I know cats’ major purpose is to do weird-ass things so their owners can talk about them online, but this takes it. I was visiting my mom over Christmas, and heard her cat Shade making that weird MROWR sound like they do when they’ve caught a bird or something.
I peeked in the other room, and he had one of his toys (a long tiger-tail on a fishing pole, like this) strung out along the floor, with the tail and the pole in a totally straight line. He was walking along the tail like it was a tightrope, placing each paw perfectly in a line, then turning around and going back the other way, over and over, MROWRing softly to himself.
He saw me as soon as I tried to get a video on my cell phone, and of course acted like nothing had happened. Totally perplexing - anyone else’s cat do this?
FWIW, he’s about 8 years old, and when he was born (to my cat) he was a little, uh, special. Last one to figure out things like walking, so maybe he’s just proud of himself?
My cat, who I’ve recently taken to calling her John Spartan because she seriously needs to enhance her calm, will walk up to the water bowl and stare at it. Then she bats it with a paw until she knocks some water onto the floor. Then she will drink water from the bowl.
If she knocked the water out of the dish and then drank the water on the floor then I would figure she just didn’t like to drink out of a bowl.
At first I thought that maybe she wasn’t sure there was water in the bowl what with water being clear and all but then the first time when the water level was low and I poured some into it while she was sitting right there watching me pour the water into the bowl and she again knocked some water out of it before drinking from the bowl it dawned on. Cats is weird.
Yup, sounds like a cat to me too. I think you caught him playing a new game and he was embarrassed to let you know about it, so pretended nothing was going on.
My cat does that all the time; he likes to pretend that he is much to dignified to actually play with kitty toys or the dog, but he does so frequently. If he notices us noticing him, he will immediately stop what he is doing and start washing paws and trying to look nonchalant.
That reminds me of what our cats do. If we put cat food in their bowls they eat it like normal. But if we put ripped up ham or chicken in there, they’ll take it all out of the bowl and eat it from the kitchen floor.
Our idiot Bengalhas taken to pushing the water dish around. It’s one of those with the water bottle feeding the bowl, and he’ll shove it all around the kitchen, leaving puddles in his wake. One time, the bottle was almost empty and he managed to dislodge it, then he pushed the bowl to the middle of the floor and left it there.
Our cat does the same thing. I asked the vet if maybe he had a vision problem. She said it a common thing for cats to measure the distance to the top of the water. She said that although they have binocular vison, their dept perseption isn’t the same as ours.
My sisters cat has a habit of following us to the 7-11 at the end of the corner and back.
He follows on the way there, dilly-dallying around for intervals and then running to catch up. If we go to far ahead he makes these strange, desperate, bark-like meows as if to say “Hey! Don’t leave me behind!”
Then he’ll sit at the store and wait for us to come back out. On the way home he’s the leader, running ahead and constantly looking over his shoulder to make sure we’re still following him.
All animals have Camera-sense. In most cases it causes them to become incredibly boring and probably look the other way. Only a small number of animals react to the camera sense in the opposite way (do something funny) Either that, or it’s just me. I’ve never met an animal that did anything remotely interesting while it was being filmed. If anything they became more uninteresting the second the start filming button is pressed.
I think it’s a cat thing. Cats like to pretend they’re dignified, but they go completely nuts when they think nobody is watching. Having proof on film would be even worse.
My Seth used to only play when nobody was around. For a year, we thought it was our other cat stealing socks out of the dressers, but it was him - we finally caught him in the living room one day, surrounded by socks and looking like a lion with his kill. He also liked to jump in and out of boxes - but only when nobody was watching. If you went into a room where he was sitting in a box, he’d leave and pretend he was in no way, shape, or form having any fun at all. Because Seth was dignified.
Thank you for this. It makes sense now, for a cat. I’ve never had a cat do that before until John. She does it every single time she goes to drink so this sounds like a very good explanantion.
You should call her Gummitch. And read Fritz Leiber’s short stories, “Spacetime for Springers” and especially “Kreativity for Kats”. She’s re-enacting the second story.
But yeah, cats is weird. That’s always MY primary theory when wonder why a cat does what it does.
All cats is weird. Our four are each weird in their own way.
Soda also bats at the water when he goes to drink. He likes to marinade his toys in the water dish and then bring them to us. Sometimes we find soggy cat toys in our bed. He also loves to eat lettuce.
Scotch, Soda’s sister likes to eat the fried noodles that come with take out Chinese food. She also has a morning ritual of knocking the comb off the bathroom counter.
Red is mostly fat and lazy, but is another one that will act all goofy is she thinks no one is watching.
Blue will stand on my lap and knead a blanket (or my leg – whichever is handy) and yowl at me for no apparent reason. He doesn’t want to be petted, that just makes him yowl louder. He also carries around his collection of stuffed animals and lay them, one-by-one, at my feet. He’s a bit neurotic.
I think you caught him playing a new game and he was embarrassed to let you know about it, so pretended nothing was going on. 
