Hello humans. Are you happy that your outdoor territory is beginning to warm up now? Maddie and I certainly are. We like being outside, chasing things. If there’s nothing else to chase, I chase Maddie but for some reason she doesn’t find this any fun. Unfortunately, hunting season this year might not be as much fun as we’d hoped either, as Mum has removed the bird feeder now that we’re going outside all the time. I can’t understand this. She says they don’t want to encourage birds into our territory because it makes it so much easier for Maddie and I to catch them, but surely that’s the whole point?
I know Mum hates it if we manage to catch a bird and bring it indoors. It makes no sense to me, how upset they get about it. After all, when they go out hunting for their bread and vegetables and other strange things that they like eating, they don’t leave them outside, do they? They bring them in. So where’s the logic? Dad likes the bird feeder, he says, because he likes birds. But Mum says she likes people, too, but she doesn’t invite people to our territory for dinner and then let tigers loose on them. I have no idea what any of that’s got to do with us, unless she’s got a bit mixed up and thinks we’re tigers. I believe they’re bigger than us.
I don’t like to complain about our humans, really, because they’re normally very kind to us. They provide some nice soft places to sleep. And they're good at stroking us, and have mastered the art of the under-chin-tickle, which is a particular favourite of mine.
But sadly, I have to say we're having difficulty with the standard of menu available to us at present. I’m sure everybody knows that we cats are fussy. We’re not like d.o.g.s, thank goodness – I’ve seen one of them eating, and quite honestly, they’ve got no manners whatsoever. They’d gobble up anything you put in front of them, even human food which frankly looks revolting to me – green stuff, orange stuff, even red stuff. But let's not go there.
The fact is, your average cat is far more discerning. And like any self-respecting animal, we go off things from time to time. Mum seems so happy when she gives us a type of food that we really enjoy, she gives it to us again and again, until we get fed up with it. Then she does a lot of sighing, and goes hunting for something different, which I think is only fair. Fortunately, she finally seems to understand, now, that we won’t be fobbed off with inferior types of cat food – the ones she calls a reasonable price. We show our disgust if she offers us one of those. So, recently, she told Dad she’d given in, and ‘out of desperation’ bought us one of the most expensive ones she could find. Of course, it was absolutely yummy, we ate it all up, so she bought another box of it. But of course, we’d gone off it by then.
Maddie is particularly good at showing her feelings about something she doesn’t want to eat. She sniffs the food dish and looks back at Mum as if she's trying to poison her. Then she parades around the house wailing that she’s starving – whereas I just find it less trouble to go off to bed and sulk.
Well, I just hope sooner or later Mum will get the message: what we really need is several different kinds of the expensive food, all served up at the same time in separate dishes, so we can sniff them all and decide which one we want on each particular day. She can just throw away the ones we decide against. I can’t see the problem with that, can you?
Honestly, we keep telling our humans what they need to do to please us, but sometimes I think they have some kind of difficulty understanding us – like they can’t even speak Cat. It’s not as if they haven’t looked after other cats before us – you’d think they’d be better at it by now, wouldn’t you?
I suppose I shouldn't complain. It’s not a bad life here, to be fair. They do their best, and I suppose that’s all we can ask for, from an inferior species. No offence intended, humans. We can coexist. Just remember we’re in charge! I'll meow to you all again soon. Love and purrs from Monty.