A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

Long and boring rant about my fucking cat. I’m so humiliated that I have nothing in my life except this stupid animal.

I’ll need a cupboard for all the rods I made for my own back by attempting to use classical conditioning on Graham to improve his bad behaviour, which has completely backfired because he now weaponises his bad behaviour to force me to feed him treats.

Of course there is the way he bats at my plants because he knows I hate it. Then there’s the way I would feed him just before bed so he would sleep through the night and not wake me up at 5am, and now from about 11pm he starts being unbearable because he expects a ‘midnight snack’.

And he’s always desperate to go outside. At first I thought he actually wanted to go outside and felt sorry for him, because he used to have a big backyard and a neighbourhood territory whereas he now only has a tiny concrete yard. But now I suspect he begs to go outside purely because he sees several steps ahead and knows that I will give him a treat when we go back inside.

I started doing this because I wanted to dissuade him from running away to explore, and he can wriggle out of his harness and leash, which in any case he tangles up in the outside furniture. So, he can go outside unleashed, but whenever he makes a move towards jumping up on the back gate, that’s when outside time is immediately terminated. 

This was meant to teach him a lesson that if he wanted outside time he needed to stay away from the gate, but now he has come to associate going back inside with getting a treat, so he deliberately feints towards the back gate in order to goad me into bringing him back inside for the fucking treat. He will pretend to jump up there and then when I react he runs back inside and sits next to the cat food machine.

I hate that his intelligence is directed solely towards getting food. The vet’s always like, “he’s too fat“, but he is absolutely unbearable if he doesn’t get his food – yelling, destroying stuff, etc. I’ve been sick and too weary to put up with his bullshit, and so I have indulged him just to get some rest.