I like that Badger is excited when I wake up even if he’s not waiting to get fed because he has several cycles of being Noticed and petted to catch up on
This doesn’t look like much but it’s actually really rare and promising for Badger to be relaxed on the bed with me when I am less than 100% motionless lying down, I’m hoping he’ll start sleeping at my feet, which he’s made some gestures at since kittenhood but skimpers off whenever I even shift my weight a little
At least once a day Badger sets up like this – on the floor pillow in the bedroom, at my crossed legs, flopping down on his left side, head to the left – for me to scratch his belly and ribs while he purrs. Eventually the purring dies down and if I keep rubbing he flicks his tail in annoyance, then I hold my hand still or take it away and he lies there for another few minutes before getting up and climbing onto the bed to curl up
Badger lately has been posing motionless and quietly mrring before small gaps – between the refrigerator and counter, the sofa and wall, the grid-covered return vents in the floor
And at first I thought he batted something under there or smelled something, so I’d open it up, but increasingly I’m getting the sense he’s run out of novelty so he’s fixating on the few parts of his everyday experience he hasn’t seen in detail
He’s also being more pushy about always being the focus of attention when he’s around, which gets irritating, I’m thinking about getting another cat so they can be each other’s companions, the original plan was to wait at least until he was 6 so they’d have more staggered lifecycles, but that was when for a while Leo was playing the “cat companion” role.
I suppose one option would be to adopt a cat significantly older than Badger, I raised Badger from a kitten to develop a bond between us but my point here is to make the cat emotional economy less centered on me
On the other hand if an older cat came in with an established dynamic that didn’t match to me and recruited Badger to it, that could be a hella bad thing that would outlast the elder’s lifespan, hm
Badger lately has been posing motionless and quietly mrring before small gaps – between the refrigerator and counter, the sofa and wall, the grid-covered return vents in the floor
And at first I thought he batted something under there or smelled something, so I’d open it up, but increasingly I’m getting the sense he’s run out of novelty so he’s fixating on the few parts of his everyday experience he hasn’t seen in detail
He’s also being more pushy about always being the focus of attention when he’s around, which gets irritating, I’m thinking about getting another cat so they can be each other’s companions, the original plan was to wait at least until he was 6 so they’d have more staggered lifecycles, but that was when for a while Leo was playing the “cat companion” role.
Trying to step his wet food down from 1 to 5/6 of a can daily (while still giving 1cup/day dry to browse!) teaching me that what I thought were Badger’s “needy” and “forlorn” noises were just “I want a thing” and “I really want a thing and the last noise didn’t work”
And to think, once I thought that cats were by nature girls, I should’ve thought that girls were by nature cats
Badger has been better about coming in the window, curling up with me for 2 minutes of skritches and purring, and then walking into the kitchen to eat, instead of nagging me to supervise him eating it directly
this AND he’s been better about waking me up lately
If I wake up to piss starting at like 1040 he’ll pose in the hallway headed to the kitchen I’ll go feed him his wet and he won’t bug me out of bed until like 4 when I’m glad for it
Even if I don’t, he’ll wait for me to drift close to wake from like 1 on
The flip side of this is he has started to do his “I want you to open the front door” signals in an insistent but ambiguous way, like he will loudly claw at the carpet but at the far side of it where he used to right close to the door
And then once he’s baited me into opening the door standing there indecisive, the classic feline annoyance I’d never seen until now
Badger has been better about coming in the window, curling up with me for 2 minutes of skritches and purring, and then walking into the kitchen to eat, instead of nagging me to supervise him eating it directly
Badger’s been getting comfortable cuddling with me even when I don’t remain perfectly still; this week he’s climbed up on my bed in the late morning, curled up at my feet, and stayed there through me rolling over to either side, that’s nice.
So Badger brought home a big fat mouse and I gave him treats as a reward so to top that 25 min later he brought another one, still alive, to show me how he kills them. Bit into its neck and the whole back half flopped around a bit, then bit again and I could hear the crunching of the spinal cord.
The other day I came home and Badger was outside, and he jumped into the neighbors’ front yard and I saw an all-white blur moving around I was like “hey look, a new cat in the neighborhood!”
“No wait that’s just a huge opossum.”
And Badger stared it down and it did that open-mouth pose and eventually spun and ran away and Badger chased it.
And I was like “Badger, no” cause it was like half again his size, but then I realized they don’t get rabies and their ultimate move is “fall over unconscious” so feh
The vet said badger put on a pound in a year and neutered males tend to get heavy from age 3 so I should step his food down
And he’s been suuuch a whiny bitch over just going from 1 to 5/6 of a can of wet per day that I’m retrospectively seeing so much of our relationship as manipulation-for-food
