Transcription A Bluesky post from "Slippy", @damnslippy.slippy.me, with a profile picture of a woman with short, purple hair holding a knife: Sincerely delighted to discover, 45 minutes into this nearly-wordless three-hour documentary about French monks who take vows of silence, that among the reasons they \\\can\\\ talk is "to make sure the monastery cats know when it's mealtime by making little kitty-calling noises at them." :::
They do it for themselves, not the cats. The cats know when it’s mealtime, unless mealtime happens at a new random time every day.
Do something your cat enjoys at a specific time every day for a couple days, and you’ve got yourself a furry alarm clock that will make sure to remind you of the time if you forget.
Not just cats. That’s the Pavlovian response. Even YOU can be similarly trained.
Yes, but cats love routine, and follow it as much as possible, like a clock.
You can train a dog to respond a certain ways to certain signals, but you can’t train it to wake you up every day at a certain specific time, unless it can recognise some signal. But cats will train themselves to do that, if they get something out of it, and are by nature well aware of the time of day, with surprising precision.
Of course, if you train your cat to wake you up for work, better be ready to be woken up at the same time on weekends, unless there’s some noticeable enough difference (like traffic noise on the street outside) between workdays and holidays and you’re lucky to have a sufficiently smart cat who can notice the difference. Cats might be quite adequate clocks, but they’re not calendars.
My dog always woke me up at a consistent time every morning. I didn’t train her to do that, and I don’t know what the signal was (other than the position of the sun, I guess). I used to hate it, because it was always too early, but I eventually got used to it.
Maybe I was the trainee, in this case 😆
If she could see the sun, or hear people moving outside, or anything like that, yeah, a smart dog can easily learn to recognise those signals.
Yeah, I think it was the sun. She probably trained me to follow her own circadian rhythm, using her cuteness and affection to convince me to comply lol
I’m not allowed to sleep past 9am without feeding the cat. She dose not give up.
Do people change their pets feeding time when the clocks change (daylights savings)?
Probably not, but when it’s an hour later than usual cats will complain, and probably get stressed. (If it’s one hour early they’ll happily eat it, but might ask for seconds and hour later.)
My cats remind me every few minutes that it’s mealtime. I don’t even feed them manually; I have an auto-feeder.
It’s not the same, though. It tastes better when you do it.
(Bonus points if you “cook” it in the kitchen like you would your food; they’re part of the family, after all, they’ll appreciate being treated like equals. Or betters.)
Throw up in my own shows at the same time every day, got it!