The other day I was standing outside my apartment building waiting for the bus to come down the hill and out the corner of my eye I spied a wee kitty, (half mature). Anyways the little thing started nuzzling up against my leg and pretty soon I was giving it's head a scratch. When I went over to the bus stop it followed me. At first we thought (there were other people there) that it was too well kept looking to be a stray. This morning there was one of the bus stop regulars sitting there and he was holding the cat. Apparently the cat was sleeping under the shelter's bench when the other gent arrived there. My question is- do cats (strays) tend to show affection to strangers in the hopes that they might get adopted? Are they 'that' smart?

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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. ~ Ernest Hemingway ...

A friend and his wife worked in the same building. One night, quite late, they were leaving when a cat came up to them in the parking lot. They called to it and it jumped up on the car to get closer to them. It had no collar or microchip, so they took it home and waited for signs. None were posted so they now have huge, black cat to go with the other pets.

I think that some cats may see people as an easier way to get food and water than hunting for it themselves. If they never have a reson to fear people, people become a resource.

For contrast, I live with my girlfriend and her cat. The cat used to tolerate me to the point that it would sit on my lap while I watched TV. She's fetch the mousey for me. I could even play the "face game" with her (grab her whole face while she claws and kicks, almost always without claws). Then one day I was reading something. I'd rech over and pet the cat each time I turned the page. When I finished, I stood up to leave, reached out for one last pet, and she hissed at me and hid under a chair. That was 4 or 5 years ago, and she still hates me. She hates everyone except the GF.

My personaly theory is that the average cat has a lot of free space in ther brain. Every now and then, the nerves line up and you get a few moments of sanity. Then they sneeze and go nuts for a month.

I've been watching this cat when she gets the "night crazies", and I think it's floaties they can see in their eyes. She seems to track something fora bit, then runns off like she killed it, then runs from it. This lasts for about 45 minutes.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

Go figure. A couple of months ago an acquaintance sent us a cat he could no longer keep in a densely occupied suburban area. We made sure that it had its favorite foods (shrimp, raw liver, etc., which it gobbled down with abandon). We took it for walks, put it out in the yard on a twenty foot tether to get used to things, etc. Kept it in the house, played with it, petted it, etc.

After about three weeks we figured it was time to let it go outside for a bit. We opened the door, the cat ran out and it hasn't been seen since.

Still have some frozen chicken livers, though.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Well, it depends on whether the cat is genuinely stray or outright feral. Ferals generally won't willingly let humans within arms reach on a casual basis, although the young ones can be trained to accept (and even crave) human company given enough time and earned trust. It's not a given, though, and seems less likely to develop once the cat enters adulthood.

A cat who was raised from a young age in a loving domestic environment will come to crave human contact, especially if the experiences are positive. The stray you saw was clearly well-socialized.

I just hope it's not a Summer Cat. That poem tends to trigger tearful, but blinding rage in me, and a big reason why I can't allow myself to volunteer with any of the local animal shelters. The number of deserving strays/rescues needing good homes is staggering.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

Boy, this all sounds so familiar. Maybe my cats aren't so odd after all.

That's an interesting theory about the eyeball floaties. My kitten exhibits this behavior several times a day. Up to now, I'd always thought that he had a hair or something caught in his whiskers that I just couldn't see. I really don't care, anything to keep him occupied. But one sure likes to have explanations for things.

I think that Moose nailed it when he talked about the social aspect of cats. Generally, any grown cat will reflect the environment it grew up in. If it didn't grow up around loving people, or people that would not provide affection, they can be hard to make friends with. (Like in the case of some barn cats -- they see people all the time but can still be wary of them.) Earning trust is key, along with patience and understanding.

Another issue, at least for females, is estrus. A female in season acts very differently from one that is not. They can be very loving one second and claw your skin off in the next. I wouldn't know about boys 'cuz I've always fixed them.

??

This is a cat we're talking about here???

Yup. It would get all excited if it saw us picking up the harness/leash. Actually just stand there while we buckled it in.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

We've had two cats.
First, one that appeared in a neighbour's garage as a thin-as-a-rake ?nine? month old youngster. With us fourteen years later, he has taken twelve of those to socialise, and learn to purr. He will lash out still for no reason and draw blood. He does sit on your lap now and again, but only when he wants that seat for himself. We think he was a stray from an early age, was born in a domestic situation and possibly ill treated, hence his psychopathy and sociopathy. But he is a home boy, never leaving our garden.

The other was a wandering star. He walked in one day, and announced that he liked us. His kind and loving owners, who had given him his collar and tag, lived a mile away and although we took him back, he was round at our house again that same day. They accepted this, as cat owners must, and he came to live with us.
He would talk to anyone on the street, run up to them and rub their legs. He lost an eye that way when, the vet said, someone must have kicked him. But he never changed his habits. He would go on trips; two or three days without being seen and there he would be again. One day, he never came back. New home, or no lives left? We never discovered. I miss him.

John

Oh, c'mon. Cats behave the way they do because they're cats! No other explanation is needed.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

I think this is built up need for exercise.

