Miz Allie Comments on Sleeping Cats

Now today TGIF I am taking my usual snooze, can you see my eyes??? Maybe if you squint a little....Mommy likes to sneek up on me but I can see her all the time...meow...Have you noticed that we cats spend a lot of quality time snoozing. In fact, we sleep anywhere from 13 to 16 hours per day. In other words, we spend approximately 2/3 of his entire life in dreamland. Ahhh Meow....

We sleep more than almost any other mammal. Realistically, we sleep about twice as much as our mommys and daddys do. Meow.... How much each of us cats sleep depends on our age, hunger, the temperature and the weather. Like you humans, we go through both Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and non-REM sleep.

Although no human can actually ask us that, but humans assume that we dream during REM sleep. Some humans may notice our whiskers twitch or our eyes moving behind our eyelids. The deep non-REM sleep is when our body grows and repairs itself. Meow.....yawn..I am getting tired now...meow...puuurrrr

If we seem lethargic or depressed we may be ill.... mommys and daddys should always call our Vet doctor if we change our habits in sleeping....oh no... We may be sleeping less than usual may have a thyroid problem. Although dogs are more often hypothyroid (meaning they don't have enough thyroid hormone), I knew we were better than that ole Foxy... ....meow....here's some proof...meow....us cats are more likely to be hyperthyroid (meaning they have too much thyroid hormone). Because the we are producing extra thyroid hormone our metabolism goes up, and we sleeps less. Ah try and catch us if you can....meow....

Most of us house cats, do a lot of our sleeping at night. We tend to wake up our mommys and daddys in the middle of the night and they say we are a "nocturnal" kitty....although that's not exactly true...... We are "crepuscular," which means we are most active at dawn and dusk. We like to do our hunting at these times because our prey is usually most active then....yummy...meow...

During the heat of the day, we like to sleep. Although we have good night vision, we can't see in complete darkness, so we tend to sleep then as well. Oh yes I curl up on mommy's pillow every night and push that ole Foxy out of the way....Meow...

If you notice that we are waking you humans up early every morning, we may simply be reacting to our crepuscular nature.Meow....What is that???? Meow....

When the sun comes up, we wakes up. Of course, you also can give us a big kitty reward, meow....for getting you up so early then you don't need that old loud alarm clock.....meow..... If you feed us, yum yum, in the morning, you might want to wait awhile and not jump to feeding us right away, or we might tend to think we need to wake you up so we can eats!! meow.....

The big humans say to not respond to our demansds??? But I think every mommy and daddy needs to listen to our demands closely ...don't you?? meow....and remember that we all need 16 hours a day of beauty-cat-rest...and if we get our days and nights mixed up, then mommy or daddy needs to keep waking us during the day and play with us...meow...meow...

But, sometimes when we are in the wild or feral state, us cats need to spend a good proportion of our time hunting in order to catch enough food. Because we cat hunts alone, it we only have ourselves to rely on to find enough food to survive, so we have to keep going until we are successful. Hunting tends to take place when the natural prey species of the cat (small rodents) are active, which is mostly late in the evening and early in the morning. Because hunting is hard work for us cats, we tend to rest and sleep for much of the rest of the day to conserve energy. It often seems that our cats sleep a lot because they sleep during the day when humans are up! Meow

There are also differences in sleeping habits between individual cats: some of us cats are very inactive and will rest for a large proportion of the day and night. This particularly occurs when our activity patterns are inhibited in some way: for example us indoor cats that do not have an adequately enriched environment may become very inactive. And like me take siestas many times in the daytime. Meow....

Now I need to finish my nap, please...meow....puuurrrr