We recently took in a stray kitten. Her name is Great Whore Jezabel — Jezzie for short. She’s much bigger now, practically full grown but still full of kitten energy. We bought her a toy that she just loves. It’s a bundle of weighted feathers at the end of a cord that is tethered to a plastic stick about 3 feet long. You can drag the feathers across the floor or in the air, and she chases them down until she catches up with them. She gathers the bundle in her mouth and takes it to a certain place where she drops it and stands guard for a while until she’s convinced that they won’t move again.
But here’s the weird thing. Jezzie hears the stick being picked up no matter how quietly you do it, and even if she is in the back bedroom with the door closed. The moment you pick up the toy, no matter where she is, she darts straight to wherever you are and begins chasing the feathers. You can do it as stealthily as possible while she is asleep in a closed room with the TV on, and she will hear the toy and bang against the door until you open it to let her out.
How does Jezzie know her toy is being “activated”? Has anyone else seen anything like this?
Not with a toy, but my cat Max KNOWS when I’ve bought treats for him at the store. Keep in mind that the treats are in a foil wrapper, which are in a plastic bag, and then I generally put that in my tote bag. I can have other things with me as well (other strong-smelling food, etc.) and it doesn’t matter–he’ll still come running and meowing in a very distinctive way.
My mom’s cat Sebastian also somehow knows when it’s a man ringing the doorbell at the house. He’ll do this from rooms of the house where he can’t see the doorstep, so we have no idea how he knows the gender of the person at the front door.
Tasha the Queen Kitty can discern the difference between any old zippie bag being opened and a deli zippie bag full of sliced roast beef being opened, from anywhere in the house. And she’s VERY discriminating. A deli zippie bag full of sliced turkey gets zero response.
I had kind of put it down to her having a good nose for roast beef, until I realized that her response time is way too fast for the aroma to have gotten to her. She ALWAYS makes it to the kitchen, even from the back bedroom, before I have the zippie part fully disengaged.
We have one of those cheap, bullet-shaped laser pointer key chains for playing with our cat. No matter how carefully you pick it up, the chain makes some tiny noise, and she comes a-runnin’.
I have another keychain with a similar chain that fakes her out sometimes. “No, Lou, we’re not going to play Red Dot. I just need the keys for my file cabinet.” Truth be told, she looks so cute I always end up finding the laser pointer to play Red Dot with her anyway.
I had one for the dearly departed TeddyCat. He LOVED it, much like your cat does. Loved it so much that one day while I was out, he destroyed the feathers and managed to eat the string.
Luckily he passed it just fine, but it was a tense couple days of poop-watching to make sure it came through OK. According to the vet, if it didn’t it would have been a miserable and costly surgery.
Hankyspank does **Hanky of the Jungle ** each night at bedtime. He waltzes from room to room, doing a high-pitched wail and looking for his stuffed hedgehog. When he finds the hog, he delivers it to mummy and daddy in bed. Then mummy and daddy pat him and say, “Thank you for the hooooogggggg, Hanky! Thank you! Thank you for the hoggggg!”
This nuttiness has been going on for 11.5 years.
When Hanky has overnights at nana’s, the hog goes with him. Because he’ll stay up all night wailing for the thing. No hedgehog, no peace.
Boy Kitty knows when the raw shrimp come out of the freezer. And he will piercingly cry “MEEEEEEEE mmmmMMMMMEEEEEEE” until you thaw one, clean it, and cut it into kitty bite portions for him. Miss a step and it’s back to “MMMMMMEeeeee”.
Snowball goes nuts for her hairbrush and the kitty treats can. If you move either, you must pay homage to the alphaKitty. Same goes for beef jerky. Or sometimes taquitoes. Or steak. You haven’t lived until you look up and see a 5 lb. cat lugging a 6 lb. beef roast slowly down the hall.
But BabyCat is the weirdest of them all. She’s addicted to water. No - really. And she covets the water and resents it being used for others. We water the houseplants using a 40 oz plastic fastfood cup. She can be dead asleep under the bed in the farthest spot from the kitchen. But it takes 5 seconds (we count it off) for her to be awake, down the hall, and lying prostrate at the foot of a flower pot. “NOOooo, don’t waste the water on them. You big hairy monkey! They’re green enough! They don’t need it!” Then after you’ve poured the water in, she sits there and mourns as the water trickles into the saucer under the plant. “My water… Gone! Look, they’re peeing out my precious water. Stupid Plants.” Quite pathetic.
My cat, Princess Penelope Prissypants - Penny for short, hears the stick being picked up as well. She will also find the stick and drag it to you when she wants to play.
What is really weird about her is that she has the same toy Lib described but she prefers to have the feathers removed. She likes to go after that little bit of chain and catch that in mid-air. More of a challenge, I guess.
Jake the Asthmatic Wonder Kitty can do this, but it’s when I move anywhere towards the screen door to the balcony. It’s not that he’s going to try to escape, but that he will be able to sit in front of the door - I figure he hears me move and just assumes that’s where I’m going.
Scout (the girl kitty) knows when I pick up the ball - not the jingly one, but the soft one. She’ll come running so that she can chase it across the room. But then, she also knows whenever I walk into the kitchen, even if it’s just for a second.
Our cats respond the same way to the same toy - when we moved, they actually kept track of which box the damn thing was in (they were able to pick the box out at the new apartment) and sat in eager anticipation any time we would open it to unpack!
Khan can hear that chain from anywhere in the house. I have bought and lost several laser pointers over the years, and no matter how long it’s been since he’s heard the clinky-chain, he always comes running the very instant I take the new one out of the package. What’s worse is that he knows exactly where I keep the laser pointer, and any time he hears that drawer open, he comes a-runnin’. The unfortunate thing is that it’s the junk-I-use-regularly drawer, holding other such items as the Chinese takeout menu and the VCR remote control.
