Cats and vacuums

... Does it ever go right?   Trying to desensitize Mille now by keeping the vacuum in the living room right after vacuuming, but I doubt the results 

I have never been able to do it. If you stand with your back to the cat vacuuming sometimes it delays the escape. I think it's the actual vacuum cleaner rather than the noise because the cats that do hang around in my house while I vacuum with my back to them run once if have to turn around and the is vacuum facing them.

Happily our current home is all tile so the only thing we vacuum now is the furniture. At our old house as soon as the vac was turned on the cats would make a mad dash to hide under the bed. Except for Zuzu who would stalk the vacuum through the house while I did my sweeping. She never actually attacked it, but when you turned it off she would sit down directly in front of it and glare at it until I put it away! Then she would have to walk around sniffing everywhere that thing had been.

All finished wood flooring was one of the selling points when I bought this place.  I have eight who believe that the vacuum cleaner was sent from the devil himself, and two who don't.  Peanut will lie wherever he is, having been nineteen years desensitised to anything which isn't actually edible, but the stupid wonderful Snowshoe will throw herself down directly before you, writhing and flopping back and forth like some demented, furry fish out of water until you kneel down, switch to the upholstery tool and vacuum her - and will then spend the next hour in some prominent place, grooming, as if to say, "you did a lousy job, you know."

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