accomplished. So last night when we woke up to the thump of one of his books being pushed to the floor from the nightstand, we assumed Sylvia was hungry. By the time I got out of bed and around to her, her head was dangling over the edge as she reached into the open shelf with a paw trying to get at something. This was a bit much – I was already up! I was going to go with her for food!
She didn’t hop down and head out of the bedroom as I expected, so I went back to get her. When I picked her up she was tense, like when I’ve removed her from something she REALLY wants, indicating her focus remained firmly affixed to whatever she was after. I deposited her on the floor – and back to the night stand she went to try to get into the shelf again. After a couple more rounds, I picked her up and carried her to her food. She proceeded to eat a bit, and I headed back to bed.
Only to hear just a minute or two later the same sound of her digging around in Jon’s nightstand. Now, the shelf she was targeting is basically where he keeps his kindle and his cell phones (US + German). That’s it. These things have never interested her before. However, she’s a stubborn stubborn cat, so I was getting worried about whether I’d be stuck spending weeks teaching her NOT to go after these things. I shooed her out of the room and symbolically shut her out. By symbolically, I mean that I almost but didn’t quite close the door. She understand this means she’d been shut out until she’s ready to stop doing whatever she was doing (such as asking for a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th middle of the night snack). Then she can come back in. If she returns and recommences mischief, I actually lock her out. But I don’t like doing this – eventually she’ll get distressed about being stuck out all night, and it traps Pippin on one side or the other. Anyway, she usually gets the message. Symbolically shutting her out as proven extremely effective at delivering the message without causing distress, and is generally successful.
But nope. Yet again she heads back to the nightstand. And this time we hear a small sound of something hitting the ground. A very very specific sound. The sound of a Ricola lozenge. Jon immediately realized what happened – he’d stashed an extra lozenge there before going to bed.
Sylvia love love loves batting around empty Ricola wrappers. She clearly knows how to identify the smell and could tell there was one in there. That it still held a lozenge was totally besides the point. She was going to get that wrapper, and no amount of scolding or chastisement was going to stop her. I expect it says something about our relationship to our cats that Jon was annoyed with himself for not realizing the probably repercussions of his actions, rather than annoyed at the cat. And I was mostly relieved, because she wasn’t after the electronics.
We are never repeating this mistake again. The convenience of a Ricola in the nightstand shelf does not outweigh the determination and obsession of our cat.