I want to know, because I know I dislike those cats, and she insists that this is normal cat behavior - so should I determine from this that I dislike and should avoid most cats? I have a lot of friends with cats that want me to meet their cats, or visit their apartment with cats, or cat sit for the weekend, and right now I hate the idea of doing any of that, if their cats are anything like the ones I lived with.
For a month last year for various reasons, my roommate at the time (R) brought her two cats to live with us. My husband does not like cats but was fine with it if the cats stayed out of our bedroom. I knew nothing about cats, and asked if it was the same as a dog (I had one growing up), what I should know or prepare, what I should look out for, etc, and R insisted her cats were totally sweet and I had nothing to worry about - so I told her ok too.
But these cats!!! With the dogs I know, if you leave them alone they leave you alone. One cat had a hobby of biting my feet - I would be sitting at the dining table eating lunch, and it would bite me out of nowhere, repeatedly, until I sat cross-legged to keep my feet away. I would be standing around talking to R and it would walk across the room to approach me and claw my leg, through my jeans, drawing blood. R thought they were bored and that I should play with them more. If that's the case, I don't understand why they went after me when R, their owner, was right there. I'm convinced they liked making me yelp and jerk in pain.
Also I didn't like playing with them. With my dogs if you're playing and they nip you, you can yelp to train them not to do it. The puppies I've played with give you a guilty look and are more gentle after. The cats didn't care if you yelped. These cats always clawed and bit when you petted them, even though I swear they seemed to be enjoying it, they were purring not hissing! I eventually stopped petting them because I didn't like having my hands scratched up and couldn't tell when that was coming. R said that was normal for cats and that they couldn't help it.
The cats loved to claw the sofa. I wanted them to stop - it's my sofa! With my dog, when it was jumping on someone or putting muddy paws on the couch, you said "Off!" loudly and sternly so they'd know it was wrong. When I did that with the cats R got mad at me for yelling at them. So to save my couch if I heard them scratching or caught them at it, I had to put down what I was doing and drag them off the couch. R didn't have a scratching post, so I don't know if that was why the cats were so persistent about wrecking my furniture, but she said that particular pieces of furniture in her childhood home would get shredded even with a scratching post.
Also the cats thought the forbidden bedroom was the most interesting thing ever and would dart in every time we opened the door a crack. We had to block the doorway with our bodies every time and they still got through, and then we had to chase down two cats, pull them out from under the bed, and throw them out of the room while not letting the cat we'd just tossed back in. This also often meant scratches. R thought it was normal for cats to want to explore and it was our fault for trying so hard to keep them out. I feel like these cats were jerks and had no boundaries and that they knew they shouldn't be in that room and that's why they wanted to go in.
Living with these cats was a painful and miserable ordeal and if that's cat ownership then I just don't get it. If R said "oh, they're stressed from the move, they're not normally like this, sorry" - that would be one thing. But she insisted this was normal. My cat owning friends disagree, but they also want me to visit and get along with their cats, and I keep wondering if they're misleading me like R did when I asked if there was anything I should know before I agreed. I've seen jokey memes comparing cats to devils and calling them assholes and showing clawed-up hands as a sign of cat love, so I wonder if this really is all normal for cats.
Do I dislike cats in general? Or just two of them?
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/bfudki/are_my_friends_cats_typical_or_unusual_jerks/
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