[Essay] Cat Owner Troubles #2: Curtain Climbing

By Manager

Meowdy, everyone!

Today, I, Noboritai Curtainer, will be answering some of the many troubles that plague people who live with cats.

Today’s topic: cats climbing the curtains.

They do, don’t they? Cats love climbing curtains. What exactly is so much fun about it? Is it the satisfying way their claws hook into the fabric? Or are they driven by some mountaineering instinct along the lines of, “Because it’s there”?

No one knows for sure.

Watching a cat enthusiastically scramble up and down a curtain can be rather charming. For the human watching, though, the experience may be slightly more complicated—especially if said curtain happens to be the magnificent imported one you bought the other day at a stylish furniture shop in Aoyama.

By the time you think, “Oh,” it’s already too late.
The cat is halfway up the mountain.

Some people may panic and pull the cat down. Some may remove the curtains altogether. Others may swear, “You are NEVER climbing that again!”

So today, I am here to answer your concerns.

Cats climb curtains. Period.

One of the important lessons in living with cats is learning, to some extent, to let them do what they want. Because really, you cannot completely stop a cat from doing anything.

Tell them not to climb, and they climb.
Tell them not to go in there, and in they go.
Tell them not to touch that, and they touch it.
And if there is one particular place where you desperately do not want them to throw up, that is precisely where they will throw up.

At that point, it is much easier to change your own way of thinking than to change the cat.

In other words: stop worrying about a curtain or two, baby.

Which reminds me. Not long ago, two rescue cats named Johan and Rottenmeier went out for a trial adoption, only to be returned to the shelter about a week later.

The reason was that they’d peed outside the litter box.

Um.

Well, yes.

Of course they might.

To them, it was a strange house. Strange people. Strange smells. They had suddenly been taken from a place where they had been peacefully going about their lives and dropped into a completely different world.

If a human were suddenly placed in some unfamiliar house and told, “This is your home now. Please make yourself comfortable,” I doubt they would immediately put their feet up and relax either. I would probably hide in a closet and stare at my phone at least for a month.

For the record, neither of these two cats had ever had a single "accident" while they were at the shelter.

Of course, every household has its own circumstances. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and we are certainly not going to force anyone to live with a cat.

Still, from where I stand, it feels like a bit of a shame.

Because it is rather like reading the first chapter of a novel and then putting the book back on the shelf.

Maybe the protagonist seems unpleasant in Chapter One. Maybe the story has barely started moving. Maybe, frankly, it’s a little boring. But by Chapter Two or Chapter Three, it might become absolutely fantastic. A character who was peeing on the floor in Chapter One might be someone you couldn’t imagine life without by Chapter Ten.

Living with a cat is much the same.

You never know what is going to happen. There is no script. Things rarely go the way you imagined they would.

But that is exactly what makes it interesting.

Welcoming a cat into your life means welcoming a whole new story into it.

And besides, the period in which a cat joyfully scales your curtains is only a tiny part of a cat’s life.

Give it a few years and they will settle down. Eventually, they will spend most of the day asleep. The curtains that once seemed irresistible will no longer interest them in the slightest.

And when you look at your cat after all those years have passed, you may find yourself thinking:

“I wish you’d climb them just one more time.”

The claw marks and frayed threads that once looked like damage will, somewhere along the way, turn into memories.

And cats, more often than not, leave this world before we do.

When that day comes, which story would you rather have lived?

The one with a pristine curtain without a single scratch?
Or the one with a curtain covered in claw marks?

Unfortunately, this particular story is not streaming on Netflix. You cannot fast-forward to the ending, and you cannot rewind and start again. It can take more than ten years to reach the end and is, frankly, a terribly time-inefficient form of entertainment.

Still, a damaged curtain can be replaced.

But you cannot go back later and buy another copy of today—the day when that particular cat was climbing that particular curtain.

So come on.

Let them climb the curtain.

It’s only a curtain.

If the cat is having fun, isn’t that enough?

No?

Well, I seem to be running out of column space.

I’ll see you again next time with another one of your cat-related troubles.

And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter!

Bye-meow!

(End)