Your Cat Is Not Skittish. She Is A Small Magistrate.

Last Updated on May 13, 2026 by admin

Here is a partial list of objects my nine-year-old tortoiseshell, Esther, has formally identified as serious threats to her wellbeing:

1. The robot vacuum.
2. The doorbell.
3. The corner of the rug, but only when it has folded over slightly.
4. My yoga mat, unrolled.
5. The cardboard tube from inside a roll of paper towels.
6. A new houseplant for the first seventy-two hours.
7. Any plastic bag that has been left on a chair instead of put away.

This list is incomplete because it is generated daily and rarely revised. The plastic bag, for example, will be a personal nemesis on Monday and a perfectly acceptable lounging spot by Wednesday. The threat assessment is hers. I don’t ask her to explain it.

Here is what she has decided are not threats:

1. The actual mail truck reversing into our driveway, brakes engaged, two feet from the front door.
2. The fire alarm.
3. The hawk that lives in the cedar tree.
4. The vet.
5. Other cats.

I once tried, lovingly, to reason with her about the rug corner. I lifted the corner. I smoothed it. I weighted it with a coffee table book about Italy. I sat on the floor and said, “Esther. This is the same rug. The rug has not changed.”

She looked at me with the patience of a saint who has heard this argument before, walked around the rug at a wide cautious arc, and resumed her business.

She is not afraid. She is making a point.

A cat does not fear an object the way you fear an object. A cat decides that an object is no longer welcome in the social contract she has drafted, and then she behaves accordingly.

The folded rug corner has, in some specific way that she cannot articulate to me, betrayed her trust. The cardboard tube did something. The plastic bag was, at the time, suspicious.

The vet, by contrast, has earned her respect. The vet is allowed.

The magistrate in your living room

If you have a cat like this — and I suspect you do — please understand that you are not in a household with a small skittish animal.

You are in a household with a small magistrate.

The magistrate is, at all times, drafting and revising the list of things that have personally offended her this week. The list is not arbitrary. The list is not anxious. The list is judicial. She has reviewed the evidence — the way the rug folded, the sound the cardboard tube made when it rolled, the angle of the plastic bag against the chair — and she has rendered a verdict.

The verdict, for now, is: Banned.

It will be revised on Wednesday. Possibly.

An honor I did not know I was eligible for

The things she has NOT banned, you should know, are the things she has affirmatively approved. Her chair. Her side of the bed. The corner of the desk where I write. The specific square of sunlight that lands on the kitchen tile between 2:42 and 4:11 in the afternoon.

And me, somehow, most of the time.

It is the highest honor of my life to be on the side of the list that is not on the list.

Tell me one ridiculous thing yours has banned this week. I will read every reply. 🐾