I also find myself feeling bad for faking him out when I don’t mean to, so I’ll get the pointer and play for a bit. I just finally got a new one, and Khan’s little bro Sirius had never played Get The Red Dot before. First time, he was scared to death of it, but he’s since faced his fear and stalks the Red Dot of Death better than anyone I’ve ever seen.
Another noise that brings Khan running, no matter where he was or what he was doing–the sound of a can of Pillsbury crescent rolls popping open. No matter how many times I tell him that they have to be cooked first, he still comes flying out of the bedroom as soon as he hears it.
YAY a kitty stories thread! (Remember that thread recently called “eeeeeeheehee a kitty”…I never posted in it, but the title almost made me laugh every time I saw it. Too cute! I think it reminded me of Monsters, Inc. when that little girl called the big blue monster “kitty”. hee hee.)
Anyway, my kitty, Johnny Rotten, has a strange obsession with the fridge. Every time I open the freezer to get ice, he comes running. And then he waits for me to open the door to the fridge so that he can sniff-sniff-sniff. Strange, I tell ya’. He doesn’t eat “people” food EVER. What’s he thinking? Sometimes he’ll meow at me (elsewhere in the house) incessantly until I follow him to the fridge. Crazy. I’ll let him do his sniff-sniff routine, and then he’s fine.
He also has the stick-with-the-string-and-feathers toy. Although, it was quickly reduced to just “stick”. He doesn’t mess around. He wants to chew the string and eat the feathers and attachments, so I had to get rid of it. Now we just play “chase the stick”. (I hold one end and run the other along the carpet…woo hoo, fun!) And then he lays down and “loves” the stick while I pet his belly. He rubs his whiskers/cheeks on the stick while holding it with both front paws, while stabilizing the rest of the stick with his back paws. It’s so ridiculously cute and I think it’s just the sweetest thing. “Love the stick, LOVE THE STICK.” (God if my neighbors can hear me saying this, they must think I’m INSANE! lol!)
My kitten can hear the older cat coming down the stairs, sitting at the top of the stairs or possibly thinking about coming downstairs at some point.
When she had her collar on (it’s allergy season and it annoys her) it would jingle a bit, so that was understandable…
Tanker, the older one, can differentiate the sound of a cat food can being opened (she only gets wet once a week… so she’s damn excited to hear it). I opened some pull top soup cans recently, thinking she’d come, but she was not interested in the least. Jake couldn’t care less about wet food, but pour a glass of milk and he’ll leap onto your shoulder meowing until he gets some.
My parents had a former junkyard cat they christened Dirtbag. (He was a devilish smoky gray and black cat, until he was washed and the gray become white—hence the name.)
Dirtbag’s kitty-nemeses were marbles. Not any marbles, mind you, but clear ones. If you rolled colored marbles past him on the hardwood floor, he would ignore them disdainfully. The clear ones, however, he would chase until he was exhausted. I’m not sure what the difference was—were the clear ones more sparkly to look at? because I sure couldn’t see them when they were moving at speed—but those were the only kind he liked. He seemed to locate them by sound alone and pounce upon them in mid-carom as they rocketed noisily across the hardwood at near-warp speeds.
Marbles were also his personal downfall. He loved to escape the house and climb trees, hide under the deck, chase mice, etc. (Not all at the same time.) However, drop one glass marble on the hardwood floor, and Dirtbag would hear the marble from outside the house and come tearing back in to see where the little demon-marble went. He could be dozing on the bed upstairs and hear the sound of a dropped marble so accurately that he could go to within a few inches of its location (even if you hid or moved the marble).
He loved to stick marbles in shoes, for some reason. Ouch. You learned to look, after a while.
When we started reducing our egg yolk intake, we’d give our cat Mowzer the egg yolks and soon he’d come running whenever he heard the sound of an egg cracking. Soon after that though, just the sound of someone taking the carton out of the fridge, or even lifting the carton (e.g. to move things around in the fridge), and he’d zip over to the kitchen and sit on your foot until you gave him a yolk. He’s gotten old so his frantic meows for yolk are now reduced to little barks: “Meh! meh!”
When he was younger he’d love to play with the end of an old “telescoping” radio antenna that had broken off and like Khan would come running whenever the drawer that held the antenna was opened.
Also, he’s now diabetic and I have to prick his ears once a while to get his blood glucose levels, and to make up for it I usually give him a cat treat after the ear prick (he’s on a special diet so rarely gets these tasty treats which to him seems like the equivalent of chocolate truffles). He now gets all buggy-eyed & excited when I pull out the kit that holds his blood testing equipment, I feel so bad that he’s anticipating my maiming his lil ears!
One of my dogs does something similar. If I’m quietly --even silently – petting Bailey (the alpha) in a room where Guinness (the beta) isn’t present, he’ll somehow know, and immediately rush in.
My tiny fluffy loon-cat, Daisy, loves roasted chestnuts. She won’t eat them, but she’s a regular Pele with the shells. The first year she played with them, well, that was great. A year later, she remembered the smell of them roasting, and tried to climb into the oven to get to her favorite toys. (I had to discourage that.) Now, every holiday season, it’s our tradition. I get to eat them, and she gets to hide pieces of shell all over the house.
The Carpet Shark keeps her favorite toys by her food dish. Or in her food dish. We’re not sure why. No matter how many times we put them away in her toy box, wait an hour or so and they will be back in the food dish. But only the “favorite” toys. She will get the others out and play with them, but only the pink and purple long-tail mice rate the dish treatment.
I WISH I could play with one of those wand-feather things. She takes one look at the feathers and then attacks your hand.
She will not drink out of her water dish. She drinks out of the bowl the bamboo live in. I don’t know why.
