“Curiosity killed the cat!”
“Oh you’re just a scaredy cat!”
I’ve heard those two sayings all my life, never really pondering how they contradict each other… until I’ve found myself living with one of each:
Scaredy Cat
Oh my sweet, sweet Bailey. Never have I known a more gentle and loving cat. I don’t know if he even knows how to use his claws to scratch in defense or malice. He just want to love and be loved.
And he also just wants to hide at the drop of a hat. He is my Scaredy Cat. Sometimes, despite his want to be loved, he’ll run and hide even when you just try to reach down to pet him!
When we have company, it’ll take hours before he’ll venture out to even peek around the corner at these strangers who have invaded his space. When we go out of town and ask a friend to “check the cats for us” we often hear that they just hope Bailey is okay, because, “I didn’t see him at any time I was there.”
His favorite place to be is under our bed. For hours and hours and hours at a time. If he happens to be curled up in his cat bed in our bedroom, and I go in to just get something off my dresser, he’ll BOLT under the bed before I can even say, “Oh, Hi Bai–.”
He is my sweet little scaredy cat.
Curious Cat
Oh. My. Goodness. Rascally Smokey is curious cat to the -nth degree. He IS a mischievous child.
His newest curiosity is my closet. It’s up high, with a seperate cubby for my shoes on the bottom. I open my closet to get a shirt, and he leaps up inside… we spend ten minutes of me pulling him out, going back for a shirt, only for him to leap back in again. It usually results in my having to kick him completely out of the room to get dressed.
He wants to climb inside of dresser drawers, and he’s already once been locked in the bathroom for hours on end because I didn’t know he’d gone to lay behind the toilet while I showered.
The freezer is of particular interest as well. I go for ice and he wants to climb in and investigate (the freezer is on the bottom of our refrigerator). I go to close the door, and instead of getting out of the way, he tries to just climb up on a shelf. Frozen curious cat, anyone?
He climbs. He jumps. He pushes his boundaries. When guests come over, he is ready to climb in their lap and get to know them. I think he thinks his name is, “No!!” or “Stop it!!”
My crazy, crazy curious cat.
Our sweet Bellatrix seems to be a combination of both. I had no idea she was a scaredy cat until I had a playdate for her and she hissed for three hours straight and hid behind the couches.
However, she will inevitably kill herself by doing something stupid because she must know about EVERYTHING. You open a door, she darts in… it’s hilarious in a way… but yeah… people come to the door and she hides.