It’s amazing to me how quickly cats can form new habits. When we adopted Binky and Wingnut, we would keep the door between upstairs and downstairs closed at night. The cats stayed downstairs with us (we have a daylight basement where our master bedroom is) because we didn’t totally trust them upstairs by themselves.
Justifiably so as evidenced by the fact that Binky broke a wine glass by getting on the counter the second day we had him.
Anyway, every night, one of us would say, “Who wants to go downstairs?” Both cats knew that was the code for getting treats in the bathroom.
But after a year (or less, I don’t really remember) we gave them the run of the house. We still said the codewords, and they still came down. Until we stopped. I don’t know why. Different habits, different bedtimes, different job duties or commutes…who knows?
There have been a number of habits over the years. The latest (before we lost Binky) was for John to go to bed before me. I’d stay up and write for a while. Wingnut would go downstairs with John and have treats in the bathroom (with the door closed so Abbie didn’t try to steal them) and then when I went to bed, I’d give Binky calorie gel. After his cancer diagnosis, he needed to put on some weight, and he LOVED calorie gel. LIke he’d eat half a tube of it at a time if we let him.
Abbie would get a tiny taste of calorie gel too because we didn’t want her to feel left out.
After we said goodbye to Binky, “Bathroom Treats for Wingnut” just stopped. In part because Wingnut would often stay up with me on the couch now that Binky wasn’t next to me.
And within two days of Binky passing, Abbie stopped wanting calorie gel. Whether she sensed my sadness or didn’t want it because Binky wasn’t getting it or what, I’ll never know. But a couple of days later, since we were sad and wanted to make Wingnut and Abbie happy, I brought down a treat jar and we started having “bedtime treats.” Each of them get 3-4 crunchy treats on or near the bed.
Well, after two days of that? Wingnut no longer wants treats in the bathroom from John. He just wants treats from me when I come to bed.