It’s a post I saw on Facebook so it must be true!! 
A cat that resides at a place of employment (like a warehouse or something), spots a mouse on one of the security monitors. Cat then proceeds to go to the corresponding room and catches the mouse.
In the post, it shows a picture of the cat looking at the monitor, and it also shows a picture of the mouse in the cats mouth.
So… does this sound plausible to you?
I SO want to believe this story. Lol
Cats usually don’t pass the mirror test, so I’m more than a little skeptical about the cat correctly interpreting the image on the security monitor.
Whenever any of my cats have seen something on a TV screen or computer monitor, they have tried to bat the screen itself. They don’t seem to understand that it’s an image. They have even tried to follow race cars across the screen, and look visibly confused when the car doesn’t pop out the side of the TV and keep going.
It’s a cute story. And to be fair, I think that it is possible that the cat sat and watched the monitor, and then the cat may have left the room and caught the mouse. I just don’t believe the cause and effect part of the story. If the cat left the room and caught the mouse, it was just because it left the room and went hunting, and had nothing to do with what it saw on the monitor.
I agree that engineer_comp_geek’s explanation is the far more likely one.
I could maybe imagine a case where the cat would actually follow the monitor image to the mouse, and it goes something like:
That’s well within the bounds of cats’ ability to learn from repeated stimuli. The cat doesn’t have to understand the concept of a camera to make the connection between “food in the box” and “food in the room”.
Color me deeply skeptical. Cats aren’t especially bright. Case in point: my cats love peanut butter. What I do is take some on my fingertip and smear it on their fur, which they then lick off. This isn’t annoying them, because they come running to me when they hear the lid screwing off. However, wherever I put it, they have to sniff themselves all over before they find it: if none of them are ever smart enough to eventually understand that the peanut butter is where I just touched them then there is no way that they would be able to comprehend security cameras. (Put a bit on the top of their nose and they will search the room before eventually finding it.)
That sounds like a line of sight thing as opposed to intelligence. I remember reading cats have a blind spot that’s right in front of their face (or something like that hence the whiskers).
I used to have a dog that would watch animals on the tv, and if they ran off the screen, she’d look for them behind the tv. But the cat in the OP is hard to believe.
Totally impossible.
Cats do not have the abstract reasoning capability to do this. Very, very few animals could; I’m not even sure a gorilla could do this, but I am certain a cat cannot. The smartest cat in the world can’t do this. Well, as e_c_g points out, it is possible the cat saw a mouse on a security camera, and coincidentally subsquently apprehended a mouse, but those two events were absolutely not a cause and effect thing.
Having said that, even the coincidence explanation is unlikely; this story is probably entirely fictional. I’ve seen a lot of security cameras in a lot of factories and warehouses and workplaces, and they’re all set high up and scan a large amount of space from a distance. A mouse would barely be large enough to be visible on a security camera and the resolution would be unlikely to be good enough to allow even a cat to tell what it was even if it could be seen at all.
I don’t believe that any animal has that type of reasoning ability, let alone a cat.