A story of the enlightenment of a cat

Here is a story I must share about one of the cats that lives in our house. And his enlightenment or dare I say the discovery of what I call “The Roger Principle-cat food in bowls/cat food on the floor, are they the same?” The particapants of the story:

Roger (aka:the monkey dog) a Russian blue type of cat with no tail, very stocky, looks like a monkey dog. Not the brightest animal in the world. My roomates cat.

Frank a grey any white cat, looks like an ordinary cat but is a really smart cat. My cat. It should be noted our house is a low-tech black and white cat house, one day I hope to afford a Hi-res color cat with 2 million colors all in orange.

The situation: It’s one hour after I fed the cats, yet they are hungry again. I keep the cat food under the sink so they can’t get to it. Frank has been studying the placement of the cat food and has figured why he can’t get to the cat food. There is a door.

Frank tries opening the door…“YAY! It works!” Proceeds to dump the bag of cat food on the floor. I hear this run down the stairs and I see Frank shoving food in his face ala- Garfield style. Roger hearing this runs into the kitchen and sees Frank eating and me standing there. It should be noted that as a guy I decide to just put the bag of cat food up on a shelf that the cats can’t get to (I hope) and I decide to let the cats clean up the mess.

The discovery: When Roger runs in and observes Frank eating, and me standing there with a bag of cat food, he comes to the conclusion.

“AHA it’s feeding time again let me check my bowl.”

                                                     Roger walks across the pile of cat food past Frank trying to put as much food in his mouth as possible, and checks his bowl.

“What?!!? there is no food in the bowl let me ask the feeding god.”

Roger looks up at me and says “Meee…”

Getting no response from the feeding god except laughter he has another idea.

“If Frank is eating there must be food in his bowl, let me check out his bowl.”

Roger walks back across the food, past Frank who is now trying not to laugh and eat at the same time, and checks out Franks bowl which much to his surprise and dismay is empty.

To the food god “Meee…Meeee”

Roger in deep thought (ankle depth for him) walks across the food to his bowl and starts pondering. You can actually see the one gear in his head slowly turning.

“Frank is eating…there is no food in his bowl…the food god has food in his hand…I’m not eating…there is no food in my bowl…hold on, hold on…I walked on food…it’s on the floor…can I eat it?”

Roger paws a single piece of food towards him siffs it, eats it.

:slight_smile: :slight_smile: !!! “IT’S FOOD, WONDERFUL FOOD! I CAN EAT IT!! WHOO HOO!” Turns into an eating machine, Frank stops eating wanders off letting Roger enjoy his discovery “The Roger Principle”

My female cat, Annie, feels that food on the floor is much better than food in the bowl. She therefore proceeds to pick out one piece at a time, flick it on the floor and THEN eat it.

Freak.

Hehehe! That’s hilarious. Thank you Briminator for such a good laugh. :slight_smile:

My cat lies down to eat. Of course, it also weighs 35lbs. so…

I loved it when my other cat Spaaz discorvered the mirror, and got into a huge fight with the cat on the other side. :slight_smile:

I actually have an inverted tupperware lid under my cats bowls since they seem to relish pawing at the bowls on occasion. Not to eat, no, they eat from the bowl, properly. They just like to paw at their food (and water) bowls every once in a while. Crazies.

Great story, Briminator!

Our oldest cat, Marble, will rip open a new bag of cat food when we bring it home and happily chow right from the bag as long as it lasts. If she can’t manage to tear a large enough hole, she will simply reach in and pull out one piece at a time and eat it.

Your cats eat food from bowls on the floor???

This is amazing. My cat only likes to eat things that are on my plate. When he needed worm medicine-disguised-as-cat-treats, I had to put it on a plate and pretend to eat from it. Then I had to invent an elaborate charade, in which I would suddenly notice something outside of the window that was completely engrossing and turn my back on my plate, so that he could have the satisfaction of stealing “my” food.

The bowl full of food that we foolishly keep on the floor only has one purpose – so that we accidently kick it over when we are running to answer the phone, causing much feline merriment.

pl, Annie likes to do the “rip open the new bag” thing too. It presents a challenge to her, I guess. I let her play with it for a little while as long as she’s not making too much of a mess.

