 Purred: Sat May 8, '10 7:20am PST |
 | |  | | I think you all confuse temperament with gender sometimes.
I have one of each, and yes, the boy (Boris) is a lot more rambunctious, even now that he's nearly 4. In contrast, Gracie is a lot more sedate (most of the time), or at the very least when they play it's usually always Boris that starts the game.
But being a girl does not necessarily make a girl less destructive. Since Boris moved in with us over 3 years ago, the most he has destroyed is a few rolls of TP, and maybe a couple of blinds. All and all, he'll run around like a mad man and climb just about any surface (when we had a refrigerator that stuck out from the rest of the furniture, it was very likely he'd be lying in wait on top of it to surprise passerbys  ), but he's hardly destroyed anything.
Gracie on the other hand is a holy terror when it comes to destruction. As a kitten she'd dig up plants (not mine, we were staying in a furnished apartment) and climb on walls (walls!) with her claws. She's also chewed and destroyed several laptop cables, one iPod car adapter, and one iPhone charger in her short 2 years of life. She's also the reason why most fabric toys in our home are now "banned" and our cats can't wear collars (not that any we tried on her stayed on to begin with), because collars have to be killed and ingested to boot. If, like any conscientious cat owner you try to take stuff she's chewing away, she will swipe at you and totally go for blood (and yes, we take the "toy" away regardless, because the danger to her if ingested always outweighs the danger to our limbs most of the time).
Also destroyed: 2 box springs just because she thinks they should be nests from which she can plot further evil, several shoe laces, one of the couch legs clawed to near bits despite having a sturdy cat tree right next to it. No amounts of training has worked to dissuade her from her acts of destruction. Even with redirective noise, she'll look up with dilated eyes for a second as if to say "hey, what's that?", she'll be offered an acceptable toy, and then her eyes go back to normal and she goes right back to work. Compare that with our other kitty, where all you need is aversive noises, and you can guarantee he'll stop dead in his tracks and change his activity (very useful when he likes to beat up on Gracie as play). And now that we've finally wised up and gotten cable protectors for our electronics, she chews on those too. I don't doubt that she is just determined to achieve victory, even if she has to gnaw for it for a good long time. 
Don't get me wrong. We love both our cats to bits, and we'd never rehome them for any reason (the husband and I even discussed scenarios where a kid of ours is allergic, and agreed we'd still would try every workaround possible, or get one of the grandmas to keep the cats safe and comfy in their home until kid could be safely medicated). That said, we've just come to accept that our girlie cat is a sweet, cuddly and purry lemur 95% of the time, and a little demon the remaining 5%, and that the price of having her grace our lives with her presence is to have to put up with that 5% that's just her being a temperamental cyclone of destruction (when she's in a destroying mode, she'll usually destroy more than one object). 
That long digression just to say that it's not gender that causes every difference, sometimes temperament plays a big part. Boris might be alpha kitty in our home (for now), but we have it on good authority that he was a very timid kitten when living with other foster cats in his foster home. Gracie OTOH came to us very young, and was clearly the alpha kitten of her litter (loudest, most outgoing kitten ever). I think those personality-related differences have a bigger impact on their amenability to be a "good kitty" when the humans demand it than their gender does. |  |  | |  |
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