You might find it oddly satisfying when you get a cat to sit on your lap and it starts purring. Ostensibly you think it is because the cat trusts you and loves to get full body massages. But that is only 2/3 of the story. They are also there to steal your warmth.
You will find that cats prefer your lap much more often in the winter, spring and fall than summer. That is what clued me in on the warmth stealing. They also like to steal the heat from baseboard heaters and even warm lights if they can get close enough (this one is likely to come to an end as more people invest in LED lights and other lighting that produces little heat). But a light has to be on and baseboard heating goes off and on, too, so they still like the lap.
Or the bottom of the lap. Ever notice that when you get up in the cooler months from an insulated couch that a cat has stolen your spot? They are just sopping up the warmth that you left unguarded. So you can either force the cat to move or entice the cat to move. That is if you still want the spot the cat has stolen. This is usually true of a favoured viewpoint to watch the television.
So I present a way to entice your cat out of a favoured location. This method hopefully avoids a confrontation with our cat overlords.
First of all decide on a spot that your cat can curl up in. It must be insulated and comfortable like the spot that you just had stolen from you.
Secondly, sit in the spot for 5 or 10 minutes. It helps if the spot also has a half decent view of the television or is elsewise good enough for the 5 to 10 minutes you will be in it.
Thirdly, you must remove yourself from the spot you don’t want. Warning: this isn’t a very good plan in a 2 cat household. In that eventuality, the second cat is likely to grab this second warm spot. Which means you must soldier on to spot number three and waste another 5 or 10 minutes.
Fourthly, the hope is that your cat moves itself to the new warm spot. Also, if your cat feels too lazy to move this plan can backfire because of that, too.
Finally, you can sit in the favoured spot or you can call your cat a lazy no good bum.
And that is the plan. Use it wisely, grasshoppers.
