Stocking-gate........

Cats have an extraordinary sense of smell! Ours can smell a chicken cooking a mile away. Certainly Jonesy could smell it even from the caravan park (see earlier blog post), and would race back home before we could even start the electric carving knife. On that note.....cats have extraordinary hearing too, lol. The whizz of the carving knife starting up has always been the cue for our cats to storm into the kitchen, and seat them selves impatiently right under my husbands feet as he strived to hack a joint apart. I suppose association could factor in the sense of smell, but it seemed to us that our cats were pretty sneaky where food was concerned...and Ripley and Peanut still are!
As humans go, I imagine our cats have always thought we are pretty dense. Why do I say that? Because we try in vain to hide the fact we have food, cat crunchies, cat treats and even cat Christmas stockings from them. Every year I ask my husband if we should buy a cat Christmas stocking, and every year he says an emphatic no! It's all, no doubt, because of 'stocking gate' which ran for two Christmases.
In our wisdom, when we were relatively new cat owners, one Christmas we decided to buy a great cat Christmas stocking and wrap it, and hide it under the tree. Silly us!! Arriving back from work one day shortly after, we found some of the wrapping paper strewn around the tree. The cat Christmas stocking appeared to be okay so I gamely re-wrapped it. Oh how daft. The very next day we came home to a totally dismantled present, with cat treats missing from the bag, and cat nip toys dotted across the lounge! All the cats were snoozing around the house...indeed Jonesy was under the tree. How could we tell who had been 'naughty cat'? Ripley was (still is) champion paper shredder, Jonesy had the sense of smell that would spot food miles away, and Peanut usually sat there egging the other two on! I will admit they did not get any more treats that Christmas.
The following year we tried again. You can tell by that statement that the important word is 'tried'!! This time I took the drastic action of hiding the stocking in the wardrobe. Of-course I forgot it was in there, like you do? I even totally ignored the fact all three cats would go off into the wardrobe if I left the door open. After all, if I caught them in there I would shout and flap my hands, until they manoeuvred themselves out of whichever shoe/bag/rubbish they had been hiding under.I never thought, in a million years, that one of them had managed to chew open the cat Christmas stocking again...and eat all the treats! In fact it was Christmas eve when my husband went to fetch it, cleverly hidden as we thought, to place it under the tree. Oh woe is us, for the stocking was ripped to shreds and the toys were over the wardrobe floor and the treats were gone. Which cat had done the deed? To this day we have no idea. Cat nip sends the cats into ecstasy, and then sleep mode....nothing unusual for all the cats at some point in the day. We were oblivious to the sneaky cats! Have we bought a cat Christmas stocking this year? No, lol.............