As a parent, it’s important to model good behaviors for kids, otherwise they’ll end up imitating you in ways you’d prefer them not to. Always need a beer after a long day at work? Expect junior to gravitate towards hops. Raise your voice at the slightest inconvenience? You’re going to have one indignant tot on your hands. Lick the icing off your Pop-Tart before sinking your teeth into the pastry? Your kid’s probably going to be a serial killer.
What no one tells you is that your furbabies are just as capable of imitating you as your human children, but since animals aren’t particularly wired for human nonsense (they have their own nonsense), you have to give their efforts a bit of grace.
TikTok‘s @chripotle, as you can see above, still has some learning to do in this department. It’s clear that Chris’ cat Bubba has picked up on more than a few of Chris’ habits (more on that in a moment), so now all Chris has to do is reel himself in so that Bubba can feel more included. For the moment though, Chris is beating Bubba to the punch on scaring each other, thanks to the latter’s reaction time.
But there’s no question that Bubba is his father’s son, because despite the vocal differences between man and cat, the feline manages to squeak out a noise that sounds exactly like the one Chris made moments ago, confidently strutting off after the fact like a proud toddler might.
Now for the twist. It’s far more likely that it was Chris who picked up this habit from Bubba rather than the other way around. All that sneaking around that Bubba does is part of a cat’s hunting process which, for domestic cats, is like entertainment for them. According to Purina UK, even though hunting isn’t necessary for house cats given the supply of cat food that they hopefully have access to, their hunting instincts are still hard-wired in their brains, and so even though they don’t need to go and kill anything, they still get an endorphin hit from killing a mouse or a bird.
So all that’s left to do now is hope that Chris doesn’t end up picking up additional behaviors from Bubba in this vein. We all know the pipeline: first you start scaring each other, then Chris starts hunting small animals, then he actually starts killing small animals, and then he licks the frosting off his Pop-Tart, so to speak.