Cornershot

At first, the behavior manifested itself within a reasonable time of our alarm clock sounding. Recently, it started happening as early as midnight to about 3 a.m.

Our orange tabby cat, Omar, began his quest to force us to rise and feed him by going through the following ritual: jump onto a cedar chest, chew on the window blind pulls ; jump on my spouse’s night stand, knock over a small picture frame and push a telephone onto the floor; jump onto my nightstand, push my Kleenex box to the floor and nose my telephone receiver off-hook; finally, leap onto my spouse’s dresser, push a picture frame around, play with jewelry boxes and swat at stuffed animals.

Picking up Omar from the dresser was fruitless; he immediately returned after we got comfortably back in bed.

So, we began locking him in our guest room with water and a litter pan.

Consistently, when we release Omar to feed him and his four sisters in the morning, he is perched on the guest room dresser where the pictures are all askew.

We considered our 18-year-old rescue the smartest, most attentive of our cat family; however, after nearly a month of carrying him down stairs and locking him in our guest room, he does not seem to equate his human sleep-disruptive behavior with going to “jail.”

This might in some small way explain why Ivan Pavlov used canines in his stimulus-response experiments.

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