Their is no doubt that Dyson has made vacuum cleaners infinitesimally better more than once. But I’m not going to tell you that company’s ads. Instead, I’ll deal with that one topic the company and inventor have so far completely ignored. That is the vacuum cleaner’s arch enemy – the common housecat or felix vacuumius hatius.
Every cat owner knows that as soon as any vacuum cleaner is turned on it sends the cat of the house fleeing for safety. Sometimes even the cat’s safest of places needs vacuuming. There has been little respite for our furry friends. Personally, I am trying my best for my cat by inhabiting an apartment without any carpet. But even I have thought life might be easier with my cat’s archest of enemies.
So I guess it’s up to me to come up with a vacuum that Dyson and all the other vacuum companies have missed.
The first thing I note is that it seems to be the sound of the vacuum that has cats everywhere fleeing for their lives. So perhaps sound is where we should start.
We can do this scientifically by finding pleasing sounds for cats. But sound is a monstrous domain. One type of sound is music. One type of music is country music. For years my Dad had a room filled floor to ceiling along every wall with just the Canadian country music put out on vinyl. Each LP contains forty minutes of different musical sounds.
As you see we are looking for a needle in a haystack. Instead, we should have started with the sounds that cats make and judge these sounds by their reactions to them. Cats like purring sounds of course. So instead of a roar, we must make vacuums quieter, as quiet as their own purrs. That’s where the future lies in vacuuming.
And I heard you non cat lovers thinking that if only we could make vacuums louder with more of a hiss to them. For shame. May the cats of the world spit out a hairball on your property.
Perhaps it’s not the sound but the actions of the vacuum that arouse a cat’s ire and fear. Vacuums suck away dirt and sometimes scents too. All the marking of its territory that the cat puts down each and every day might partially disappear due to the sucking of the vacuum.
Perhaps a scent, analyzed to be exactly your cat’s scent, could be put on a marker at one end of the floor attachment of the vacuum. Then you could clean up in such a way that you are marking the carpet for your cat after suctioning.
Now I know this requires chemistry and the willingness to put a scent on your carpet even while you are cleaning it. But isn’t your little shnookums of a cat worth it? After all I’ve heard that cats, when confronted by their owner’s death and no more food, only begin to eat the owner after feeling a second or two of remorse.