My former cat Simon (by former cat I mean he’s now dead, not that he’s metamorphosed into some other creature) used to always rip a hole in any new bag. It wasn’t hunger; it was a self-sufficiency. I adopted him after a hard, awful life on the streets, including his being hit by a car, having his diaphragm torn and half his intestines migrating into his chest cavity and that being untreated for months. That cat was an utter survivor.

He liked his new “soft life” but I always took the catfood-hole thing to be his way of asserting that he could still get his own food, thank you very much. If needed.

Loved the story, Brim.

And then there was my Mom’s cat, George, a cranky old Himalayan-Siamese mix. He got breakfast in bed. Literally. He slept at the head of her side of the bed, and she’d bring in his dish and lay it on the bed so he could eat it without having to move.

May I add, she never treated the family quite that well!

Some hilarious stuff here. Thanks all. I have childproof locks on EVERY cupboard in my house because on one little girl named Tiki. She will eat anything, We can’t leave out a tomato, cabbage, cantaloupe, brewers yeast, or even raw lima or garbanzo beans. Guests coming to our house can never get into a shelf to find anything. Good thingk I like her. Actually, I guess we are the ones who got enlightened.

Great story, Brim.

I’ve got a cat that’s not so much stupid as stubborn. Boojum is definitely bright enough to open doors, turn on faucets, and recognize key words and phrases.

One of those words is “no,” but when you use it, it doesn’t deter him from whatever he shouldn’t be doing. It just pisses him off. Just say NO to him, for no reason at all, and his tail will start whipping about. He was a very aggressive cat in his youth, and if I hadn’t fixed him as soon as he hit puberty, he would have been completely unmanageable (instead of just mostly unmanageable).

Honestly, I had to resort to dominating this cat in order to keep him in line. The vet advised this. How? Cold showers. It was amazing - I’d hang him by the scruff of his neck under a cold shower until he was soaked, and then leave him in the bathroom with a pile of warm towels. This would change him from an aggressive hand- and foot-biting wild thing into an affectionate housecat… for a week or so.

Fortunately, by the age of three, he had calmed down enough and accepted his position as number 2 in the household. (His 10th birthday is sometime in September.) Even lady bug is number three. But since she spoils him, there’s no conflict.

As for Boojum and food, I have fed him the exact same food his entire life, since switching from kitten to adult food. It’s great - he almost never begs for table scraps (unless you bring home smoked fish), and he’s never picky about eating. I put down several days’ worth at a time, and have even left him on his own for 10 days with a huge bowl of food, and there was some left when I got back. (He’s got a cat door and can go in and out at will, and gets plenty of exercise.)

One of his odd food habits is that when he gets a fresh bowl of food, he must cover it with something. If I don’t put down a throw rug or a plastic grocery sack, he will scratch and scratch and scratch at the kitchen tiles forever…

There’s plenty more stories about Boojum, but I’ll save 'em.

My cat also will paw a piece of food out onto the floor before eating it, unless he’s really hungry, in which case he just sticks his head into the bowl and starts eating.

One thing he does that I’ve never seen is grunting while he eats. I think it’s because he’s trying to purr but it doesn’t all coordinate. It’s really funny. He LOVES food.

Great story, Brim. We, also, have a very stupid cat. I can’t mention her in front of our friends without one, who kittysat for us once, shaking his head and saying, “Man, that is one dumb cat.”

For all four years of her life, the bag of catfood has been in the exact same place. 20 lbs. of Purina Kitty Chow. Leaning against the dryer. Open.

Twice a day, for four years, the cat has whined for food, watched us walk over to the open bag of cat food, scoop out her portion, and dump it into her food dish.

It has never once occured to her that she might find food inside that bag.

My cats will rip open a new bag of food if left out. They will then eat directly from the bag. Whatever hits the floor will not be eaten. If I scoop it up and put it in a bowl, fine, but from the floor? No way. One of my cats, Cherokee, will not eat if he can see the bottom of the bowl. His bowl HAS to be full. All my cats prefer to drink from the bathroom sink and only use their water bowl to play in or tip over. And yet I keep refilling it. I wonder who’s the dumb one here?

