The best way to describe how a cat might feel about their personal territory (even though my perspective can only be of the two-legged variety) might be the recounting of a picture, which they say is worth a thousand words. It is a tale of one of my favorite cats, a male tuxedo shorthair named Goliath who let me know how he felt about his space one day, a very long time ago.
His favorite spot was on the wide windowsill in my bedroom. He would sit there for hours watching people and animals go by, and the other cats in the house had other special places but never that window (at least when he was in it). From this perch he could see his many adoring fans who would pass and exclaim things like “Mommy, look at the panther sitting in the window.”
He was a large, imposing fellow, weighing about eighteen pounds in his heydey. One day I dared to put a plant on the window while I dusted a nearby bookshelf and cabinet (a rare enough occurrence). The sill was vacant at the time, but not for long. I was soon distracted from my cleaning (which didn’t take much) by a phone call in the other room. When I returned to my chores about twenty minutes later, there was nothing left of the plant save a sort of green stump! This plant had lived in my house undisturbed for years, but alas met its maker at the paws of my “little (big) cat of horrors.”
On another occasion, I had placed a small box on the sill because I didn’t want to forget it. I didn’t have to worry about that because it actually disappeared for a while. When I saw it again, it was on the floor in another room. I put it back on the sill while “King Thing” was there just to see what he would do. Within seconds, he shoved it off the sill with one sweep of his big paw. I repeated the process several times, all with same result.
The moral of this story is not to mess with your cat’s turf. He or she may mess with yours, but two wrongs don’t make a right (Or do they?)
Harmony comes with respect. If you don’t believe me, just ask the ghost of Goliath whom I know still lurks somewhere on my old windowsill.
Do you have a story to tell about YOUR cat’s sense of territory? Please share.