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Comment by MichaelDickens | Hacker News Reader

I can foresee a design flaw, which is that the cat will ignore all the specially designated areas and sit on your keyboard instead.

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Past experience with cat-wrangling over the years have taught me one thing (amongst many): It doesn't matter what the object is, if human cares about it, cat will use said object as a cat would, in order to communicate with human.

Communications from cat tend to be along the lines of: I'm hungry, or in most cases, I want attention (play/stimulation).

Past objects observed: Keyboards, houseplants, pens & pencils, kitchen area counter and anything on it, pet ants, rock and fossil collection.. the list goes on.

And related to cat areas, the secret that I've found was to never rely on buying fancy cat furniture but rather making a unique spot for cat every few days. Blanket for comfort, areas always in sight range of the work desk but not in it (to be distracting for work). Bonus points if you visit and pet cat when they're sleeping in those spots to reinforce that this is their spot and all is well with safety and comfort.

And same for toys, makeshift toys are cheaper and more effective than overpriced pet store shenanigans (Eg: elastics, pieces of string tied together, sandwich bag clips, small bouncy toys). The secret there is also reinforcing playtime with those toys by simply playing with cat!

Edit: written with cat at arm's length distance in makeshift bed in a chair~

I awoke this morning to newcat lapping from my bedside drinking glass (with a dash of tea/caffeine). She has two other waterbowls... but I guess is mad at me because the edible I ate last night caused me to sleep in too long for her breakfast likings.

Lil'shit knows this is not allowed, on a tabletop she's not allowed upon, no less!

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I'm not a cat person and somehow have inherited a black kitten from each parent.

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At least she didn't curl up napping upon my Apple Silicon (thankfully kess attractive than older Macbook AMD GPUs)... that's when I know I've actually fucked up #catWorld

When I was dying from COVID, it was an agony that lasted for two or three days. I don't remember the most of it, but I had no will or strength to get up. My cat was pissed off about me not feeding her. Obviously she was, though I didn't witness it with my own eyes, I was too deep into that COVID thing. At some point she decided that enough was enough, so she came to me and sat on my face. But the real devilry was the piece of shit that was stuck to her fur. I can tolerate my cat's ass on my face, but not her shit. I was fully awake in seconds. And she got her food.

I always thought of her as of the stupidest cat I knew, but that event convinced me otherwise. She was the smartest cat, she was smart enough to conceal her intelligence so as not to raise my expectations for her behavior.

You've heard of the [in]famous cartoonist/commentator _catturd_, I hope...

Yeah after investing in countless cat toys from the pet store, I found out that my cat's favorites are (in no particular order):

- McDonald's paper straw

- Bird feather from outside

- Empty toilet paper roll

- Shoelace

- Strap of Velcro

- Bottle cap

I think variety is the key, and we've had really good outcomes by having a few pet shop toys (feather on wand, squeaky mouse, ball with bell) that we bring out for a few hours every few weeks and then put away, so it doesn't turn into something normal for them to ignore.

Cat + bottle cap around the hours of 3am - 5am seems to be a preferred form of entertainment, from my experience

I woke up early the other day. The house was perfectly silent until I got near the kitchen, when I heard a ping followed by an odd sound. As I got closer to see what was going on, an empty beer can casually rolled past my feet. The cats were nowhere to be seen.

Elastic hair ties have always been a favorite of my cats. My wife has to hide them unless she wants to be gifted with the "kill" at 3am.

+1 after many failed attempts to buy useless cat toys, I’ve been really surprised that those are what we loves the most. He can play alone with it for hours and is absolutely crazy happy to play fetch with me. Maybe when I throw the elastic hair is kind of a bird like feature him.

They are incredibly communicative animals. Their problem seems to be that I am a very stupid creature that often does the wrong thing, like not feeding them every time they’re hungry, sitting at a desk instead of playing with them, carrying them out of the room when they were clearly trying to get on the kitchen counter, and so on.

Or, god forbid, stupid creature that I am, I buy _the wrong flavor food_. Then it's all "why are you trying to poison me, hooman? do you not love me anymore??"

One of the best Human-Cat interactions scenes about food in a movie is the opening 10 minutes from movie The Long Goodbye

Rewatched this movie last week. Best movie I've seen in at least a year. Robert Altman is immortal.

https://youtu.be/_u0uo0TxS-I

And yet despite all our deficiencies they still choose to spend their time with us, how great are these creatures.

They are very patient with us

From my direct multi-year study, the surest way to have a cat not lay in a specific place is to place a fluffy cat bed in that place. Also, no toy is more precious to a cat than a non-toy item stolen from the hooman with hair ties being one of the most precious items.

My cat yells at me a lot but my god I took a pastic bag from him a few days ago that he was licking (is there a more annoying noise on the planet?) and my god he sulked about it for a good 18 hours.

My cat also likes to lick plastic, but they're plastic containers. No idea why.

I cat sat once for a friend who had a plastic goblin. I spent the entire two weeks obsessively checking that I didn't leave any plastic out only to (occasionally) find the cat happily chewing on something that I didn't think they would find.

I learned my lesson about the depths of feline creativity lol and I was thankful they didn't get into anything that hurt them

She doesn't even like to chew plastic. She will just sit there and lick plastic bins.

Copying humans, they feel they need more microplastics

My cats actually love their cat tree. I’ve had to replace it because they clawed through the scratching post legs (all the way through the cardboard underneath the sisal rope).

