It’s Winnie the rescue cat’s first Christmas with her adoptive family and they’re learning if they want a tree up in the lounge room, they must be prepared for the mayhem and mischief it inspires in their new feline friend.
“It was such a nice tree,” Kialla’s Jo Clark says, amusingly lamenting the partially destroyed silhouette the iconic festive decoration is now cutting.
Winnie has taken the tree’s installation as an invitation to climb it like a scratching tower.
She darts in and out of the artificial branches, thwacking at the baubles and peering devilishly out at her humans from the leaves she has ruffled.
Winnie was born in October last year before winding up in the pound, where the Clark-Ford family met her on a cat adoption day in February.
They’d just endured a long year in a catless household after their almost 19-year-old Burmese cat Dottie passed.
Winnie was still a kitten then, harbouring the secrets of the wild personality she was going to reveal in the ensuing months.
“She is the weirdest cat I’ve ever had,” Jo said.
For starters, unlike most cats, Winnie loves water.
So much so that she even sticks her little fur-covered head under running taps and climbs into sinks filled with dishwater.
The night before The News met the fluffy black cat, she had joined the family’s teenage daughter Jorja Ford in the bath.
“I should’ve shut the door so she couldn’t get in,” Jorja said with a laugh.
Winnie reportedly doesn’t like closed doors though.
“She won’t come into the bedrooms and sleep on any beds, but she hates doors being closed,” Jo said.
“She just likes to know what’s going on.
“And she dumps all her toys at Jai’s (the family’s son’s) door through the night.”
The domestic medium-hair is not a cuddly cat — yet.
Although, she does love kids and prefers them to adults, often following Jai and his friends around when they’re visiting.
She runs around the house, skids on the floor and plays hide-and-seek in what the family describes as a puppy-like manner.
“She also eats everything; she thinks she’s a dog or a human,” Jo said.
“If you leave food out, you have to cover it.”
The behaviour stumps the cat-familiar crew, as Winnie began life in the pound among other cats, with no dogs to model animalistic behaviour to her.
Despite the identity crisis, Winnie does exhibit plenty of typical cat behaviour.
The inside cat sleeps with her head on window sills, watching anything that moves beyond the pane of glass.
She reclines back in funny positions, showing off the only white patch in her fur, which Jo says looks suspiciously like a pair of bikini bottoms.
She drinks from her paw and then decides it’s pretty fun scooping water, so flicks it all around the room.
She intensely watches the washing swirl from the top of the machine, treading on its sensitive buttons, often sending the program off course.
“I thought the machine was broken because it just kept stopping or making funny noises,” Jo said.
“Until I worked out it was Winnie reprogramming it with her paws.”
Jo said she had a feeling the crazy cat might present a problem come Christmas time.
“When we went to put the tree up, I just knew she’d be a terrorist,” she said.
Looking a little worse for wear, it’s unlikely the tree will live to see another Christmas.
But if Winnie can minimise her mad mischief, she’ll hopefully see as many as Christmases as her long-living predecessor Dottie did, possibly breaking a Christmas tree-destroying record along the way.