I often used to think that cats just didn’t know or didn’t care to follow the rules that humans set for them — like dogs do.
For example:
My fiancé and I make it clear that we don’t like Pumpkin (our cat) scratching the couch by pulling him away when he does, taping over parts of the couch, and buying him a couple nice scratch posts.
I kind of thought that the only reason he has stopped scratching the couch was because he has better stuff to scratch on now, but I didn’t initially assume he understood that we didn’t like him to scratch the couch because In the moment he doesn’t seem to care at all.
But I think he does know we don’t like it when he scratches on the couch because whenever he wants attention and isn’t getting it (like when we’re sleeping) we’ll hear him start trying to scratch on the couch when he doesn’t do this anymore otherwise....
The same goes for things like playing in the toilet bowl, scratching the curtains, playing with the rug, knocking stuff off of shelves and so on...
At first he did these things more frequently— he didn’t know we didn’t like those behaviors then, but now he only does it when he needs something.
So he’s actually manipulating us to get what he wants. Maybe, in a less cynical frame, he doesn’t want to make us mad unless he has to for attention. Crazy. Cats are so damn smart.
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/ftkapk/im_pretty_sure_my_cat_is_manipulating_me/
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