The back bedrooms have exterior doors. The screen doors are not typical, in that they don’t swing out. Instead, they retract like window shades set 90º off (i.e., they retract into the side of the doorway). They are held shut with a strong magnet in the sliding portion of the door that contacts the metal frame.
Yesterday the cat learned that by pouncing on the door he can dislodge the magnet and the door would slide open under the power of its retraction spring. He got out, chased a neighbourhood cat, and then got distracted by some yummy grass. Roomie got him, and he protested vociferously. (She was slightly irked that he’d learned how to open the door, but she was mad that he howled so.) When I was at home on the weekend the cat pounced at the door and it opened, and it scared the hell out of him. But now he knows The Secret.
Looks like I’ll have to install hooks on the screen doors.
Learn to sleep with one eye open as well. I have child-proofed the garbage can, to prevent theft of morsels like “bacon grease soaked paper towels” and “food wrappers” and “other cat’s vomit.”
No-'Nads Nick was the smartest cat I ever knew. In his later years, he didn’t want to go down two sets of stairs to the litter box so he would pee into the tub drain. Pretty cool.
He could open the storm door. He would stretch and stretch up to the handle and bang on the button with one paw until the door popped and catch the door with his other paw and he was in.
My dad absolutely refused to believe Nick could do this in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Very funny.
We have double swinging doors between the kitchen and dining room, not spring controlled, and open only one way.
Our Bengal cat Zubin opens them from the kitchen by running full speed and banging against them with his head (no, he ain’t too smart). When we close them again, he crouches down, puts his front leg, paw up, under the crack and pulls it open.
He, like most cats, cannot abide a closed door. He sometimes opens the powder room door, then walks away. As long as it is open, he as no interest.
Cats is weird.
The most amazing door story about one of our first cats, Pogo, was the way he figured out how to open the old-fashioned door handles. We lived a 150 year old house. The doors on one side had the old U shaped handle, and on top was a small thumb-shaped lever. It had to be pressed down to release the catch to open the door.
Pogo studied us opening the door for a couple of weeks. One day we came in to find the door open and Pogo outside. What the hell?
We kept an eye on him and eventually were rewarded by seeing how he did it. He leapt up to the handle (about four feet off the floor), hung on with one front leg, then took his other paw and pressed down on the lever. He then shook his whole body until the door swung open
In this picture, Bruno appears to be enjoying a crate, but that’s only because he has stolen it from the dog. In reality, he does not groove on a closed door.
He and his brother are frequently shut in the laundry room, and Bruno expresses his feelings about the situation by whanging on the doorknob until everyone goes insane. I once thought I would thwart him by putting some packing tape on the knob…he used the tape to stick his little foot to the knob and turn it.
When I was a kid, we had a female cat named “Evie”, which was short for Evinrude, because she purred “like an outboard motor.” :rolleyes:
Anyway, we lived in a log house in Anchorage at the time (1958) that had windows hinged at the top. The cat would go outside by pushing the window open with her head. Nothing unusual there. But to get back in when the window wasn’t propped open, she figured out how to jump up on the log wall, reach up with one paw, hook the wood-framed window with her claws, pull it open and launch herself through it before it slammed back on her tail. An astounding feat of dexterity and speed.
Back when my Maine Coon was alive, he used to vomit after eating. So I installed a folding louvred door in the doorway to the kitchen. It was closed with an eye hook. Sure enough, the cat learned that if he jumped and hit the hook upward with his paw, it opened. Mmmm, fresh vomit on the dining room carpet.
