If you’ve been reading my newsletters for a while, then you might remember that way back in the summer of 2019 I adopted two cute kittens from Safe Harbor Humane Society. I’d never owned cats before, and I was afraid we might not all get along, but my worries turned out to be groundless. Almost two years later, Simba and Nala are the sweetest, funniest, quirkiest cats I’ve ever met. They love to wrestle, run around the house like maniacs, and jump out from behind things to scare each other.
Of course, being cats, they aren’t always on their best behavior. Simba in particular is a little rascal. He likes to perch on top of the loveseat in my family room and scratch the heck out of the blinds covering my front window. This has been a pattern of bad behavior since he was a kitten.
I’ve gotten him scratching posts and tried discipline, but nothing helps! Eventually I started keeping some of the accordion blinds pulled up all the time to keep his fuzzy paws off them, but the set in the family room is a pain to put up and down every day because of the large window. There are several large scratch marks on it. The thing that irks me the most, though, isn’t the damage — it’s the fact he does it to spite me!
Simba loves to sit in my lap and adores it when I pet him. So when I go into my home office to work, he gets annoyed that I’m ignoring him. Several times a week when I sit down to start typing, a few minutes in I hear a “scritch scritch scritch” from the family room. So, I poke my head around the corner to tell him off. He always freezes when he sees me coming — usually with both front paws still stuck in the blinds.