No really.

We have three cats, our original one, Dani, is a rescue. Specifically, he’s a rescue because he was considered unlikely to get adopted. Then he was put in the worst foster for a skittish acting cat. Three unruly children who really did not know how to act with animals, two crazy barking dogs, another skittish cat, and an unfixed aggressive Tom.

When I went to meet him the foster grabbed him from hiding, wrapped him in a towel and brought him to the living room instead of taking me to where he was. Every time he almost relaxed the youngest child would thrust a toy in his face and it was clear the cat was freaked out. It’s really hard to get a handle on a cat’s personality like that, but I came with a trick I learned from Jackson Galaxy, the slow blink. In theory, slow blinking at a cat is like saying, I trust you, I won’t hurt you. What you are looking for is them returning that slow blink.

Dani, named custard at the time, slow blinked back to me and I thought “there is a savable cat in there.” That blink and the fact I just wanted that cat OUT of that freaking house is why we have the single sweetest cat I’ve ever known. No, he’s not a lap cat, but he will step up onto my chest to cuddle and purr next to my ear and spend a little time on my lap. He also loves bead bumping with you in the bedroom and cuddling there. He’s a great cat that could have never had a decent house.

But why does that make me awesome? It doesn’t, but now you know my cat a little.

Sadly when you get a cat like that they come glitchy, and most of them we’ve learned to live with. We now know he can NOT go outside or he likely won’t come back for months. Skittish cats apparently tend to sort of forget they can go back in the door they came out of. The one annoying thing he does that I just can NOT stand is this crazy screaming meow he’ll do over and over to you if he even thinks you have touched his food.

He is food-obsessed, not shocking as Kent and I both think he was actually going into ketosis when we got him. I’ve never been around a cat that had a smell of its own, a base smell like people generally have. Rather, I’m sure they do, we just can’t smell it. Dani smelled sweet when we got him, we didn’t think much of it as it eventually went away. Then he escaped for four long months and once we got him back, he smelled sweet again, that’s when we figured it out. I’m guessing the Tom stole all the food as the fosters just did the single bowl of food on the floor thing.

All of that boils down to that horrible crazy screaming thing. I’m really sound sensitive and that sound would just anger the crap out of me. So for the last four years, I have tried several different things to try and stop him making that sound, to varying degrees of success. He would get it…then he wouldn’t. Most of the time we settled for sneaking the food into his bowl, not an easy thing as he figured out the tricks fast. I knew he was smart enough to learn, he just wanted to do things his way.

Finally one day he sat at the top of his tree and just watched me grab the hidden food and drop it into his bowl. I can work with that. So I started feeding him every meal myself, so everything would be exactly the same each time. For three weeks if I waited for him to be quiet on his tree he would let me drop the food in his bowl without a sound. Then Kent started working at home and Dani was like “Sweet, I don’t have to stick to the rules.” For two weeks he would only go into his tree and not make a sound off and on.

Yesterday I’d had enough of it, I knew he understood exactly what I wanted him to do. So when he tried doing his running around on the floor screaming thing, I would step in front of him and block him, back and forth behind our chairs. I knew he was either trying to follow me or check his bowl obsessively. Finally, I pointed up at his tree and told him to go up the tree. Honestly, that was just me being annoyed and determined not to give in, I’d forgotten that in the three weeks when he was good if he tried being on the floor to meow I would point to his tree, tell him to go up there and then sit down. Now when I’d go around and block him in front of the chairs he would turn and look up in his tree, telling me he did understand what I wanted. We did this a few times more before I pointed to the tree and he ran up it. I grabbed his food, almost got it in the bowl when “MEOW”, and he ran down. Nope. No food for you then. Once he clearly understood the food had NOT gone in his bowl, I pointed up at the tree and told him to get up there. He. fucking. did. This time he didn’t make a peep.

YES! But that’s just once right? I told Kent I was going to do the food for a bit, but this morning he decided to try. Once I corrected Kent on something and he changed it, he pointed at the tree and told him to get up there. It took a couple of tries, but Dani DID and didn’t make a sound.

I TRAINED A FUCKING CAT! That’s right people, even glitchy cats can be trained, you just have to stick to it. Now we just have to stick to it, but I am freaking thrilled with myself. Not bad for a dog person.