If they haven't played enough, or hunted anything, then by midnight (or for some cats, an hour before the owner's alarm goes off!) they go nuts and run around the house and run up and down the stairs and chase anything there is to chase. Until the cat gets tired enough to stop.

You could say this is due to something they can see that we can't. But I'd assume it's just a need for exercise.

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"I'm as accurate as any psychic. And I'm a cartoon!" -- Squidward

"Arrrgh, the laws of physics be a harsh mistress!" -- Bender

Oh, c'mon. Cats behave the way they do because they're cats! No other explanation is needed.

Hehe, exactly. It's well known amoung cat lovers that you can never choose a cat, they choose you.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

We call this "chasing invisible carpet bugs".

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

A cat showed up at our door one morning, and it I let it in.
It may have been raining at the time, (I wouldn't leave a cat
out in the rain!) or it may have been very insistant about
wanting in, or maybe it just rushed past me as I opened the
door. I've forgotten. It was in 1977. Three days later it
gave birth to four kittens.

Three girls and a boy. Each had a different personality.
Elizabeth Taylor was gorgeous. If she had gone to kitty
high school she would have been the prom queen and
probably an honors student, too. She had the most
normal personality. I've forgotten the name we gave
the second kitten (I named the first and last, my mother
and sister named the other two), but it was the kitten
whose personality best matched my own. She was
definitely curious and friendly, but she wasn't at all
exuberant about it, usually watching her siblings rather
than being proactive. Unlike me, her sedentary tendency
may have destined her to become a fat cat. If I could
have kept one of the kittens it would be a choice
between these first two, and I think I would have gone
with the compatible personality rather than sizzling good
looks.

The third kitten was the boy, given the name Funny
Valentine, for a heart-shaped white spot on his forehead.
He was lean and feisty compared to his sisters. A potential
troublemaker. Kitten reform school material. The last was
Sophia Loren, which was a mistake on my part. I have
trouble with names. Italian actress was correct, but it
was Gina Lollabrigida who I meant. I thought the kitten's
nose looked a bit like Gina Lollabrigida's nose. But then,
I've never seen a movie she was in.... Sophia wouldn't have
been my choice of kitten to keep, but I wasn't going to be
the one to take care of it for the next 20 years, and I did
get to name two of them.... Sophia turned out to be very
intelligent. she would get a small rubber ball, take it to
the top of the basement stairs (which were uncarpeted),
and drop the ball so that it bounced all the way down, then
chase after it and bring it back up again.

My sister had Sophia at her house for about 15 years.
One day she had a party, with a fair number of people over,
and somebody mentioned what a nice, friendly cat she had.
My sister didn't make anything of that at first, although she
might have wondered a bit because Sophia was a bit skittish
with strangers, and somewhat standoffish in general. (Not
full-blown aloof, though.) Anyway, somebody else mentioned
the cat, and said it had been eating out of the cat's bowl.
And they mentioned that the cat was black. Eh? Sophia is
grey and white. It was a party-crashing cat my sister had
never seen before. He stayed for the rest of his life, which
was five or six years.

Two years ago a Norwegian forest cat showed up at my
sister's door, and he has stayed on. She tried to find out
where the cat came from, with no luck, but just recently
realized that the cat first started showing up at about the
time a couple who lived a block away broke up and
apparently abandoned their house.

While Sophia was with us, a kitten followed me home all
the way from the corner store two blocks away, although
I tried to warn it sternly that it was making an injudicious
choice. Unfortunately, Sophia's immediate reaction was to
hiss and swipe at the kitten, scaring it off, but I later learned
that it's human found it after a couple of days. I didn't get
any details, but I wonder if the kitten's human and I were
both in the store at the same time, and to the naive kitten,
one human is pretty much the same as another.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Beautiful


Today it was a perfect blue sky. I was amazed at the amount of floaties in my eyes. I don't really see it in a standard, detail filled background, but in the clear blue sky it really was a nuisance, gone was the uniformity. You'd go chasing nothing for less...

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Talking about girlfriends, mine was complaining about her evil kittens. Apparently they decided very early this morning that they were awake and she wasn't, so they fixed that problem by waking her up.

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Howling from the Shadows

It must be fun to lead a life completely unburdened by reality. --- JayUtah

You can't reason an irrational person out of an irrational belief. --- Noclevername

Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

If you wonder "why do cats behave this way" always ask yourself "what are they gaining from their behaviour this time?"

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Yes, it's interesting. Dogs have a pack identity and they became domesticated when they started seeing humans as their pack. Dogs are like family. But cats are different. Cats started hanging around humans so that they could eat the mice that ate our grain. They never wanted to be our friends. It was just business.

Though they do seem to heavily enjoy being our friends from time to time. I do think that it's more than a parasite charming its way in. they're too sweet for that from time to time. I think that they honestly like humans. And underneath that cherry, we are their slaves .

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Somewhere, somebody else said it right...dogs have masters, cats have...staff. Pete.

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A third