Okie-Dokie, a really neat black cat, adopted us about eight years ago. Okie-Dokie is neat because she’s a very worldly indoor/outdoor cat. She has a bit of a sordid history, starting life as a ferrel cat. She was adopted and neutered by a family in our neighborhood, who later had a baby. When their second baby arrived, Okie-Dokie (whose name, we discovered later, was Maxine) decided she wasn’t getting enough attention, so she started hunting gophers in our yard. After a few weeks of feeling her way around, she decided to move into our house, and she’s been here ever since. She’s a good indoor cat, but she is also savvy about cars on the street, and she’s a good mouser.
When Okie-Dokie was checking us out, we did not know who she was, or any of her history. We learned it later, when someone from the neighborhood saw Okie-Dokie and said, “That’s Maxine.” So then we got the whole story, and Maxine’s parents are glad for her to have a happy home.
Okie-Dokie has a nice sheepskin bed on one corner of the sofa in our den. She doesn’t always sleep there, but she does sometimes and it’s a great place to hang out.
Last night, Barbara washed Callie’s sheepskin puppy bed and put in in the hallway so she would remember to carry it in to Callie’s crate. (Callie is a five-month-old Golden Retriever puppy, still crate training.) We turned our backs for just a minute to get dinner ready, and when we walked into the den, Callie had carried her puppy bed into the den and put it on top of Okie-Dokie’s bed on the sofa!
Where do puppies get ideas like this?
I don’t think the wolf pack taught them where to put their puppy beds, did it? Is this a way of competing with Okie-Dokie for the Alpha position in our family? Maybe she just thought the sofa was the place for sheepskin beds.
Our pets’ behavior often mystifies me. I try to understand, but there are times when I get frustrated and wish I could look inside their minds. Callie seems to have had some kind of reason for putting her bed on top of Okie-Dokie’s. We thought it was incredibly cute, but we also wondered what she was thinking.
Callie has been confronting Okie-Dokie a little lately. When she first arrived at our home, she was an eight-week old puppy weighing seven pounds. But now she’s five months old, and she weighs about thirty-five pounds. At first, Okie-Dokie showed Callie who was boss with a few pokes at Callie’s nose. And Callie became very submissive. But now much larger than Okie-Dokie, Callie seems to be saying either “you can’t beat me up any more” or “let’s have some rough play.”
So maybe Callie put her bed on top of Okie-Dokie’s to prove her superiority. Or maybe she just did it.
It’s a mystery.
