Cats sleep anywhere. And they’re right.

There seems to be great entertainment sought from shared pictures of cats sleeping anywhere…anywhere except the bed their humans got them.

Chuckle at the examples here and here.

I too laugh and these are witty, but also illustrative of our anthropocentric attitude to non-human animal behaviour. The animal’s behaviour is appropriate to them. It might not make sense to us…that’s a bed, isn’t it?!

We have decided that this seemingly arbitrary shaped cushioned item is where cats should sleep. And dammit, they should like it!

But what happens when we ask cats? See those links above for the answers!

The animal never misbehaves.

The animal’s responses are appropriate to the conditions to which we expose them. The responses they produce are correct according to their ethology, their experiences, their current conditions.

There is no wrong or right, good or bad, of behaviour. There’s just behaviour and behaviour is information.

Cats sleep in short bouts…literal cat-naps. They fall asleep relatively easily and they sleep where they feel safe and secure. Their bodies are flexible and when they pour themselves into a space, they appear liquid. Cats sleeping anywhere, any table, any chair…and so on…is because cats choose to sleep in those places. Not arbitrarily, but because of how their ethology, experiences & current conditions have prepared them.

The cat’s behaviour is information telling us humans about their needs and preferences.

Behaviour is information.

I got Decker a memory foam bed before Christmas ’23. He’s old and we’re doing all sorts of medical stuff and conditioning exercises to minimise the impacts of aging joints on stiffness and strength.

He has lots of beds, several within just metres of this one that lives beside me while I work. Sun traps are the only main draw away from this bed and he will lie for hours in the sun, in a lounger bed, that I move about for him as the sun moves.

In the memory foam bed, he spent most of his resting and sleeping time curled up, in a ball.

Enter the pink Muppet-skin bed

His behaviour was telling me he sought something that he found more comfortable and comforting. So I went hunting beds with which to experiment.

I started with a less than pretty pink Muppet-skin bed and the hunt pretty much ended with this…

From the get-go, he spends most if his time sleeping like this. While he almost always starts out sleeping curled up, and always has no matter where he sleeps, he now blossoms and opens out to sleep on his side or on his back.

He sleeps deeply, breathing rhythmically, snoring contently. This was definitely missing, or at least, less with the healthy memory foam bed alone. Now his Muppet-skin bed is piled on top of the memory foam bed, and he can choose which one he sleeps in. Not once has he picked the memory foam alone.

Providing options is important, and a feature of creating an enriched world for them. And listening to their preferences is trusting that their behaviour matters.