We had an orange cat who remembered the sounds of our cars.
He’d lie in the middle of the street, get up for the vehicles of the neighbors and of strangers; the mail,UPS, FedEX trucks. But he’d sit there blocking our driveway access until someone got out of the car and scolded him.
This cat loved baiting a scold. He was declawed( a former owner did this to him–we got him that way from the pound, so please no links to “declawing is mutilation” websites )and loved to go through the motions of clawing curtains, furniture, human legs, what have you, until you said the magic words “Bad kitty!”
This cat also loved napping in neighbors’ garages until one of the neighbors left for a weekend with the cat trapped inside. We never saw him in our own garage let alone the neighbors after that incident.
Are you sure that’s not my cat? She does that too. My cat has a fear of heights. Whenever I pick her up she scrambles around with her paws like she’s afraid the law of gravity has been repealed.
In a house we lived in a few years ago, our older cat (who is still with us; the younger one has since passed, of Tony Gwynn Syndrome*) would have qualified for this. My parents’ bedroom had a roughly one-human-tall, five-humans(standing)-wide mirror stood up against a wall, and the cat loved to stare down his image, growl at it a little, and then run full speed and slam into it head-on. Every night at about the same time you could hear thud! thud! thud! anywhere in the house. A visiting uncle once noted “that guy must be thinking, ‘Man, this cat has a hard head!’”.
Nike, the aforementioned TGS* cat, ate dust and little bits of keyboard wrist-rest with similar results. We thought that he had a nose problem and actually couldn’t tell food from non-food, but used the opposite reasoning of that which yBeayf speaks–instead of assuming nothing was food, he assumed everything inanimate and small enough to fit in his mouth was food.
Destroying a once-extroardinarily-nimble body by eating too god damned much.
There was a while when my dad was in the habit of imitating cat noises at our cats, and holding conversations with them. (The cats always wanted the last word.) The same uncle I mentioned earlier once observed that “it’s never a good idea to speak a language you don’t understand”. I still think my dad has entered into some devilish cat-contract he doesn’t understand.
My current cat is probably at the middle to top end of cat intelligence, but that still doesn’t mean I’ll be sending her off to MIT any time soon.
exhibit A: I live alone – it’s just me and the cat. The cat sleeps on top of me most nights, so clearly has not trouble with my presence. Yet if I walk into the room while she’s eating, or get to close while she’s sleeping, she will bolt in a panic. Conclusion: cats love drama and will manufacture it if they don’t get enough of it in their lives.
exhibit B: I just bought her a kitty drinking fountain. A continous stream of water fed through a filter by a pump. Pure water. After one drinking session, she has ignored it. Instead, every morning she jumps in the shower after I bathe and drinks from the drain, happily lapping up a mixture of water, Dial soap, and shampoo.
The family I lved with in my early teens got - I still don’t know where from or why - three baby kittens who were the Paris, Roma and Sofia Hiltons of the cat world. They were blonde, thin as sticks and stupid as the day is long (as you might suspect, their day was not).
They had two favourite sleeping places: the top of car wheels (right near that nice warm engine), and on the white line in the middle of the road outside (the black was too hot, but the white line - just right). All three of them were gone in less than two weeks.
I always keep the lid down on my toilet seat because I noticed a tendency for all my cats to jump on the toilet and fall in if the lid is up. My last two kittens took this to an extreme, it wasn’t enough to jump up and fall in, they would try to do it in those few seconds between when the humans finish their business and stand up but before they can put the lid down, resulting in them falling into pee water. If that wasn’t enough they would jump up there while my boyfriend was standing in front of the toilet and they would get peed on. There’s nothing like having to bathe a kitten at 3 am.
My 10-year-old Emily truly outdid herself last week. About an hour before I normally wake up, I was ripped from my slumbers by this truly astonishing caterwauling, and groggily came to to see a rolling ball of furious cat on my bed.
So what got her so mad? Turns out she’d been chasing her tail – and she caught it. Sunk a couple of her front claws in it and got stuck. In her own tail.
I, of course, was then much abused by the remaining 15 claws, plus teeth, while trying to free her. It was, of course, all MY fault!
I was waiting for someone else to break the ice on this aspect of negative intelligence.
We had a beautiful solid white Persianesque (some Persian somewhere back in its lineage mated with several other nationalities) we just had to name Sugar. In most respects Sugar didn’t display any unusual behavior. Ate smart, slept smart, observed furniture and belongings in a deceptively shrewd manner. Gave the impression that she was all right with the world.
We lived on a divided street that intersected with another divided street at the top of the hill that was a few houses up our street from us. Cars made a habit of topping that hill at ungodly rates of speed and then applying their brakes for most of the block we lived on in order to slow down enough to avoid skidding into oncoming traffic at the foot of the hill. (This made for some exciting viewing in the winter.)
Sugar made no effort to alter her speed as she crossed the street, despite many close calls. Cars already trying to get back to subsonic speeds from the descent of the hill would apply still more braking power when Sugar began her saunter across their lane. This was not impressive to Sugar. She would just continue her stroll until she had crossed the street.
One day she didn’t make it. Stupid caught up with her.
Our cats are all pretty stupid, I must say. Our Buggy is quite the drama queen. He constantly digs at our kitchen floor. It’s ceramic tile, so you’d think he’d have figured out by now that he’s not getting anywhere. He digs around the food and water dishes, and mostly at the door to our enclosed porch. We keep most of the doors in our house, to the bedrooms and such, closed to keep the animals out. Buggy has a tendency to try to dash into these rooms when the door is opened, and hide. So we close the door, locking him in. This, of course, he does not like and is immediately whining to get out.
