Has anyone else ever had a cat that seemed to be stuck in perpetual adolescence? I've got a pair of siblings, one boy, one girl. They're 8 years old. The girl has grown from a wild kitten into a fairly sedate and 'normal' adult cat, i.e. spends most of her time sleeping or trying to sit on your lap. But my boycat...he's a nightmare! And seems to be getting more so as he gets older.
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he won't drink out of his bowl but will scale a bookshelf to drink out of any human's water receptacle
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if I let them sleep in our bedroom, he will wake me up sometime between 3am and 7am, guaranteed, in order to demand food. I don't give him food when he does this; he just gets shut downstairs where he can't hassle me. But nevertheless, he has done this from tiny kittenhood and has never got the message that it's not worth it. His methods range from jet engine purring, to sticking his nose up my nose/in eye/in ear, to clawing of soft parts like underside of arm/behind ear/eyelid if he's really getting desperate. (We don't generally let them sleep in our room anymore as they are too hairy for words, but last night he woke me up at 4.15am from downstairs, banging on the hall door with his skull )
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when Beaker (the girlcat) sits with you, she just sits quietly and purrs. When Malcolm (delinquent boy) sits with you he's constantly barging about, demanding FULL ATTENTION, digging his claws in and generally behaving like a nutter. In fact, he's really demanding of attention generally and has a very loud miaow. I think there might be a bit of Oriental in their moggy mix, which might explain it.
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he will eat anything we're eating. Literally, anything at all. In a way it's good because it means we no longer leave half-finished bowls of spaghetti sitting on the table for hours at a time, but he's getting more and more cheeky about it. The other day I caught him up on the kitchen worktop licking the griddle pan that I'd fried some steak in!
I know some of this is bound to be our fault (we do feed them leftover scraps of fish and meat, so they probably associate any plate of human food with treats now), but the rest of it is a mystery. Anyway, not really looking for advice as such - I love them both dearly as they are and enjoy Malcolm's nuttiness...it just gets a bit tiring at times!