A Cat's Guide to Humans
1. Introduction: Why Do We Need Humans?
So you've decided to get yourself a human being. In doing so, you've joined the millions of other cats who have acquired these strange and often frustrating creatures. There will be any number of times, during the course of your association with humans, when you will wonder why you have bothered to grace them with your presence. What's so great about humans, anyway? Why not just hang around with other cats?
Our greatest philosophers have struggled with this question for centuries, but the answer is actually rather simple: They Have Opposable Thumbs. This single attribute makes them the perfect tools for such tasks as opening doors, getting the lids off of cat food cans, changing television stations and other activities that we, despite our other obvious advantages, find difficult to do ourselves. True, chimps, orang-utans and lemurs also have opposable thumbs, but they are nowhere as easy to train and their incomes are limited.
2. How And When to Get Your Human's Attention
Humans often erroneously assume that there are other, more important activities than taking care of your immediate needs, such as conducting business, spending time with their families or even sleeping. Though this is dreadfully inconvenient, you can make this work to your advantage by pestering your human at the moment it is the busiest. It is usually so flustered that it will do whatever you want it to do, just to get you out of its hair. Not coincidentally, human teenagers follow this same practice.
Here are some tried and trusted methods for getting your human to do what you want:
3. Punishing Your Human Being
Sometimes, despite your best training efforts, your human will stubbornly resist bending to your whim. In these extreme circumstances, you may have to punish your human. Obvious punishments, such as scratching furniture or eating household plants, are likely to backfire. Being unsophisticated creatures, humans are likely to misinterpret these activities and then try to discipline YOU. Instead, we offer these subtle but nonetheless effective alternatives:
4. Rewarding Your Human: Should Your Gift Still Be Alive?
The cat world is divided over the etiquette of presenting humans with the thoughtful gift of a recently disembowelled animal. Some believe that humans prefer these gifts already dead, while others maintain that humans enjoy a slowly expiring cricket or rodent just as much as we do, given their jumpy and playful movements in picking the creatures up after they've been presented.
After much consideration of the human psyche, we recommend the following: cold blooded animals (large insects, frogs, lizards, slow-worms, grass snakes and the occasional earthworm) should be presented dead, while warm blooded animals (birds, rodents, your neighbour's Chihuahua) are better still living. When you see the expression on your human's face, you'll know it's worth it.
5. How Long Should You Keep Your Human?
You are only obliged to your human for one of your lives. The other eight are up to you. We recommend mixing and matching, though in the end, most humans (at least the ones that are worth living with) are pretty much the same. But what do you expect? They're humans, after all. Opposable thumbs will only take you so far.