10 Bad Habits We Wish Our Cats Would Give Up
Cats make wonderful pets, but they have some seriously bad habits. We know that living with a cat can be peaceful and it can actually help you live longer, but it can also make you about as crazy as anything else. Cats are just as irritating as anything or anyone else in your life in that they adopt these annoyingly bad habits that you just can’t seem to break. While you can break cats of their bad habits, it’s not always as simple as you might think. Here are 10 of the worst bad habits your cats probably have and how you can deal with these bad habits.
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Lack of Litter Box Usage
Sometimes cats just don’t use the litter box like they should. Maybe this is our fault and instead of it being a bad habit that the cats can’t control it’s our own bad habit. Cats are notorious for not using the litter box when it’s not as they see fit. For example, if they use it and they think that it doesn’t smell good anymore, they might not use it again until it’s been cleaned. It’s really annoying when the find a new place to use the bathroom.
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Coughing up Hairballs on the Carpet
Our cat does this every few months. We will hear him making a sound that’s just awful, but instead of finding a bathroom or tile on which to vomit up his hairballs, he always chooses to do this on the rug in the children’s play room. It’s gross, it requires that we have to clean the carpet, and we hate this awful habit our cat seems to think is just dandy and fine. Maybe he thinks because it only happens every so often that it’s okay, but it’s not.
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Peeing on the Bed
Maybe this is just a southern thing, but it seems like every cat that I know and every cat that I’ve ever had has a bad habit of wanting to use the bathroom on beds when there are new sheets on the bed. Thank God for those mattress covers that don’t allow anything to seep through onto the pillow top mattress. Our cat has been banned from bedrooms because he likes to do this anytime a new set of sheets comes home.
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Vomiting Food they Inhale
Does your cat do this, too? Our cat will eat like he’s never been fed before, even though he’s well fed every single day. He will inhale all his food in one fell swoop and then promptly go find a piece of carpet on which to vomit up his entire meal. We think he might be suffering from an eating disorder. It doesn’t happen all the time but when it does, it’s highly annoying and very irritating. We’ve talked to the vet about it, but it seems that he’s just not the smartest cat around.
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Clawing Furniture
One way to handle this situation is simply to declaw your cat. There are mixed feelings about this type of procedure, but we did it and we are so happy we did. Our cat was literally tearing apart our brand new leather furniture to the point we had to replace it less than a month after we bought it. It was irritating and it was the cat or his claws, so go ahead and do your judging.
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Scratching
Cats with claws scratch, and this happens even when they don’t intend to hurt you. Cats have claws and cats like to use their claws, so we just have them removed. Scratching can be a bit problem, particularly if you have children or other animals in the house. It’s not easy to get cats to stop doing this, so it’s often just far more productive to have them declawed to stop the mess and madness on your own. Talk to your vet to see what the best option for you might be.
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Jumping on Counters
Cats like high places from which they can judge and watch and be out of the way. They like the tops of furniture, tables, counters and even cabinets in our house. Our annoying cat likes to jump from the floor to the kitchen island to the top of the fridge to the top of the counters and perch high above the rest of us at something like 9 feet and watch us. Sometimes he jumps down and scares us into oblivion.
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Jumping on Tables
Cats do what they want on a pretty regular basis, and it’s because they are annoying and feel that they have the run of the house. Cats jump on tables because they are high and cats like to be elevated. If your cat is jumping on the table, you have to stop the cat from doing this. Either remove the temptation by taking things off the table the cat likes to play with – or eat – and start using a spray bottle to shoot water at the cat when he or she is jumping. It helps.
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Begging for Food
They have their own food, and they’re well fed, but cats really just want to eat what we are eating. Our cat smells dinner as it cooks and he follows us around the kitchen like a puppy – or like a cat. He keeps a keen eye on everything that’s happening so that he can find even just a split second in which he can possibly grab a piece of steak or chicken from a plate and help himself to it, and we have to keep an eye on him at all times – which is not what we do. We put him in the laundry room and shut the door.
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Stealing Food
Cats have an annoying and nasty habit of stealing food if they see it sitting around. This is particularly annoying in my house since we have small children. While our older girls are good about not allowing our cat to get too close to them at meal or snack time, our almost 1-year-old twins aren’t quite as good at fending him away when he’s trying to take food from their high chair trays. It’s beyond irritating and annoying.
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