How smart is (are) your cat(s)?

In My Humble Opinion
1

We have two cats, a brother and sister from the same litter. Both are very good-natured cats, but the male is extremely friendly and engages with people much more than his sister, who is somewhat more aloof in general.

He also seems to be extremely intelligent. He plays fetch- the cats have a number of these cat toys that are little plastic multicolored springs that they bat around and chase. The male cat loves it when someone throws the spring— he’ll chase after it at top speed, then bring it back and drop it at your feet. He’ll even initiate a game of fetch- many times I’ll be sitting on the couch, watching TV, and he’ll hop up, drop the spring next to me and look at me expectantly. I tell my wife he’s more dog than cat (not because I think dogs are smarter, because the way he engages with people seems very dog-like). And, like a dog, you will get tired of playing fetch before he does.

My wife discovered YouTube videos where cats have been trained to (adorably) ring a bell for kitty treats, so she ordered a bell. We wondered how long it would take for the male cat to figure out the bell trick. The answer was almost immediately. His sister? Not at all.

There’s also an egg-shaped cat toy that has holes that release cat treats when the toy is batted around. The way the holes are designed the treats don’t come out easily- it takes some manipulation to coax a treat out. The male cat will paw it in a very careful and focused manner, giving the thing a quarter turn at a time until he gets a treat. When he no longer hears rattling he knows it’s out of treats and stops playing with it. His sister hasn’t figured out the treat thing.

Now, I’m not trying to say that boy cats (or the male of any species for that matter) are in general smarter than girl cats, just making an individual observation of ours. And of course, an argument could be made that his sister is actually the smarter one, being too above it all to embarrass herself by interacting with dumb humans.

2

In our household, the gender/intellect are reversed from @solost’s household. Our male cat is a gorgeous Bengal, who is friendly, curious, and dumb as a box of rocks. Or, perhaps, just doesn’t care about anything. He isn’t very trainable, as he is the most food-indifferent cat I’ve ever experienced. He manages to get stuck in the bathroom repeatedly, gone aggro on his own tail, and otherwise shown a complete lack of cat-common-sense.

Our female kitteh, a late generation Savannah, is brilliant. And manipulative. And brilliantly manipulative. She also isn’t into being trained (although very food driven), she would rather train us. Tools for automated feeding fall before her clever paws in less than 24 hours. She watches carefully, disperses love in carefully metered doses, and tests her limits every single day. I have sat there as she makes carefully calculated mews of ‘starvation’, and then she watches to see which ones get more attention. I hear new mews regularly, even after 3 years as she dials in to -my- mental patterns with terrifying efficacy.

She tolerates my wife, but gives me love. The wife is convinced that the cat believes I am the cat’s husband, and the wife is the shameless hussy interloper. Despite the fact that is was my wife that rescued her from the vet where she was being rehomed due to being mean to the other cat of her prior household, and who feeds QueenKitteh 3/4 of the time.

3

Our Maine Coon is fabulous, lovable and endlessly entertaining. He’s also one of the dumbest cats I’ve ever met.

Get a light paper or opaque paper cup and a treat. Let kitty watch you put the treat under the cup and see how long it takes for kitty to figure out how to get the treat.

VeryBadCat not only got the treat almost before I had lifted my hand from the cup, she’s also learned to wait until George gets tired of figuring out how to get his treat before going for it herself. VBC figured out how to hold her paw on top of the treat ball to shake the treats out with minimum effort. George thinks the treat ball is something to bat around and hasn’t made the connection between the occasional treat on the floor and the ball.

4

A lot of this may have to do with inter-cat dynamics. I had two cats, a solid black male and a part-Maine Coon female. The male was obviously super-intelligent, while the female was shy and obviously dumb, intimidated by the male. After several years of this, the male died. Then, the female gradually came out of her shell and blossomed into a smart, inventive animal. Best Cat Ever.

5

My cats can’t even remember that there’s two ways into the kitchen where their cat food is. When I close one door while taking a shower, they’ll just sit by the closed door and whine at me about how hungry they are.

6

It is unclear which is the smarter of our two cats.

She will open an ajar door by scooping at it with her paw.
He will open any door by standing next to it and looking at us.

7

My boy is pretty average. He’s curious and alert, conducts gravity experiments, quickly figures out where/when/how he might be getting good food/treats, and has a good sense of my routine. He wants to be involved in everything I’m doing and sometimes does things that surprise me because they seem to betray an understanding that I didn’t think he had. I would not say he’s unusually brilliant, but he’s just right the way he is. He’s naughty enough that I wouldn’t want him to be any smarter.

