Friday, April 30, 2010

Lazy cat.

Cats do not bury their droppings because they are "neat" or "fastidious", they bury them because they are ambush predators and they don't like leaving signs around warning the food that death is lurking in the bushes.

Rannie, on the other hand, seems to have figured out that she's in no danger of scaring off the kibble bowl and so she'll just give the wall of the litterbox a couple of pro forma scrapes and then get back to power napping in a puddle of sunlight, leaving mommy to take care of that smell.

20 comments:

2yellowdogs said...

Ah, cats. As my labs would say, I love cats, but they can be filling.

Anonymous said...

"Cats do not bury their droppings because they are "neat" or "fastidious", they bury them because they are ambush predators and they don't like leaving signs around warning the food that death is lurking in the bushes."


Given how many times I've seen cats do it, they bury their droppings to turn them into jerky to dig up and eat later.

Lets face it, a scant layer of dirt isn't going to deaden the smell of cat shit much at all to any animal in the vicinity (ask any cat or dog that's dug it up and eaten it), and other ambush predators don't bother to do it.

Anonymous said...

Bugger...that was me.

Anonymous said...

What the hell? Me being OA, and the comment system has apparently taken Friday off.

Laughingdog said...

They also hide their droppings to conceal their presence from even bigger predators. So when a new cat enters the home, and your cat wants to make sure the new one knows who the biggest badass in the home is, it can get pretty smelly then as well.

Drang said...

Indeed; sometimes cats deliberately don't bury their scat as a warning to other cats and things. The Princess is still warning The Boys, alas...
(Ratbane will hold it until we let him go out; Sparrowbane is quite the diligent little digger/burier, even in the automagic cat box Mom bought him so he would stop leaving little piles of litter outside the box...)

wv: groweat. No, the other way around...

BobG said...

What it proves is that your cat has you trained properly.

Joanna said...

Cats have perfected the art of selfishness. They're like slightly more intelligent toddlers.

breda said...

One of our female cats is the official litterbox monitor. She has always been this fastidious, even when she and her littermates were tiny kittens, so naturally her brother is a lazy slob who is more than happy to let her clean up after him.

og said...

I just thought it was kinda nutty, myself.

Eric said...

Nothing like having a cat "walk the parapet" so to speak waiting for you to remove the last nugget so they can refill the litter box.

TXGunGeek said...

You're lucky, our barn cat (yes that means he lives outside and chases mice in the barn as well as talks to the deer and cows) comes into teh house to get morning food and a treat then uses the litter box THEN goes back outside fr or the day.

loren said...

Yup, walking into a house you can always tell when the owners have a cat. Never could understand how people could live like that. Now bringing in a wet dog after a hard day hunting, well that just adds to the ambiance.

Tam said...

"Ambiance", "funk"; toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe... ;)

Peter said...

1. Bob G
2. Joanna
3. Eric

Yep.

loren: Those people are known as slobs. Do not eat or drink anything offered by such people that isn't sealed.

Joanna said...

loren: Those people are known as slobs. Do not eat or drink anything offered by such people that isn't sealed.

No joke. I clean the litter box every day, without fail. My cat's bathroom gets cleaned more often than my own.

Although sometimes with more than one cat there's not much to be done either way.

Justthisguy said...

I'm such a slacker that the kitteh gave up on me and just asks me to open the door, rather than use the sandbox. He'll still pee in it, but that's all. He did spend most of his fifteen years pooping outdoors, so it's no big problem for him.

On eating cat poo: I mind a kitty, hight Zebadiah, and an English Setter, who answered to Sally Jane. There was never any need to scoop cat turds out of the box, as Sally would gobble them up before they had a chance to cool off. Yes, I did kiss that bitch on the lips, but not after I found out about that.

WV: indede. Heh. indeed.

Anonymous said...

If Rannie-kitty is older, and this is a relatively new habit, it's time to take kitty to the vet and get it checked for proper kidney function.

Another possibility - if the litter box isn't cleaned often enough, kitty will pass on the cover-up to keep her paws from getting euwkie ( I just made that word up).

paulcr39 said...

Baby, my late giant orange tabby would sometimes get in the box, do the hunch and while looking over his shoulder at me drop a loaf on the floor. At least he had the courtesy to dust it with kitty litter...

Baby did this most often when the box was spotlessly clean. He also once dropped one in my shoe, but that's a story for another day.

phlegmfatale said...

Your little spackle artist thinks you enjoy cleaning up her Jackson Pollocks.