Travel
What Traveling With Cats Taught Me About Routine
The first time I went away for more than a weekend, I asked a friend to look after the cats.
I showed her where the food was, told her 'roughly twice a day,' demonstrated the litter tray situation, and left.
I came back to three cats who had clearly had an eventful week and a friend who was visibly relieved to see me.
The problem was not that she had done anything wrong. The problem was that I had given her almost no useful information.
Cats do not adapt well to inconsistency
Cats are creatures of routine in a way that is easy to underestimate. They know what time meals happen. They have preferred spots at preferred times of day. They have rituals — the order in which they eat, the post-meal grooming routine, the spot they occupy for morning sun.
A week of inconsistent feeding times, different handling, and a stranger's presence and smell can produce cats that are anxious, off their food, or acting out in ways that have nothing to do with anything the cat sitter did wrong.
Write everything down
I now leave a printed document. It has: exact feeding times, exact portions by cat, which cat eats where, which cat has which quirks, what normal behaviour looks like for each of them, and what to do if something seems off.
This sounds excessive. It is not. A person looking after three cats for a week has never seen Pickles' normal before. They have no baseline. Written instructions give them one.
The difference between my first trip and my second trip, in terms of how settled the cats were when I returned, was significant.
Having a formalised feeding schedule to hand to your cat sitter makes a genuine difference. The cat feeding schedule calculator can help you build one if your current routine is more informal than written-down.
The carrier situation
Cats that are not used to their carrier find it extremely stressful when it appears, because the carrier only appears before something unpleasant.
I leave the carriers out as furniture. They have blankets in them. Mango sleeps in his fairly regularly. When the carriers come out for actual travel, they are familiar rather than alarming.
This took some adjustment on my part because carriers are not aesthetically ideal as home decor. But it has genuinely reduced stress for them and for me.
Coming home
Coming home after a trip is usually met with one of two responses from my cats: intense attention-seeking from the ones who missed me, or pointed indifference from the ones making a point.
Mango is almost always in the second category. He greets me, turns, and walks away, as if to make clear that a week of my absence was noted and will not be forgotten quickly.
Within a day, everything is back to normal. Routine re-establishes itself quickly once you are there to maintain it. The key is getting back to the usual schedule immediately rather than easing back in.