My girl… I genuinely struggle to describe this in serious terms, especially without being offensive to human people with intellectual disabilities. Because most of the time, I’ll describe it in some jokey, flip, and ultimately ableist kind of way like “she’s a few crayons short” or “her elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top” or just “she’s not exactly all there” but she’s more than just a little dim. She has a few physical issues that go along with the clear intellectual deficits, but is overall healthy and nobody’s entirely sure what caused the issues. A co-worker (who was there when this happened) thinks it may be from when she was a baby and got a loose string from part of her bedding wrapped around her neck overnight and had to be revived when she was discovered in the morning, but I think she was different even before that.

My current office cat, on the other hand, is a wonder. She knows just how to get what she wants and communicates it clearly. When she wants to be held and one person puts her down because they have to get work done, she runs to the next person and begs to be picked up. She knows which cats have the good prescription food in their cages and will pull the food out with her paw. And she knows tricks! I just started teaching her and she’s caught on very quickly. She knows sit, shake, high five, and sit pretty. We had to put a pause on it because, between learning the tricks and showing them off, she’s gotten enough treats to upset her stomach and she’s not fooled by our ruse of putting bland diet food in the treat bag and trying to feed her that instead. She just got picked to join someone’s family, so she won’t be with me more than a few more days and I’m really going to miss her and all her shenanigans.

8

Now my first two cats (Hector and Alberta) were pretty smart. I got Hector about a year before Alberta, both of them were re-homes from other people who couldn’t keep them for various reasons.

Now, of course Hector was annoyed at this blatant violation of his territory. So there ensued an arms race between them as they sorted things out. Hector was declawed before I got him, and he knew it, so he knew he would come out the worse for wear in a slap fight.

So he invented judo.

He was bigger than Alberta by a large margin, and was also the strongest cat I’ve ever met. Basically solid muscle. So he’d maneuver to where he could scoop Alberta up, pinning her front paws to her chest, and then body slam her, such that her throat was exposed for biting.

Alberta quickly figured out that, while Hector was stronger, she was faster. so she developed fire-and-maneuver tricks, with quick slashing attacks to his flanks. Hit and be gone before he could turn and try to pin her.

Hector also helped me train Alberta to come when I whistled. I trained him to do that when I first got him by giving him food right after. The first time I whistled for both of them, Hector started to come, then realized that Alberta wasn’t coming as well. He got this annoyed, “Don’t you know this means food?!?” look on his face, then went back to ALberta and chased her back to where I was.

9

This describes our two cats, with the gender reversed. He has an amazing ability to recognize a door not even fully cracked ajar, just not properly closed so it’s latched, and do the paw-hook trick underneath to get it open.

Sounds like a very cool office cat! I have to ask, what is the difference between ‘sit’ and ‘sit pretty’?

10

My wife’s cat Ginger knew how to operate the control on the electric blanket.

11

We used to have a battery-powered cat toy that consisted of a central motor thing with an arm that stuck out with a mouse-looking thing on the end that would rotate back and forth randomly around the center. Our male cat figured out how to turn it on all by himself. The on button was at the top of the center thing, but it was recessed and made for a human finger to push. So he had to kind of work at it with his paw.

He never bothered turning it off when he got bored with it though, so we’d always find it running, or dead with a used-up battery.

12

I do think my old boy cat was pretty clever. We had to tie our taps (faucets) up with bungee cords because he kept turning them on to drink from. Had to do the same with a couple of doors because he’d open them even though they were slippery metal handles. He was also very vocal in specific ways - had different ways of asking for wet food or dry food or saying “what is going on?” if he heard something unusual and looked towards you to confirm you also heard something unusual.

He could play fetch too, with an elastic band for preference, and after three years as an indoor car he understood the cat flap immediately, including coming straight back home. And he turned out to be surprisingly athletic, able to leap huge distances from wall to wall having neve even had the chance to try that before.

My female tortie was probably not that bright, TBH, just very friendly. Too friendly; she made friends with the local foxes, and they killed her.

Moonie has street-smarts and seemingly no sense of smell. You can drop something she likes right in front of her, and have to point her towards it. She also can’t, or refuses, to. use the catflap.

But she did do some impressive hunting when we had my boy cat or my tortie at the same time as her. Since then she’s done no hunting at all - I think she was literally showing off to the other cats.

That’s a certain sort of cleverness; she’s a former semi-feral cat and is tiny, just about 7lbs and a British shorthair (obviously I don’t know her fill breeding but she’s obvs a British Shorthair, basic cat type), but I’ve seen her puff up and stare down enormous tough semi-feral males that live down the road from us and sometimes visit our garden. She doesn’t see the foxes as potential friends at all. My boy cat, and my tortie, didn’t have those street smarts.

