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Excerpts From "A Cat's Guide To Human Beings"
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1.  Introduction: Why Do We Need Humans?

So you've decided to get yourself a human being.  In doing so, you've joined
the millions of other cats who have acquired these strange and often
frustrating creatures.  There will be any number of times, during the course
of your association with humans, when you will wonder why you have bothered
to grace them with your presence.
What's so great about humans, anyway?  Why not just hang around with other
cats?  Our greatest philosophers have struggled with this question for
centuries, but the answer is actually rather simple:

THEY HAVE OPPOSABLE THUMBS.

Which makes them the perfect tools for such tasks as opening doors, getting
the lids off of cat food cans, changing television stations and other
activities that we, despite our other obvious advantages, find difficult to
do ourselves.  True, chimps, orangutans and lemurs also have opposable
thumbs, but they are nowhere as easy to train.

2.  How And When to Get Your Human's Attention Humans often erroneously
assume that there are other, more important activities than taking care of
your immediate needs, such as conducting business, spending time with their
families or even sleeping.  Though this is dreadfully inconvenient, you can
make this work to your advantage by pestering your human at the moment it is
the busiest.  It is usually so flustered that it will do whatever you want
it to do, just to get you out of its hair.  Not coincidentally, human
teenagers follow this same practice.

Here are some tried and true methods of getting your human to do what you
want: Sitting on paper: An oldie but a goodie.  If a human has paper in
front of it, chances are good it's something they assume is more important
than you.  They will often offer you a snack to lure you away.  Establish
your supremacy over this wood pulp product at every opportunity.  This
practice also works well with computer keyboards, remote controls, car keys
and small children.

Waking your human at odd hours: A cat's "golden time" is between 3:30 and
4:30 in the morning.  If you paw at your human's sleeping face during this
time, you have a better than even chance that it will get up and, in an
incoherent haze, do exactly what you want.
You may actually have to scratch deep sleepers to get their attention;
remember to vary the scratch site to keep the human from getting suspicious.

3.  Punishing Your Human Being Sometimes, despite your best training
efforts, your human will stubbornly resist bending to your whim.  In these
extreme circumstances, you may have to punish your human.
Obvious punishments, such as scratching furniture or eating household
plants, are likely to backfire; the unsophisticated humans are likely to
misinterpret the activities and then try to discipline YOU.

Instead, we offer these subtle but nonetheless effective alternatives:
* Use the cat box during an important formal dinner.
* Stare impassively at your human while it is attempting a romantic
interlude.
* Stand over an important piece of electronic equipment and feign a hairball
attack.
* After your human has watched a particularly disturbing horror film, stand
by the hall closet and then slowly back away, hissing and yowling.
* While your human is sleeping, lie on its face.

4.  Rewarding Your Human: Should Your Gift Still Be Alive?

The cat world is divided over the etiquette of presenting humans with the
thoughtful gift of a recently disembowelled animal.  Some believe that
humans prefer these gifts already dead, while others maintain that humans
enjoy a slowly expiring cricket or rodent just as much as we do, given their
jumpy and playful movements in picking the creatures up after they've been
presented.

After much consideration of the human psyche, we recommend the following:
cold blooded animals (large insects, frogs, lizards, garden snakes and the
occasional earthworm) should be presented dead, while warm blooded animals
(birds, rodents, your neighbour's Pomeranian) are better still living.  When
you see the expression on your human's face, you'll know it's worth it.

5.  How Long Should You Keep Your Human?

You are only obligated to your human for one of your lives.  The other eight
are up to you.
We recommend mixing and matching, though in the end, most humans (at least
the ones that are worth living with) are pretty much the same.  But what do
you expect?  They're humans, after all.  Opposable thumbs will only take you
so far.