I really find animal behavior endlessly fascinating. For instance, you often see the boys cuddled up together as they are in this photo. That was almost all you saw when they were kittens.

Around the age of two, though, Simba decided he was much more interested in cuddling with humans than with Gizmo. Gizmo, unfortunately, has cuddling with big brother as his main aim in life. Simba no longer allowed it.

A couple of years later, around the age of four or so, Simba again began to cuddle with Gizmo — sometimes. Sometimes they cuddle for a while, then Simba will attack Gizmo (never anything worse than a few tufts of fur torn out or a scratch on the nose, but I keep a close eye on it). Other times, they’ll cuddle for hours.

Other times, Simba will go over to where Gizmo is curled up on his own bed and just stare at him. If Gizmo doesn’t respond, Simba attacks him. The truly baffling part of this, to me, is that Simba doesn’t even take over Gizmo’s bed after he’s run him off. He doesn’t want it (you almost never find him in this particular bed). Apparently he is just asserting his position as alpha cat (yes, I truly do believe there is such a thing as alpha cat).

And here is the truly bizarre bit (to my mind): Simba never tries to run the dogs off of their beds. In fact, the dogs have pretty much totally taken over what was once Simba’s favorite bed — and he lets them! Although just to shake things up, yesterday Simba did curl up in that bed for a while (but no dogs were harmed in the process).

I still can’t quite figure out why he is meaner to Gizmo than he is to the dogs. He certainly isn’t afraid of the dogs. The other day I was cutting up chunks for his food, and Chester was curled up in his bed in the kitchen. Simba came in & gave him several head butts. Then I think Chester may have tried to lick him, and he started bopping Chester. But he didn’t do the “I’m going to stare at you until you vacate this bed — or worse!” maneuver.

On a side note, Gizmo seems to be very appreciative of the dogs’ crates. Their crate pads are often on top of their crates (after they’ve been fed, for instance), and Gizmo seems to think that this makes a nifty cat perch.

Technorati Tags: animal behavior, attacks, alpha cat

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Last Sunday was the perfect Spring day: dry, sunny, clear blue skies (and no rain!). Although our weather here is very nice, the truth is that we don’t have as many nice Spring days as you’d think. Before you know it, it’s hot and humid (in this case, by Tuesday!).

So we took advantage of it, packed the dogs up, and headed out to a local park. Of course, just because you’re having fun in the park doesn’t mean you can’t get a little training in. Looks like we’re working on our sits here, doesn’t it?

The reality, though, is that I was trying to get the dogs to sit so DH could get the shot he wanted. It never happened, but we got some good shots anyway.

Chester is almost always glued to my side. Every once in a while he deigns to lay on DH or a visitor. But most of the time, he’ll sit (he knows he’s supposed to sit before getting on the couch — it’s a way of having the dogs say “please”) — and if I say no, he’ll just continue to sit, staring at me.

However, separation anxiety does have its uses, too. I almost always know where he is, because he’s almost always right by my side. And recently on one of our walks, he put the “brakes” on (put out his front feet, his head down, & stopped) — and his harness came off right over his head. I didn’t think it could do that!

Still, he just sat there calmly while I put it back on him. And this was on the side of a relatively busy road. Now, if a cat had run past us, I’m not so sure he would still be sitting there . . . still, if it were Lola, she’d probably be long gone.

The dogs did surprisingly well. I’ve taken them to parks before, but this is the first time they’ve had to navigate over narrow bridges over creeks and up steep inclines with stone steps. They didn’t seem to mind at all.

I do think that the noise of the falls was a little off-putting for Lola. DH wanted me to pose the dogs sitting pretty near the falls, and I didn’t have much success with that. Of course, in general I didn’t have a lot of success trying to get them to sit facing DH; something we’ll have to work on, I guess.

And finally, we have our obligatory bluebonnet picture (can you guess the state?) with great big doggie grins. They sure look like they had a good time, don’t they?

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