Let's have a dumbest cat competition

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
#1

So, Lady, one of our pair of nearly 15-year-old cats, really digs the fire place. We use it a lot in the winter, and her usual MO is to get about 1 foot from the hearth and stare into the flames. Until last night.

Now, if I was to predict cat behavior I’d think that a. cats are naturally wary of fire b. having the mesh screen drawn across the fire place is enough to keep the cat from getting closer to the fire. And I would be wrong.

You see, last night she climbed up on the hearth, squeezed her head through the slight gap between the mesh screen, climbed partly into the fire place -which had a fire burning in it - and burt off her eyebrow whiskers, burn under her eye and burnt her foot.

Now the glass doors are closed when there’s a fire too. It doesn’t put out as much heat, but cat flambe is something we’d rather not have a repeat of.

So, who has a dumber cat?

#2

I once had a lovely “blonde” kitty who fell off the same window sill every day, but I think your’s still wins :rolleyes:

#3

I don’t know anything my cat has done tha tops crawling into a fire (suicide attepmt maybe?) but my 30 pounder Fonzie jumps on the washing machine a lot. When the lid is up. He knows it is up, and falls in and gets stuck anyway. I leave it open just fo rthe kicks now.

#4

While my cat is too lethargic to do anything amazingly dumb, there is this orange cat nearby who isn’t very bright. The first time I met him, he wanted me (a total stranger) to pet him all over.

The second time he was lying in the middle of the road when I drove my car down the block. I drove up to him, left the car running, got out, and he meowed at me as I picked him up and tossed on the sidewalk (apparently the wrong one as he immediately crossed the road again).

I’ve seen him since, so perhaps he’s learned not to take naps in the roadway since then.

#5

Can’t beat trying to commit suicide by immolation…I have a fireplace too, but Elvis respects it.
I do have a barrel of goldfish and plants in my living room. They lived out on the back deck until the temps really started dropping, then I moved it inside. Elvis has fallen in a few times, he gets pretty excited watching the fishies.
Now that I have it refilled almost to the top, he’s gotten wise to it.

Elvis falls into the goldfish house.

#6

Cats can levitate when they have proper motivation, such as landing in a place where they didn’t EXPECT to get wet.

#7

Back before the cats had their own suite, BilltheCat would fall off the same stereo speaker at least once every day. It got to be such a routine, Mr. SCL wouldn’t even look away from the TV. He’d just comment “All systems go, sir. Gravity still working.”

#8

Oh good. I thought my cats were the only ones like this. You see, the mother of their litter is a perfectly fine, intelligent, normal, healthy cat. But we think she went out and mated with a rock. No wait, I don’t want to insult the rocks.
Anyway. The most striking act of stupidity is that these cats don’t know their names, and appear to maintain memory of neither each other nor the humans in the house. Every time they see you, it’s like they’re seeing you for the first time. There’s this incredibly blank look in their eyes. It’s creepy. Also, one of them has a habit of eating paper, which makes her throw up. So what does she do? She goes back and eats more, of course.

They’ll fall off stuff, of course. Seeing a cat fall off the edge of a bed while walking is absolutely hilarious.

#9

I once had a cat that didn’t know how to eat.

She would run to the kitchen ,where she recognized the sound of the can opener.
Then she would watch me open the can and put the food in her dish.
Then she would sit there.
And then she would continue to sit…
and continue to sit…

After I physically pushed her nose into the food dish, she’d start to eat. If I walked out of the kitchen, the food stayed uneaten.

Weird.

(But she’d purr in my lap for hours…)

#10

It’s possible she had a defective sense of smell. Cats determine what’s food and what’s not by its scent, and cats with olfactory damage have been known to starve, as nothing appears to be food anymore.

One of my cats is scarily intelligent, but if she’s sitting on top of the fridge and I give her a cat treat, she will invariably whack it with her paw and watch it go sailing to the floor, whereupon the other cat will eat it, and she will then be upset because she didn’t get a treat.

#11

One of my sisters had a cat that had kittens, one of which turned out to be retarded. He kept trying to follow his siblings into a certain hiding spot in the kitchen but couldn’t fit because of his larger size.

One of our cats tried to jump out a car window…while we were doing 60 down I-55. Damn good thing that window was closed!

#12

I once had a cat that used to like sleeping curled up on top of the stereo speaker. She would also hug her tail with her front paws, kinda using it like a teddy bear.

I looked over at her one day and she must have been having a dream, because she started twitching her tail, which of course was brushing her in the face.

My little feline Einstein opened one eye, saw the twitching, and promptly bit the heck out of her own tail . Which of course startled her, and she fell off the top of the speaker.

She hit the floor, and started looking all around for the beast that attacked her with a sort of, “What the hell?!?” look on her face.

