Feline Wake Up Calls

If you have a cat you've probably experienced a feline wake up call. Morning comes and there's your cat meowing, playing with the blinds, chewing your hair, digging his paws in your covers, or more. You know what I'm talking about. It is annoying as can be! You want to wake up when you're ready to wake up. Not when your cat is ready.

That's the lesson of my cat parody of "Danny Boy". The song isn't really about "revenge". In fact, it's about teaching your cat to respect the time that you sleep. It is a tutorial on how I trained Tiziano and Torre not to wake me while I slept. I played with them a lot before bed, so they knew that play time was at night and not first thing in the morning.

Today, I learned something new about cats when Tiziano woke me up. Well, not exactly. He didn't really wake me up. I was already awake. He just came to check. It was amazing. Unlike your parents, you can't fool a cat when it is time to wake up. They can hear your breathing change. And if they are unsure, they can do what Tiziano did this morning and has done countless times before.

Tiziano walked up to my face and beneath my nose, he felt my breath. It blew me away. He drew his face really close to mine. His whiskers tickled my face a little. I realized he was checking to see that I was awake by feeling my breath. My breathing had changed. He knew I was awake, so he dug a paw on the bed cover telling me to get up and feed him.

That's what really surprised me. It reminded me a human checking for a pulse, or in olden days, breath, to see if someone was alive. That is not something I'd expect from cats. But obviously, my expectations are wrong.

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Originally published at Marc Gunn .com. Read. Interact. Breathe. It's easy; it's free.

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posted by Marc Gunn @ Thursday, July 03, 2008