Training & Behavior

The telly wobbled the first time and I caught it. The second time it did not wobble, it went, slowly, like a felled tree in a cartoon, and Maud the cat sat beneath the stand blinking as if to say that was also not my fault. The screen cracked on the corner of the side table and the cat, unbothered, walked over the wreckage and out, leaving me with a bill and a question about why a twelve-year-old cat had suddenly taken up demolition.

She had not taken up demolition. She had taken up sitting on top of the telly, because the top of the telly is warm and high and hers, in the way that every high warm thing in this house is eventually hers. The stand was a cheap flat-pack that swayed if you looked at it, and a cat with opinions was simply more load than it was built for. The problem was the stand, not the cat. I had been blaming the wrong end of the animal.

So I bolted a strap. A furniture strap, the kind you fit after a baby arrives, rated for a telly three times the size, screwed into the wall where the cat cannot unscrew it. The telly stopped moving. That part was free, apart from the strap, and it worked the first night. But Maud still wanted the high warm spot, and a bolted telly is a bolted telly, not a bed, so I put a mat on the low cabinet beside it and rewarded her, with a crumble of the dried liver, for choosing the mat.

She chose the mat. Not because she is tame, but because the mat is also warm and also high-ish and the liver is the one thing that still moves her, and the telly, now fixed and uninteresting, lost its pull. The cracked screen went to the tip. The strap stayed. The mat stayed. The cat stayed off the top, mostly, and when she forgets I find her on the mat anyway, because the mat pays and the telly does not, and a cat will always do the maths.

I tell people this when they ask how to stop a cat wrecking something, and the answer is almost never stop the cat. It is change the thing, or change the deal. The cat wanted warm and high. I could not take that from her without a fight I would lose. I gave her warm and high that did not fall on her head, and paid her to like it, and the war ended the afternoon the strap went in. The telly is fine. The cat is fine. The side table has a new corner.

That is the whole of cat training, really. Meet the need, change the method, reward the new one, and stop shouting at the animal for wanting the thing it was always going to want. Maud knocked the telly over twice. I bolted once. She has not touched it since, and she got a warmer seat for her trouble, and I got a lesson cheaper than the next screen would have been.

The new stand I bought after, a proper one, heavier, with a wide foot, was almost unnecessary, because the strap did the work, but I sleep better knowing the telly will not move even if the cat forgets and the mat loses its pull, which it will, one day, because she is a cat and cats revise the deal without notice. The strap is the part that holds. The mat is the part that persuades. Both stay, and the screen stays, and the side table, with its new corner, stays, and Maud, on the mat, stays, and the only casualty was the old stand, which was always going to fail a cat with opinions, and the vet bill I joked about was never a vet bill, just the cost of being slow to blame the furniture.

I have since bolted the bookcase too, because once you see the house through a cat's sense of gravity you see the cheap flat-pack everywhere, and the strap is cheap and the peace is total, and Maud, who started all this, now surveys a house that no longer falls when she climbs, which is the least a proud old cat deserves, and the telly, bolted and ignored, hums at night while she sleeps on the mat beside it, and the war, such as it was, ended the day I stopped blaming the animal and started screwing the wall, which is the lesson, and the only one, and it cost less than the screen.

The bookcase got a strap too, because once you see the house through a cat's sense of gravity you see the cheap flat-pack everywhere, and the strap is cheap and the peace is total, and Maud, who started all this, now surveys a house that no longer falls when she climbs, which is the least a proud old cat deserves, and the telly, bolted and ignored, hums while she sleeps on the mat beside it, and the war, such as it was, ended the day I stopped blaming the animal and started screwing the wall, which is the lesson, and the only one, and it cost less than the screen, and the side table, with its new corner, holds a vase now instead of a grudge, and the cat, on the mat, holds the warm spot, and the house, finally, holds together, and the only casualty was the old stand, which was always going to fail a cat with opinions, and the strap, which never will.