She ascribes a whole emotional spectrum to an animal that, though very temper prone, has a very limited range of feelings. In fact, I’ll just say it. CATS HAVE ONE EMOTION AND THAT IS MURDER.

Hoisted high
A cat in a good mood will always be looking to pick a fight, so when you see a tail set confidently a-high like the mast of a pirate ship filled with similarly minded killers, BE CAREFUL. Do not stare directly at your cat, keep your face out of murder-reach, and above all carry a gun and a flashlight. Semi automatic is recommended because cats are fast and most know some form of Jeet Kune Do, but what’s worse, cats travel using the shadows themselves as a medium. They can pounce at you from any source of darkness, but a well timed burst from a flashlight can dissolve that cat back into the in-between place they originally came from.  They will of course return, and probably in numbers, but this will give you the precious 5-10 seconds you’ll need to leave your house (forever–you must never return) and move to sun drenched Arizona, which, no surprise, has the lowest cat to owner murder ratio in the country.

Question mark
A tail that’s shaped like a question mark is the cat’s way of letting you know it’s thinking deeply about how best to (most painfully) kill you. Know this: Whichever path to your doom it chooses, the last thing all cats go for is your eyes. They want you alive to watch as they rip into your chest and pull out first one lung then the other, and finally pull your liver, heart and other vitals which they will then curse using their cat magic (resulting in your soul being forced to walk the earth and serve your cat overlords until they finally perish after the usual 10,000 years that most cats live) and then urinate on using their cat bladders. This would be a good time to engage in last will and testament writing, prayer, or, though it seldom works, petitioning the King of the Cats Mordecai Clawvidaniya.

Flying low
You gonna die, son.

Tucked away
This means that your cat has sharpened its tail and wants to test out the effectiveness of it by stabbing your face through one eyeball, letting the tail come out the backside of your head, curving around then piercing back into your skull and out your face through the other eyeball. With both eyeballs skewered onto his tail like a scleral shishkabob, your cat will jauntily flick them off and into the air and out the nearest window where one of its crow servants will snatch them mid-throw and deliver them to your cat’s secret pile of eyeballs, which all cats have but which no one has ever seen–for obvious reasons. We only know they exist thanks to a few traitorous crows who reneged on their allegiance to their cat masters in exchange for diplomatic immunity and the right to eat any and all elderly people once Medicare and Medicaid are dissolved. Since that would leave our nation with a surplus of peoples, the U.S. government has agreed that the crows would at that point be providing a valuable public service.

Puffed up
Your cat is chilly and intends to tear your insides out and sleep in your guts until it feels warm again.

Whipping
A tail that whips back and forth indicates that your cat is hungry for baby breath–their main source of sustenance. If you have any children, now would be a good time to have social services assign an assistant to him or her since after having its breath aka life force stolen your child will remain a vacant-eyed humunculoid until such time as your cat deigns to end the farce, remove those vacant eyes, and relieve your family of the burden of pretending to care about your now spiritless meat mannequin.

Swishing
A tail that swishes from side to side is referred to as “The Horizontal Guillotine” by those in the cat-know. Your cat is telling you that though it’s too tired to do it now, soon enough it will come for you and that there is nothing you can do to stop it. And it’s right. You can’t. So just stop thinking about what you can do to survive right now and get used to the idea that you will soon be dead, probably eyeless, and just one more manufactured statistic by the police who refuse to believe that most ritual style serial killings are not done by humans but by seemingly friendly felines, a fact about which I have written many letters to them!

Twitching
As the old rhyme teaches us: Twitching tail, holy fuck you’re about to die RUN RUN RUN!!!

Cat-to-cat
A tail wrapped around another cat is how cats share race memories. When one cat does this to another, it is a signal that he is ready to pass back into the nightmare realm and forever leave behind the corporeal extension into our dimensional which we know as cats. Once the exchange is complete, one cat will simply vanish as its consciousness returns to its unknowable source, while the other will gain all the wisdom and knowledge of the millions of cats that came before it. Then it will probably lick itself for a while. Then kill you.

Well I hope this guide to cat tail signals was as informative as it was terrifying. Remember, never ever get a cat, but if you do decide you want one (to end your life), please adopt. No really. I mean that part. And the part about how Melissa’s article was actually really informative and how I hope she and care2.com know I’m just joking which I just said right now. Please don’t start a campaign against me, Care2. I don’t think I can take it right now. Maybe in the fall. I’m usually in a better mood then.

Also, seriously, visit the ASPCA and donate money or time, or just take home a fuzzy adoptee.

2 Responses to “What Cats REALLY MEAN When They Signal With Their Tails”

1. Joseph Scott says:

   July 22, 2011 at 11:57 am

   I laughed so hard at this! So much so in fact that I copied it and sent it to all my friends as if I had written it.
2. sean says:

   July 26, 2011 at 12:15 pm

   Well we’ll consider that a WIN regardless.