Oh, well, one more cat “tale.”
In our last house back East, I installed a cat door for our cat we named Jaws. If anybody asked why, I told them to just try to pet him, and they’d find out.
He was a fierce hunter, and survived the bitter upstate NY winters all right. Before the cat door, he set up the most amazingly loud caterwauling outside until we opened the door.
This cat door was the type with a plastic flap, hinged at the top, so it would swing either way for entrance or egress.
Once installed, I picked up Jaws (I was the only human who was ever able to do this and live to tell the tale) inside and pushed him through the flap. He sat there a while contemplating the thing, went hunting or whatever, came back, and began howling to be let in.
So, I went outside and pushed him through into the house, and he was happy. The next time, he bushed through the flap to go out. A while later, we heard a strange sound, and went to investigate.
He was sitting outside, slapping the flap with his paw. Eventually, he hit it hard enough to open about an inch. He immediately put his paw in the opening, shot out his claws to catch the edge, and pulled it up enough to quickly rush through the opening. He kept doing this for years.
We thought, “What a stupid cat,” but then we realized that was pretty smart of him, figuring that out. He must have though it was fun.
When winter came and there was a foot or more of snow, he would go out to do his business, then come back in muttering and swearing at us. As humans controlled everything, he must have figured out we had some perverse reason for covering the ground with snow.
He was a barn cat in New Hampshire when we first got him, and had not been socialized at all, so was really skittish when we brought him home, and never really got over it. He hated to be touched or petted, and just went his own way. One day when he was 11 years old, and I was sitting in a chair reading, all of a sudden he jumped up into my lap for the first time. I almost had a heart attack. He continued to do this, but lay there stiff as a board, ready to jump back down after about five minutes.
He was just one of about four million cats we had over the years.