Does this make my cat smart or stupid?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Or does this mean he thinks I’m an idiot?

Plunkette (or Plunky McPunkerston) likes to hang out in the bathtub. When told to get out of the tub, he very sneakily creeps behind the shower curtain. While I watch. He also likes to chew on blankets. When admonished he’ll slowly turn around, stick his head under the blanket and continue chewing.

This usually leads to me yelling, “I know you’re still in the tub/chewing the blanket! Do you think I’m stupid!”

He also has this trick where he stands around waiting for me to pour his food into his bowl and then butts the bottom of the box with his head so that the food comes rushing out, overflowing his bowl.

This usually leads to me yelling, “Look what you’ve done you stupid cat! There’s cat food all over the floor now.”

Today I watched him eat the food off the floor and the thought hit me— “Jesus Christmas! I’m the stupid one!”

So waddaya’ll think? Did Plunkette read Piaget and come to the conclusion that my sense of object permanence is impaired. He can’t be that smart. When his tail gets wet and he flicks it, he still spins around to see who threw water at his head.

2

Cats are one of life’s funniest mysteries. I suspect that there are varying levels of intelligence – mainly because I had two cats that were really dumb. The one I have now is too smart. She pees over the bathtub drain. Yikes!

I do think it’s interesting that your cat has the concept of hiding what he is doing from you. That seems pretty advanced to me.

3

My understanding was that cats are in a separate category all by themselves, one in which conventional labels such as “Smart” and “Stupid” don’t apply.

4

Cats aren’t smart, but they are very cunning.

5

Buffy likes to bat the kibbles out of her dish onto the floor (she eats on the dining room table), and then jumps down, grabs them and eats them.

All of our cats are very smart, but we call Misty our Idiot Savant, because she tends to be an airhead sometimes.

6

One of my cats, Conan, is very intelligent. Conan is the one who likes peas, and I wonder if this might have something to do with it. When Schrodinger, who is dumber than a box of rocks, was having trouble grokking the concept of the pet door (he’d stand on his hind legs with his paws on the clear plastic above the pet door and meow to be let back in once he was done being on the balcony), Conan came to his rescue by going halfway through the door and holding it open for him.

Before we got Schrodinger, Conan appointed himself Custodian of All Stuffed Animals, or at least the ones small enough for him to carry off. Once we got Schro, the stuffed animal theft stopped- he had a live toy to play with.

Schrodinger doesn’t really do much. If mom or I is reading the paper, Schrodinger wil lay on it. Specifically, he will lie on the section not being read. He can’t quite grok the idea that the purpose of lying on the newspaper is to prevent the human frm reading it, and get said human to pay attention to him instead.

Now there’s Thunder. A few weeks after we brought Thunder home, Schrodinger stopped doing things like move and eat. We thought maybe he had picked up a bug or something after a recent trip to the vet. So, I called the vet, told the story, and the vet said Schrodinger was probably depressed, feeling left out because Thunder was getting all the attention. So, mom and I went out of our way to give him extra hugs and cuddles, and after a few days, he was fine. Conan’s solution to the attention problem was to demand more attention. Specifically from me. Thunder is “Mom’s kitty”- I think he’s more tightly bonded to her because she rescued him. Conan decided to become “my kitty”. We can’t understand why, if Schro was suffering from a lack of attention, he didn’t just demand it, jump on a lap and purr, meow at someone, something. Instead, he just sat around and moped.

A couple of weeks ago, Mom was talking about possibly giving away one of the cats :open_mouth: to a lady she knew whose husband had left her and was lonely. I objected, of course. I love all the kittys. We decided that Schrodinger would be the best candidate, because he’s a lot more mellow than the other two, and gets along with different people. Also, he seems to be the least bonded to us- he seldom jumps up into an available lap, doesn’t follow us around the apartment while we get ready for work (until one of us goes into the kitchen), etc. Well, dumb as Schrodinger is, he must have picked up on the vibe, because he suddenly started paying attention to us, following us around, getting into bed with one or the other of us (he usually sleeps on the living room couch) and generally making with the rubbing and the purring.

Thunder, well, he’s a character. When he’s begging for food, he will meow most demandingly, and if that doesn’t work, he tries cuteness. He will roll over on his back, simultanteously scooting over to rub against a human foot, and put his sweet face on.
He’s also a theif. He’s not too particular about what he steals. Conan would steal food and toys (he still nabs small objects and runs with them if we make them interesting by, oh, using them…).
Thunder steals grocery receipts, jewelry, cat brushes, money (?), empty snack bags, once he carried off a package of sanitary napkins he swiped from my bathroom. What he wanted those for, I’ll never know, and really don’t want to.

Are cats smart? Dumb? Clever?

Hell, I don’t know. They’re cats.