Knowing that they love rectangles explains a lot too. They love every Amazon box that arrives, the folded hand towel in the bathroom, the top of my pc mini tower (rectangular and warm). Though they get off the tower when I’m playing a game since the gpu heats up so much and the exhaust fans blow out the top—it just gets too hot for them. I made a “cat catcher for my bed—a single hand towel folded in half lying on the otherwise featureless comforter. There’s almost always a cat there when I wake up in the morning.

This desk might actually work for me since one of my cats loves to sleep right under my office chair, dangerously close to the wheels. He’s got real long hair and I find tufts of fur around the chair and feel absolutely horrible. Crazily I almost never notice when it happens, he doesn’t yelp! I finally ended up buying a small scratching post with a bed on top and set it under my desk. He instantly took to it, so no more running over the poor cat. As a bonus he’s now in petting reach so I can get my cat fix whenever I need (petting is a two way street).

Exactly. Contrary to popular belief cats don't sit there because a laptop keyboard is warm. They also sit on external keyboards or even in front of a tablet without a keyboard (blocking the view to the screen). They just want your attention.

I'm not sure if this is enough for demanding cats, but I used to type with a small dog bed directly in front of me and my keyboard behind it, so that I'd work typing with my arms around my elderly chihuahua every day. She seemed to like it a lot, and she basically had my attention every time she stirred.

I also felt that it was probably good for me for her to break my flow and demand my attention every now and then. It helped remind me to get up and stretch and be human better than I otherwise would have done.

i came across a manuscript once that had a bunch of inky paw prints across a page. the scribe clearly tried to blot one of them, merely smudging it, then decided to let the rest be. it was in a very beautiful hand, and the full page must've taken hours to write. that scribe's exasperation echoes through the ages. i wish i could find that MS again.

to be fair, the page was probably arranged in a nice sunny spot at the time of the incident.

An example of a pawprint manuscript:

https://art.thewalters.org/object/W.305/

awesome, thank you! i'm not surprised there are more of these. i may be a little surprised i don't see them more often ;)

Partially correct. For sure a lot of it is getting attention, but they do care about the warmth. I've walked in to my office plenty of times to see my cat sitting on my laptop when I haven't even been in there for hours. She will even find the laptop and lay on it when it's in random places around the house. Reproduced with three different cats over the yeras. The warmth is definitely a cat magnet.

sometimes its scent too.

When my cats want warmth, they go on top of my desktop tower (or on my lap under the keyboard tray). If they're at the level of my desk, they're almost definitely angling for attention.

Noticed that in my absence, cats hang where I spend the most of my time when present. If for a few days I only come home to sleep I'll usually find them on my bed. If I work at my desk for a week, then the next days they'll be found on my chair. And so on.. A somewhat reliable habit indicator.

> Noticed that in my absence, cats hang where I spend the most of my time when present

Mine too. I believe it has something to do with your scent being soothing to them. We tend to think of domestic cats as solitary creatures. And while it's true that cats are solitary hunters, they are absolutely a social species, a truth betrayed by feral cats predominantly organising into colonies.

Mine take turns getting The Good Spots, so I wonder if they think it's their turn

I should also add (too late to edit the original comment), that when the laptop is off and I haven't used it in hours, she doesn't care about it. It's only when it's on that she does (which is why I think the heat is a factor).

I have a keyboard tray and a desk with two monitors. Both of my cats love to stand on the space in the desk of whatever monitor I happen to be focusing on more (preferably blocking as much of it as possible from my view). They know exactly what they're doing.

Put a useless keyboard down there and pretend you are typing with your toes.

They're predators. They are very good at understanding where your real attention is.

this is a good way to lose a toe or two

this is an invitation to toe crimes

It could have a special heated area of the desk that isn't used for any technological purpose

It doesn't work. I have the laptop next to my screen and an external keyboard. The cat always chooses the cold external keyboard instead of the warm laptop, because that's the center of my attention.

Split keyboard. Far enough apart and you have a dedicated cat zone.

Rebuttal exhibit A: https://imgur.com/a/Eu8zKMm

Split keyboard mounting each half to the chair and VR headset instead of a monitor. That way, they can't get in front of the monitor or walk across the keyboard.

A frmr coworker of mine wrote a Linux kernel module (not an April Fools' joke) to detect and prevent feline input... either stuck or neighboring keys. I don't think it was ever merged.

I put a nice box with a pet safe heating pad and blanket and the cat never sat on my keyboard again. When she wanted my attention she then just stood in front of my face and then would sit back on the blanket eventually

Yep. I have one of these on my desk: https://www.amazon.com/Generic-Cattop/dp/B09F8QQPJH/ (a heating pad shaped like a laptop), and our cat will spend 90% of my workday on it, and the remaining 10% is spent getting my attention (or getting lunch).

My wife, being a genius, has a decoy keyboard. Pretty effective, it usually has a cat sitting on it.

I tried this for my toddler but unfortunately it fooled me more often than it fooled him.

Makes sense. Cat probably thought you were grooming and warming up the keyboard just for her.

Exactly!

Although my last cat was nicer and slept between the keyboard and monitor. Pushing aside every small piece of crap that I kept on the desk of course (had to regularly gather sd cards that she pushed off the desk) but at least she let me see and type!

Mine too likes to lie between the keyboard and the monitor, but if I want to actually work I still have to remove her from the desk. The issue is that, while she usually is a lovely cat, the hand movements over the keyboard are turning her predatory instincts on, and sooner rather than later she's going to bite...

Exactly my thought, given my experience with fellow felines.

Or more likely on top of your tower pc

That is inevitable :)

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