The thing that defines Gracie is routine. She is absolutely devoted to things being the way they’re supposed to be, and the way they are supposed to be is the way she says they are.
For the first few years of her life, I lived in an apartment in Bloomfield, NJ. The nighttable was on the left-hand side of the bed, and I sleep on the nighttable side of the bed. Tig slept to my right, and Gracie would leap into bed for her bellyrub from the left. When I moved to Montclair, the nighttable wound up on the right-hand side of the bed. Tig quickly adapted and began sleeping to my left. Gracie never came into bed on the wrong side for the entire time I lived in Montclair. When I moved to Richmond, the nighttable migrated back to the left-hand side of the bed, and soon, Gracie was coming into bed every morning for her bellyrub. For the two years I lived in Montclair, she did not do this.
It’s not just routine. It is THE routine. It must be her way, or no way.
It has taken me nearly two years to break her of the habit of being petted on the bathroom sink. This is because during a visit, my mother catered to Gracie’s every whim, and that included petting her while she was on the bathroom sink. After Mom went home, Gracie would leap onto the sink and yowl for me to attend her. Her place used to be on the shelf between the living room and kitchen. I have finally succeeded in getting her back there. She won’t simply leap to the shelf, even if there’s plenty of space. She has to go around me, jump on the leather chair, leap to the top of it, and then jump onto the shelf to be petted. Every. Single. Time.
The biggest problem with Gracie’s habit of developing routines is that she is the smartest cat I have ever had. She remembers what you do. If you do something once to trick her into taking medication, or getting into her carrier for a trip to the vet, she will remember it and run like hell the second she sees you doing it again. The same goes for routines. She picks them up in a heartbeat, so you have to be careful, unless, of course, you want to spend your life enslaved to Gracie’s whims and desires.
She is currently more than a bit miffed that Tig has been sleeping on her side of the bed in the mornings, mostly because he’s been waking up around six and yowling at me for attention, and I’ve been ignoring him. So he curls up and goes to sleep next to my head (where he was formerly yowling in my ear). To my left. Which is Gracie’s side of the bed.
This morning, she came up the bed in obvious anxiety and sniffed at him. Finally, she leaped over him and onto my pillow, but her annoyance was evident. Tig, oblivious, slept on.
Cats. They are far more complex than they appear, curled up and sleeping in the sun. Gracie? Now she could use a good shrink. But she’s going to have to pay for it herself.
Regarding the cat carrier thing. When we got our little friends, the breeder suggested that we leave the carrier out all the time so that the cats would be use to it, and more easily coaxed into it for the trip to the vet.
This made sense, so we got three decent looking carriers (one for each cat…we went with the large pet carrier made by Tutto) and placed them strategically around the house.
Now we find them sleeping in them, playing in and on them, and generally thinking of them as another piece of furniture…so they don’t panic at all when we put them in for a trip (it’s still a bit of a coaxing trick if they’re wide awake and want to play, but they don’t run and hide). They are so comfortable with them that when we had to take Zorro on a trip with us, he dove back into the carrier right after I took him through the metal detector at the airport. He couldn’t wait to get back into his cave.
That’s the best vote of confidence in this approach I can think of (before we got them each a carrier, we would frequently have to wake one up and remove it from the carrier to put in the other one who was ‘going for a ride’. The correct one was never the one sleeping there when you wanted it to be…).