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A Cat Hack

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Clarissa

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I urgently need a cat hack to stop my cat rubbing against my legs. She seems to think I find this practice very enjoyable and literally persecutes me with her efforts to do it.

Does anybody know how I communicate to her that I’d rather she abstain from this behavior? Also, why do cats do it? Does anybody know what the evolutionary reason behind it is?

In an utterly unrelated aside, changing the blog template also changed the appearance of what the posts look like while I write them in the app. The change made the process enormously easier. I have no idea how the two things are even connected, but I promise that they will keep working on the new template with the goal of changing the font and adding the number of comments to posts. WordPress has made the editing of templates very hard. It’s currently at the level of what the internet was like in 1996. To get this new template to work at the level of what you are seeing right now took me an hour and a half yesterday. I recognize that it’s imperfect, and I will continue working on it.

Please let me know what to do about the cat, though. Since we’ve been away, she became extremely clingy and wants to be glued to me all day.

13 responses to “A Cat Hack”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “my cat rubbing against my legs”

    IIRC they’re give you their scent, a sign for other cats to stay away.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Wow, I had no idea. It’s comforting to know that there is some purpose behind it.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “comforting to know that there is some purpose”

        The more you know animals the more you realize very little of their behavior is just random… or pre-determined for that matter.

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  2. Occasional Reader Avatar
    Occasional Reader

    Cats rubbing tend to be 1) A bonding exercise. They get their scent on you and you get their scent. That’s how they establish that you are “family”. Its kitty affection. Playtime or a scratch can sometimes stop this. Pet her little face along her cheekbones especially. That’s where she is doing the rubbing/ where the glands are locates. 2) They want food or snacks. Sometimes just one small cat treat is enough to stop this. I keep freeze dried chicken breast cat treats on hand. They contain only chicken breast and no strange fillers and won’t make your cat obese. 3) Trying to communicate something else. Sometimes they want more water or their little box cleaned.

    Most likely though, it is option 2: they want a snack. 🙂

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Our cat is like this and refuses all snacks that we have ever offered but she is very bonded to my oldest daughter. It takes about the same time as we were gone for her clinginess to wear off.

    -K

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  4. overgrownhobbit Avatar
    overgrownhobbit

    Clicker training.

    Just the first one I pulled up btw: https://www.thesprucepets.com/cat-clicker-training-554058

    For pet owners with good self-discipline and family who won’t undermine the training: Extinction events are key. Reward what you want, e.g. replace the unwanted behaviour with one you do, and correct or better, obviate what you do not.

    Anyone know if cat psyches are similar enough to dogs: good at specifics, e.g. Stay off THIS couch, terrible at generalizing? If not, it might require the whole family to participate which usually dooms the project.

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  5. Avatar
    Anonymous

    wrap your calves in masking tape facing outwards so the cat would feel the stickiness. Do it for a few days.
    or if there is a sound she doesn’t like have ready something that makes it and do it right away when she rubs on your leg. I think that may work better for dogs though

    A

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  6. xykademiqz Avatar
    xykademiqz

    Your new template is the same one I use for my fiction pen names. You’re right, WordPress templates have gone to the dogs. There are very few ones that are clean-looking, somewhat customizable, and actually meant for blogs (i.e., primarily text), and not for people putting up image portfolios or selling products online.

    Someone on the Xykademiqz blog (where I’ve also recently updated the template and it’s not great but it’s serviceable) thanked me for not having moved to Substack. I will never move to Substack because I don’t believe every stray thought has to be monetized and I don’t subscribe to anyone’s paid Substack on principle. One of my author friends, who’s had a nice personal website and blog for years, moved to Substack because apparently having a website and blog is “old and outdated” (read: insufficiently monetized). I don’t care; I *am* old and outdated, and not everything is for sale.

    I used to have cats when I was young. Mine were super affectionate and really didn’t like to be left alone. Sounds like your cat missed you and is being clingy; it will take a few days for her to relax.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I agree 100 regarding Substack. With all of the negative changes in WordPress, it does feel like it gives me more freedom, and in some way that I can’t fully articulate, it’s less of a cage than Substack is.

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      1. Avatar
        Anonymous

        After experimenting with Substack, it has two main problems I can see:

        -too much traffic. If your goal is publicity for your book or making a living from your blog, this is great. If it’s to have a conversation about niche topics… not so much. You have to constantly police bot/troll activity.

        -soft censorship. WP seems to have its own occasional problems with this, but I experimented pretty extensively with SS and it is definitely doing something weird. I’d get fairly consistent traffic for a while, and then… it’d suddenly drop off a cliff. I would go to my activity history and delete the last few days’ worth of my own comments on other people’s pages, as well as unliking anything I had liked. And then traffic would bounce back to normal. This was very consistent. This means they are “muting” accounts based on… either saying unapproved things, or liking the wrong posts. But they are not disclosing what will get your account stomped, so you have to guess. Not OK.

        ethyl

        Liked by 3 people

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I’ve never felt any censorship from WordPress. I’m not one of their favorites, and they’ve never tried to promote me like they do others, but that’s fine.

          Liked by 1 person

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  7. Dame Eleanor Hull Avatar
    Dame Eleanor Hull

    About the cat, what Cliff and Occasional Reader said–she’s marking you as hers, and the rubbing is a sign of affection. I will add that the relative sizes of a nursing kitten and mama cat are similar to the relative sizes of adult cat and adult human. You are a large warm creature who supplies food, so in the cat’s mind, you are mom. Cats sometimes form close attachments to other cats (this is what is meant by a “bonded pair,” who have to be adopted together), but many of them are fairly solitary except for the early mother-kitten bond. So it is a mark of great favor that the cat thinks of you as her mother. I’m sorry the rubbing bothers you–I wouldn’t try to get her to stop, but I’m a cat person from way back! If it’s a sensory issue for you, maybe try to move her to something else, preferably something that smells like you. Put a worn-not-washed tee shirt in her bed, something along those lines.

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      What this cat wants to do more than anything else is lie on the bed next to me and stare into my eyes. It’s hilarious.

      Liked by 1 person

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