#13

One of my cats is startled every single day by the couches. He walks very cautiously in to the living room, notices the couches, and panics. Oh God! They’re big! And they’ll eat him!
The other one deliberately breaks glasses so she can play with the pieces. It fun to come home and notice that the floor looks oddly bumpy and Aerin is playing with somethi- Fuck! Drop it, stupid cat! Drop it!

We have switched to plastic cups.

#14

My girl cat is brain-damaged, so I’m not sure if it’s really fair to make fun of her, but I’m going to do it anyway.

She gets lost upstairs. While we’re downstairs, one staircase away, a staircase that she uses every single night. We’ll be sitting downstairs after she’s gone upstairs, and all of a sudden, we hear this sad, mournful howling from her. No matter how many times we call up “Emmy! We’re down here! Come downstairs!”, she continues to howl sadly until one of us goes up to get her. Apparently, she can’t figure out how the stairs work when she’s by herself.

E.

#15

In an acrostic puzzle I worked the other day, the answer quotation was this:

“The problem with cats is that they get the same exact look whether they see a moth or an axe murderer.” --Paula Poundstone

There are many other comments about cats at this site that may help stir some thoughts about your own cat.

Paula’s remark helped me understand that it’s not just our cat that can look at you with this expression that seems to say, “Just what the hell are you doing in my world?”

Another quote that sums it up pretty well is, “A dog has a master; a cat has staff.”

#16

Let’s see.

My cat Irving was howling from the upstairs bedroom. I went up and found that she was suspended in the curtains, about six feet off the floor. Apparently, she jumped at something and stuck.

A few months later, she was walking across a rug, snagged her claws and fell over. She just laid there until I got her claws loose.

#17

C&P from an older thread on the subject:

You know those small-sized tissue boxes? Not the standard, elongated ones…the ones I mean are rather cube-shaped. Well, when I had a recent cold, I was going through a box of those a day.

One day, one of these boxes fell on the floor. Naturally, our Boo decided he had to investigate. That’s when we all discovered that while these boxes will allow for easy entry of a cat’s head, easy removal is not part of the deal. He stood up, box firmy in place over his head, and proceeded to go stark raving bonkers. Apparently he figured the best way to escape this thing lodged over his noggin was to try and outrun it.

<WHAM!> into the dining room table.

<THUD!> into the side of the sofa.

<BONK!> into the television.

I was really torn…this was one of the funniest sights I’d seen in ages, but there was also the real danger that one of my beloved cats was going to blindly take a header down the stars.

At this point, he was pinballing himself between the sofa, the love seat, and a few end tables. I had made an ineffective grab for the box when he was by the television, so I was now near the stairs, across the living room from him. Suddenly, he makes a beeline for the staircase, with me in the way. <Yoink!>, and I grab the box off his head at the last second. Well, maybe a bit past the last second…here’s how I think the final moments went from his point-of-view:

Ican’tsee!Ican’tsee!Runrunrun!Ican’tsee!Ican’tsee!Runrunrun!<Yoink!>Hey! I can see! AHHH!! I can see I’m about to go flying down the staircase! AHHHH!! Hardwood floors! Can’t stop! <BONK!> Ow! <BONK!> Oof! <BONK!> Mrrrowww!

For some strange reason, my wife has decided to only buy the large tissue boxes anymore. :slight_smile:

#18

My mother told me this one.

She was living at Scripps Ranch. The house was on a hill, and there was a low hedge between the yard and the sheer drop-off. A black-and-white ‘tuxedo’ cat was watching a bird that was sitting on the hedge. It prepared for the pounce in the way that cats do. Spring! it leapt for the bird. The bird flew away, and the cat was hanging in space. Several minutes later the cat crawled back through the hedge shaking its head. My mom didn’t know the name of the cat, but ever after she called him ‘Sylvester’.

#19

My cat eats ear wax. She won’t lick you unless you stick your finger in your ear and give it a wiggle; then she’ll lick your finger.

She’s also afraid of sneezes.

#20

Maybe not dumb, but hard to fathom, hard to see the cat-logic.

As a rule I wake early enough that I don’t want to wake my wife. I’ll avoid any noises I can control. I wait until she’s awake even to make coffee.

The cat will inevitably start a series of meows not long after I get on the computer. First I’ll verify that she has food. Then water. Then, if it’s warm enough outside, I’ll open the front door so she can go out on the screened porch to do whatever it is she does out there. But there are times when that’s not enough. I’ll hear this cry from somehwere and go to check it out (for fear it will wake my wife) and there she (the cat) will be sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor just waiting for me to come in. Then she’ll run away and hide until I have a chance to get settled again. Eventually, after I see there’s nothing I can do for her, I’ll just wait out the crying and soon enough she’ll stop and go to sleep somewhere.

It’s hard to tell from her expression (see previous post above) whether she’s just yanking my chain or if she’s trying to communicate some cat secret to me. I don’t understand Cat all that much.

Maybe it’s not the cat that’s dumb.