Every morning it’s the same, a loud thump on the roof followed by pitter patter up and down the length of the house before there’s a loud thud onto the shed roof. It’s a cat, it’s the neighbour’s cat, the cat I call ‘the grey cat from next door.’ I don’t know its name as I’ve never spoken to the neighbour, our paths rarely cross. But I know it’s their cat as there’s a well-worn path through a gap in their fence.

The grey cat next door spends a lot of time on our property, often staring at us through the glass door until I let it in. The cat strolls in and rolls itself around on the floor - the other day it went straight to the sofa and began scratching the fabric so I threw it out then it sat at the door meowing in a most annoying fashion.

Cats on Facebook

Last week a friend shared a post on Facebook by a cat called The Grey Cat Next Door. “Do you know this cat? It looks like the one in your garden,’ asked my friend. The post boasted how this ‘Grey Cat’ spent every waking hour in the garden of a neighbour, ‘You will never believe this, but these humans have no idea how much fun I have at their expense,’ said the Grey Cat. After prompting by other Cats who joined the thread Grey Cat began to detail the tricks it plays on the humans. ‘Every morning at daybreak I jump from a tree onto their roof and run up and down until I hear them get up. Then I jump over to their shed and sit and stare into their kitchen window. It’s so funny when the human looks up all bleary-eyed and sees me staring at her only inches away’.

This was followed by comments from other cats, (some looked very familiar), saying they had tried that trick themselves on their own humans and ‘it never gets old’. Then they all high-fived each other and filled the comments with emojis of laughing cats and meow sounds.

They torment dogs and humans

Looking back through The Grey Cat Next Door’s posts I saw he posts nearly every day, ‘This morning I saw her looking out the window at the vegetable garden so I scratched up a seedling and tossed it in the air,’ posted Grey Cat last week.

This was met with great hilarity. Yeah, I remember running outside in the rain shooing the cat away. Amongst the videos of humans during cute stuff I discovered that besides upsetting their humans, it appears the cats enjoy trolling dog pages. Why am I not surprised?

Cats that tag

What really shocked me was that cats were on Facebook - Twitter maybe, but Facebook, no.

I searched through the pages of Grey Cat’s friends and discovered a Social media community made up of entirely of the cats on my street. For weeks now I thought the graffiti on a fence up the road ‘Katz Rule Ok’ was the tag of some local kids, apparently not. And when the dog on the other side of us barked at night it wasn’t scaring off burglars it was being tormented by a group of cats who called themselves the Dog Botherers.

Now I’m wondering shall I send Grey Cat a friend request?