One time, my cats knocked over a bag full of cat litter. They peed on the stuff that had spilled out.

One of my cats was spoiled as kitten since I lived in an apartment with a leaky tub faucet. She now refuses to drink anywhere but in the tub. It finally dawned on me to put a bowl in the tub and she is now quite happy, even though it was the same bowl I had so often tried to get her to drink from in the kitchen. All I have to do is remember to refill the bowl everytime I take a shower. I’d say she now has me trained pretty well since I never forget to fill it (Spot [sub]no, dammit, it’s not a ST:TNG reference; she has a f*cking big spot on her back![/sub] sitting on the edge of the tub meowing at me while I’m in the shower is a pretty good reminder).

LOL! Thanks for that great story, Brim. I have to keep all of my cat’s food locked away in cabinets and containers because of one of my cats. She had been known to eat holes through bags and knock the trashcan over in order to get at something.

God, so many stories. One of my cats has to “drown” her toys before she plays with them. Little furry mice that we buy her always seem to end up in the sink/toilet/water bowl/your glass of tea. She walks around with them and looks around, then plop! There they go. Into the toilet.

Another one, Rissa, will climb into the cabinets and then get stuck. In her constant quest for food she’ll slip past my peripheral vision and into the back of the cabinet, and stays in there when I close the door. I learned this when I was getting food for the dog, shut the door, and then heard a curious thumping. Thump. Thump. Thhhhump. She would paw at the door, expecting it to open like the bedroom doors, but because the hinges on the kitchen doors have springs in them, it just kept coming back and smacking her in the nose. But she kept doing it.

This is the same cat who will pick food off your plate. We have to apologize to company because this feline specimen has NO MODESTY whatsoever. She’ll climb up on your lap, look around innocently, and then stick her paw on your hand, following it from the plate to the mouth, then back to the plate. Sometimes she gets bold and pulls the food straight from the plate. Or your mouth. No modesty.

First kitten eats dog food. We have to constantly yell at her “You’re a CAT, eat CAT FOOD!”. That just means she stuffs 4 or 5 pieces in her mouth to cart off and eat at her leisure without getting in trouble.

One time, we had a large cardboard box spread out on the coffee table. Rissa was perched on it and decided that she would jump from the table to the couch. (Unfortunately, she isn’t heavy enough to stabilize the carboard box while she jumps.) She crouches. Prepares. Thinks. Ponders. Concludes. I will jump now. Front paws on the edge of the table. Back paws stable on the cardboard. Ready, JUMP!

Cardboard flies out from under her. Hits the wall 6 feet away from the table. Rissa gets just as far as her front paws take her, which is about 6 inches from the table, and she falls…straight…to…the…floor. Ever since then, she will NEVER jump from one object to another without jumping down to the floor first.

So many more. Maybe later.

That was a great story, Briminator. It made me smile.

I love my little feline friend. Not the sharpest knife in the droor, though.
The doors to go into my back yard are sliding glass doors. They’re clear. On my patio there are constantly birds, (doves, sparrows, what have you), that you can see through these doors. My cat loves to chase birds. The only problem is, most of the time, she’s inside, and they’re outside. But oh no, that doesn’t stop her. She’ll get a few feet away from our sliding glass doors, crouch down, and then proceed to run as fast as she can towards the birds outside on the patio, and hits the doors with a loud bang.

This has happened more than once. Quite a few times actually.

ok, posted here before but it got knocked off in the back-up the SDMB servers did … recently.
but basically I said
Briminator, that’s a really cute story and just reinforces the fact that I really love cats. Some day, when I’m old and crazy, I plan on owning lots of cats, because they absolutely never fail to pick me up when I’m feeling low.

My little cat Miss Underfoot is a real lady, crosses her front legs when she sits. And she likes to eat by picking up her little kibbles with her claws and bring it to her mouth to eat. Not all the time but it is cute.

ok, those lost posts were freaking me out!