11:58pm October 3, 2014

Anyone who thinks I have some kind of ~mystical cat whisperer knowledge~ think again.

I mean, I am better than usual at reading cat body language and communicating with cats.  I like sitting and resonating with rooms full of cats all doing the same thing, communicating with small flicks of ears and tails, nothing else needed.  I’m good at that kind of cat thing.

But Fey is attacking me.

Every night, any time I get out of bed and she’s awake, she starts following me around yowling and sometimes growling aggressively.  She then starts pouncing at my feet and biting them.  This is not playful behavior.  Most cat people I know see this as playful behavior.  No.  This is angry behavior.

She is very angry at me about something.

It’s been going on for weeks, nonstop.  I mean she snuggles me sometimes, but at night, if I get out of bed… my legs are all scarred up from the bites and scratches.  And she’ll corner me on the toilet where I can’t defend myself.  Or right before I’m getting into bed, when I have to turn my back on her so I can swing a leg over, she’ll get one or both legs at that point even with my full attention on avoiding cat bites.

Everything I do to either fight back or run away only makes her madder.

I feel so totally helpless.   I feel like she’s trying to tell me something important and I’m missing it, so she’s resorting to screaming and utter meltdown-level frustration.  And I can’t do a damn thing about it.

And no, it’s none of the “obvious cat things”:  She has food, she has running water in both faucets, she has stairs up to one of the faucets so she doesn’t have to chance falling off the slippery sink (as she did once and then refused to use sinks for months until I got the stairs), her litter box is clean, her bed is tidy, she has a nice warm area by the oxygen concentrator that’s all set up for her use, I play with her, I give her fish flakes, I give her catnip.

Those are all the things most people think of when they think of what a cat could possibly want.

The problem is, cats are more complex than that.  They are not little furry machines.  They are people.  They think.  They reason.  They love.  They have desires.  They have wants.  They have values.  They have a sense of duty.  They have jobs they take very seriously.  They are emotionally complex.  They are intellectually complex (more so than some humans – and I’m taking that from humans who used to be less intellectually complex than cats, by their own reckoning).  They are not automatons with fur and tails and cute faces.  They are not Tamagotchi.  

And I have no idea what she wants and it’s breaking my heart.  My cat is complicated.  I think she’s more complicated than most cats, even.  I want to do right by her and I don’t think I ever will.  Oh also, while she’ll get mad at other people and give them death glares, I’m the only person she goes after physically unless the person is actively hurting her.

TL;DR: My cat is attacking me. It’s not for any of the usual reasons people bring up like food, water, play, cat litter.  Cats are more complicated than that.  I can’t figure out what is going wrong.  I feel horrible.

19 notes