There's no way you can make a cat do something it doesn't want to do. Half of mankind's efforts are along this line of ambition. Cat gates. Anti-scratching mats. Pro-pooping litter. Cat psychiatrists. All of this struggle is to convince an animal that has tricked us into sheltering it, feeding it, caring for it, and squeezing its little toe beans that maybe it should also do what we want once in awhile, if it's not too much trouble.
When you get a chance, go check out what your cat is doing. Chances are it's not what you want them to do. Sometimes, though, that cat does do what you want them to do, and you can take heart in that. Never mind that this is the same mentality that people apply to gambling and religious wars.
In nature, nobody would try to teach the bears to do what they want. Well, maybe some particularly hardy folks would, but they usually end up being eaten by those same bears when it turns out they forgot some critical aspect of ursine psychology ("wash your hands after eating bacon.") Why, then, do we think that things will go better for us once we bring the wild animal into our homes?
Me, I think we got lucky with dogs. Turns out that wolves really just want to be fed Snausages, and bite the tires of RC trucks, and chase Frisbees. They were just waiting for millions of years for all that cool stuff to be invented, and for a magical walking-upright wolf to present it to them. Everything in that regard went better than expected. We probably read into that success a little too hard, and now we expect the rest of it to all be easy too. Huskies aside.
tangentwithtanner
titsay
2087