13

My Boris is an evil genius. He opens doors using the handles and getting him to the vet requires me pretending to come home at the usual time, petting him like usual then grabbing him and stuffing him into a carrier. I only get one chance. If I alter my pattern at all (such as leaving my purse in the car) he will be suspicious and run and hide. Once he’s on to me I have no hope. Once I thought I had him shut in a bedroom but before I could get to him he ran to the door, hooked his paw under it and pulled it open. I had a little electronic mouse that would move when you hit it. He took about two minutes to figure it out. He can’t be lured with treats or food. I suspect he is up to something. I have caught him with a screw in his mouth and with a piece of duct tape. I have no idea where they came from but I suspect he is building something. I am constantly worried that I will sit down on something that will fall apart because he unscrewed it.
His sister Natasha, on the other hand, was very pretty and sweet but dumb as toast. I used to joke that if I got out the carrier she’d go right in to explore and when I shut the door she would be totally surprised that she was trapped. When she had diabetes, I had to give her insulin. All I had to do was put a dish of food in the bathroom, and she would go right in and I could shut the door and give her the shot. She never learned. I dread if her brother ever needs medication. I can’t even catch him. She did like to play catch. She would bring me her favorite toy and I would throw it and she would bring it back and drop it near my feet and want me to throw it again, so if you consider that intelligent I guess she had some brains. The other thing was that Boris would occasionally get into somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be and shut the door, leaving himself trapped. She would always come and get me and meow at me until I went and looked for him. However, she wouldn’t actually lead me to him, just try to tell me where he was even though I repeatedly told her I don’t speak cat.

14

We had a barn cat that developed diabetes late in life. He’d never (to our knowledge) lived in a house, but in order to give him insulin he had to move indoors.

Because he preferred to eliminate outdoors, my gf hung a bell on the front doorknob and shook it every time she let him out. What a mistake that was! Every night between 2 and 4 am he would ring that bell. One of us (usually me) would have to get up and let him out, then allow him back in 5-15 minutes later.

15

She is a very cool office cat! “Sit pretty” is the same as “sit up”- front paws off the floor. Here she is doing it

16

Sometimes it’s hard to tell how smart a cat is. They’re not always very motivated by treats, to say nothing of human approval, so the line between “can’t” and “won’t” is blurry. But my cat is a ravenous little mama’s boy who will do anything for food (and almost anything for attention), so I know he’s pretty clever with puzzles and such. He’s also spookily intuitive about knowing when we’re taking him to the vet, even when we haven’t gotten out the carrier or anything, and he will hide somewhere we can’t get to him. I’m convinced he understands English at a minimum, and might possibly also be psychic.

17

Pretty kitty!

18

We have a long haired black cat who’s smart only for bad things. He’s really friendly but we’re trying to make him an indoor cat and he’s the cat that wants to be outside at all times.

Among other things, he knows when people come home because he’s alert enough to hear when someone is walking up to the front door so he automatically will find a place to hide from sight, then when the door is opened wide enough he bolts to leave the door. He will even hide behind a wall, peek around every so often to check, hide again, and then when he hears the door open he will run full dash at it.

19

I think my cat is pretty smart.

I play fetch with Cygnus, which is already kinda weird for a cat. I throw his catnip mousie to the top of his cat tree, and he retrieves it for a treat.

If I throw the mousie to the very top, he’ll first try to retrieve it from below–which he can if I got it close to the edge, since there’s a gap that he can reach behind. If he fails at this, he doesn’t hesitate to jump to the upper level and retrieve it from above. At the least, he has a high degree of spatial awareness, even if it’s not necessarily intelligence.

He has a favorite shoebox. When retrieving the mousie, he often drops it right in the box. Sometimes, if I leave him alone for a while, I’ll find a bunch of his other toys in the box.

Here’s what really gets me, though. The other day I was playing fetch, but the shoebox was underfoot, and I moved it out of the way (within sight of Cygnus). I threw the mousie, he brought it back, but he went to the original location of the box. He stood there a second, toy in mouth, and something clicked–and he went to the new location of the box, and dropped the toy right in.

In the heat of the moment, he forgot where the box was. But when he saw the discrepancy, he remembered where the box had moved to. It’s some extended form of the object permanence effect–not just realizing that the disappeared object wasn’t gone forever, but combining that with a memory of where it actually was.

Or maybe not, and it was just a weird combination of semi-random events, and I’m just anthropomorphizing things. Could say the same about most human behaviors, though.

20

I don’t have cats, but I would like to talk about cats, especially Siamese cats. They are the most intelligent of them all. They are forever getting into mischief with their inquisitive nature making them explore every corner of the house. This breed may respond better than others to training, and many owners report that their Siamese cats can do tricks.