Our youngest (10 months), Fuzzy Face, was born stupid. As a kitten, she wouldn’t eat the cat food we gave her, even though her brother and sister would. Could have been because she preferred to eat kitty litter. She does not allow the other cats to use the litterbox alone. She must watch or get in with them. She also just looks stupid. She has a little eye twitch going on, and tends to look at us like we’re aliens from another planet. Poor Fuzz.
This isn’t so much about stupid. It’s more about weird.
I picked up a stray cat at work and brought it home because it looked so pitiful. We already had a decent cat but this one seemed to fit right in and wasn’t much additonal trouble. She got along fine with the other cat.
As fortune would have it, about the time my wife was about due to deliver our second child (who just turned 40!), both cats were pregnant as well. I couldn’t locate the stray cat and after we got the baby home from the hospital several days later (C section) I went to find her. She had had her litter of three and had stashed them in the rafters in the basement. I tried to fetch her down but she snarled and growled and convinced me it was her privacy rights that were being violated. I left her alone for another week.
Meanwhile the other cat had her litter of three or four and we spent most of our time divided between our new baby and the older cat’s kittens. Mostly just forgot about that outfit in the basement. But after a while it became obvious that these wild things were just not going to fit in. So I put on a leather jacket and gloves, got a burlap bag and went and “collected” the feral kittens, along with their mother, and took the bag to the pound.
The pound attendant gave me a very dirty look for the mistreatment I exhibited by bringing them in in a bag. He reached into the bag and immediately let out a howl as if Dracula had bitten his neck. When he yanked his arm out of the sack, three kittens were firmly embedded in his flesh. I had to leave I was laughing so hard.
He’ll beg to be fed, then halfway through his meal he gets distracted by the shadow of his ears on the wall. I have to point to his food to remind him it’s still there.
My cat isn’t dumb, but today she did something she frequently does, that makes her a candidate for this thread: exercise poor judgment. Why, O why, does my cat decide to rub against my legs when I’m in the kitchen, with a sharp heavy knife in my hand and slippery flour all over the floor, or trying to move a heavily-laden pan from the oven to the counter without spilling any of the superheated contents? It is to grrrr.
I just remembered something else that our stupid, dear Fuzzy does. She likes to not only walk right under foot, she likes to run ahead of you, then flop down on the floor and lay down right in the path where you’re walking. Stupid cat.
I had a cat (now passed on) who was the least-picky eater I have ever seen in feline form. The wifey and I would take great pleasure in flicking peas across the linoleum of the kitchen floor, and watching him chase them down, pounce on each one, and wolf it down.
One morning, we awoke to find kitty lying on the living room floor with a distended belly, meowing pitifully. We investigated further and found that, during the night, he had managed to open the refrigerator door (our refrigerator at the time had a bad door seal, and often would not remain closed unless you really mashed the door shut). Apparently, he had then clawed open a one-pound package of raw chicken and had himself a feast.
We drove him to the vet, who diagnosed him with a simple case of raw-chicken-induced constipation. After appropriate measures were taken, kitty was fine, albeit a pound or so lighter. But no smarter.
We have one cat, Clover, who doesn’t seem to be all that stupid. He recognizes us and the other cats, he knows the layout of the apartment, and doesn’t seem to do anything absurdly stupid.
But he has a tail twitch, and he doesn’t seem to understand that his tail is part of him. In fact, his tail seems to frighten him at times: He’ll be sitting on the bed, watching it twitch, and then he dashes into the living room at top speed, as if to run away from it. But of course it’s no good, because when he gets there, he finds that pesky old tail has followed right along. So then he has to dash somewhere else, and so on.
Several years ago, I had a kitten named Taca (not named by me–her original owner assured me that her full name was Navajo for “stupid animal”) who would climb up onto the edge of the tub every morning and watch me shower. And every morning, she would overbalance herself and fall in. To her credit, rather than freak out and slash my legs and everything else in her desperation to get away from the water, she would sit calmly at my feet and mew pathetically until I picked her up and put her back on dry land. She often seemed to be saying “Yes, Ma, I know that was dumb. Now please get me out of the tub.” Taca has since passed on–I gave her to friends in the country when I moved back in with my parents, and dear Taca played tag with a truck. I think it’s very likely that her last thought was something to the effect of “Crap, I’m IT forever, now.”
Currently, I have a seven-year-old named Khan who is incapable of learning that fire of any sort will burn off his whiskers. Candles, the stove, he just doesn’t get it. Luckily, he’s only managed to set his tail on fire twice. He’s the vainest of vain cats in the world, so anything that mars his perfect appearance is highly offensive to him–even if it’s his own damn fault.
Sirius is a big fan of the “If I throw myself down in front of her feet, she’ll have to pet me, even if she’s carrying a boiling pot of pasta to the sink to strain!” He also fell off the bed just last night attempting to catch his own tail.
Our newest addition, a twenty-pound shelter tom named Chunk, seems to think that the only reason any human would enter my bedroom is to pet him. He is technically my roommate’s cat, but has decided that my room is the haven of the house. He has also not yet figured out that couches are to be jumped upon so the humans can give head-scratchin’. He’s starting to venture downstairs a little more often (we’ve had him a month, fercryinoutloud), but despite all the “hey, I’m gonna pet you if you come here” promises and finger waves and kissy noises, he will lay down in the middle of the floor and then look disappointed that you don’t get up and come to him when he’d be in Kitty Heaven if he’d just wise up enough to jump on the couch.
The poor thing, being an all-white cat, was probably stone deaf (as most all-white cats are). She would have had no idea that imminent death was quickly approaching her every time she stepped out into the road.
She would have had no idea that imminent death was quickly approaching her every time she stepped out into the road.
