Despite my desire to tell smart dog stories, the smartest animal tales I have are about cats…and a chicken, of course.
----------------Tale the first-----------------
My Mom spent a couple of years as an innkeeper at a charmingly semi-rural place in the mountains that was used as a business conference center. She fed and looked out for the feral cat living under the inn. The cat was elusive and avoided human touch. When said cat obviously was pregnant and then suddenly not, mom knew there were kittens somewhere, but she could never find them to take them to the vet, and mama cat always stayed out of range of a quick grab.
Soon after came the day my Mom got a new job and was leaving the inn forever. I was helping her load belongings into the rental truck for the move when mama cat strolled into view to check out all the goings-on.
My mother said to her, “We’re leaving – if you want to come with us, get your kittens now!”
Over the course of the next hour or so, as we loaded the last of the boxes and whatnot, mama cat appeared several times, each time with a squirming kitten dangling in her mouth, and set them into an open box by the truck. She then held still and permitted herself to be picked up by a human for the first time.
I swear this is true; I saw it myself.
That clan of cats, distinguished by their polydactyl feet, lived long, semi-feral lives with my mom. They were never big for petting, but liked to sit in the comfortable feet-tucked-in position near humans but not too close.
----------------Tale the second-----------------
The second genius cat story is the (neutered) tomcat I had as a boy, Tigger. Actually we had several cats throughout my childhood, but Tigger was unmistakably mine, or vice-versa. A big tiger-like tabby. He did all sorts of smart things; used to walk his front paws up a door, cross his paws over the knob, tiptoe to one side, then lift his hind feet off the ground and swing, turning the doorknob.
Once he was alone in the house when a large chicken (not the smart one I promised to talk about) had been left roasting in the oven (God knows why we’d leave the house with the oven on; I wouldn’t do that today). When we got home, the pan was on the floor, intact, with the chicken undamaged except for one leg that had been removed surgically and placed in Tigger’s food bowl and partially eaten. The oven door, spring-loaded and heavy, was closed, and the gas oven was roaring happily away, roasting nothing. I have no idea HOW he did it without getting burned or closed in the oven – I have only the empirical conclusion that either he did do it himself, or the chicken rose from the dead.
----------------Tale the third-----------------
Lastly comes the tail of Romeo, a red junglefowl. I’ve always thought he was a bantam junglefowl, but I see almost no references to bantam junglefowl on the 'Net and numerous mentions that the true junglefowl are small in size, so maybe he was just a standard red junglefowl. At any rate, he was small, spurred, smart, and very much the cock-of-the-walk from day one of our three-year stay at a farm in rural Virginia. Romeo led 27 hens – growing up, I thought they were Araucanas, but looking at the descriptions on the web, it looks like they were Ameraucanas. They laid blue and brown eggs and they followed Romeo’s every cluck.
The thing about being a junglefowl is that they are the original wild breed our chickens descend from, and Romeo was indeed some kind of Ur-chicken, like a Greek hero of old. Glossy and alert, sporting gigantic spurs on each leg and a keen eye for trouble, he quite literally ruled the roost.
But the day we moved in, we didn’t know he was stronger, better, faster, smarter than the average chicken.
The front lawn of the property swooped down a long gentle slope to a pond dammed by the driveway. Behind the stately white house rose a solid half acre of garden and atop the hill crest were the chicken house, the paddock, and the horse stable. To the side was a huge fenced field for the horses.
We had two cats at that time, the aforementioned Tigger and his sister, the vastly stupider Kirby. Tigger was perhaps too smart to be the foil in this story.
But Kirby…
The practice then, when moving cats, was to butter the cats’ feet and release them; they’d track butter with their scent everywhere and feel at home in the new house. this we did, and the ctas wandered off to explore.
Some time later, as we were trundling up the slope of the lawn with furniture, a squawking comes around the corner of the house. Into view comes Romeo – and he’s flying. That’s another superpower junglefowl possess over ordinary chickens. more to the point, Romeo is flying carrying a cat.
Not clutching the cat, it appears; but Kirby had her claws sunk firmly into Romeo’s spurs and rough, armored legs. Romeo, small as he was, couldn’t normally fly with a cat hanging off him, even a small cat like Kirby; but this wasn’t flat ground – the yard fell steadily away beneath him as he struggled to keep moving in the face of death. Stunned, we watched the drama play out.
Kirby’s ears were pinned back, but she seemed content to hang on and wait, tail and hind legs dangling and trailing in the grass, as she counted on her weight to drag down this alarmingly spunky bird.
Down the hill plunged Romeo, beating his wings like hell and screaming his ancestral war-cry. Clearly he wouldn’t last much longer, even with the downslope assisting. Kirby hung on tightly and waited for the end.
The green grass rushed past as they swooped down, down, down…directly for the pond.
At the last moment Kirby realized she was being had, and she bailed, landing in the glistening mud right at the water’s edge.
Romeo mustered the strength to gain altitude, flapping across the pond and perching in a tree opposite the immensely unhappy, muddy-footed cat. His neck fan opened triumphantly, his iridescent black-and-green tail swept erect, and he began to strut forward and backward on the branch, bobbing his head. His throat filled out, and “Urrr-urr-urr-urr URRRRRRR!” rang out, saying as plainly as if in English, “I beat a ca-at! I beat a ca-at!”
Neither cat troubled any of the chickens ever again.
