So last night, my husband was giving our son dinner in the dining room while I straightened up the kitchen a bit (I’m recovering from a stomach flu bug, so I couldn’t handle feeding the kid).
My dad called, I answered the phone, and he and I started talking. All of a sudden, I heard this:
“Mrooow?”
A plaintitive little girly-cat cry, so I immediately knew it was my boy cat, Oscar. (He’s, um, a somewhat feminine cat.)
I looked around for him. He wasn’t shut in the basement. He wasn’t shut in the office. He wasn’t trapped behind a baby gate. He was nowhere to be found, but that cry sounded like he was right in the kitchen with me.
Yet we heard it again.
“Mrooeoeoeoew!”
And we were stumped. I spent the next five minutes on the phone with my dad saying “I have no idea where he is.” while the poor cat wailed and wailed.
Then I remembered one of the last places I’d been before I heard him cry.
Dumbass cat had crawled into the cabinet under the pantry that I’d opened to get some fruit for my son - two shelves 6 inches tall - and was trapped on top of the napkins on the bottom shelf of the cabinet.
I pulled open the doors, and he came strolling out, glaring at me as if the whole thing was MY fault. :rolleyes:
The sad thing? OSCAR is the smart cat out of my two. :smack:
Mona (our younger) has still not figured out that if she sneaks into the bathroom without our noticing, she stands a good chance of being trapped there all day. Same with closets.
I have to be very careful when I open and close the refrigerator because my cat Joey wants to climb in there. Not a good place for kitties to get stuck! He also will climb into the toilet if you leave the lid up. I have no idea why he feels these are places that need to be explored.
Wait until your little one learns he can shut the cat up in places himself. I have to frequently rescue our dog from some shut off room or the basement after my son has been there. I hear a far off bark and think “how long has it been since I have seen the dog?” He also lets the dog outside (luckily our yard is fenced in, but sometimes I do have to play “hunt for the dog” for a while before I find her.) She usually comes out with a sigh, like “this kid did it again”. Poor doggie, wait until our second one is born in December. She will probably pack her bags and move.
Oscar likes to mess with him. He’ll wait until the munchkin is within grabbing distance and then take off flying across the room, and do the same thing. Luckily, the kid thinks it’s hysterical and takes off running after him (he’s 14 months old tomorrow).
Oscar, on the other hand, did NOT think it was so hysterical the one time he neglected to run in time and the kid grabbed handfuls of his fur and squealed (no worries, I got him almost immediately after his hands sank into Oscar’s fur - he didn’t hurt him, just startled him.). It taught Oscar to always look behind himself and not forget to run :D. (We are teaching the little one to be gentle, and not allowing him to grab the cat, but I thought Oscar was going to run, and the kid was too quick that time.). Good cat that we have, he did NOT swat at the kid and just jumped the gate. He’s a very good big brother.
I’m guessing your poor dog will just learn how to shut herself up in rooms to get some peace and quiet .
Sor far he’s been to the grocer store twice and to work with me once.
I’m pretty convinced how he ended up at the barn where I found him is through a secret car ride. He’s declawed and a very people oriented cat (he wouldn’t just wander away) and I believe he went for a ride one day with an unsuspecting previous owner, found himself at the barn, and jumped out. No one at the barn ever claimed him or knew where he came from and they were happy to get rid of him.
Our cat, Art, loves laundry fresh out of the dryer. So much so, he will hiss and swat at people if they dare to try to move him to fold the laundry.
So one day, I went into the bathroom to take a shower. I opened the door to the closet and grabbed a towel. As soon as I moved the towel I hear an angry growl and hiss. It’s a good thing I was about to take a shower because I shit myself (figuratively of course!). I looked in the closet and there was Art staring at me. I could tell by the look on his face that he was very displeased that I interrupted his nap. The funny thing was that I had put the towels in the closet (fresh out of the dryer) more than 2 hrs before that. I don’t know how he snuck in or how I didn’t notice him in there when I shut the door, but he was quite happy to have a warm, dark, soft place to snooze.
We were trying to socialize a feral kitten. One day he just disappeared. Completely. I finally notice that Star, the one cat that was trying to make friends, was hanging around the stove.
I get down to look. Huh, there’s an open gap between the bottom of the stove and the floor. I can’t see in there, but maybe… I got my camera, squeezed my hand in there, and took a couple of pictures.
Yup, he was under the stove. That became his favorite hiding spot until we closed it up.
(no, socializing didn’t take. He got put on a feral cat farm, so at least he’s getting fed. And he’s neutered.)
Bear strolled into the bathroom the other day while I was taking care of business of some kind and rubbed his chin on the edge of the lav cabinet, looking somewhat bored.
“Look, Bear. I can open this door and here’s a whole room you didn’t know about. Yes, it is small, about two feet square, and full of rolls of toilet paper and bars of soap and other bathroom stuff, but this is all new to you.”
He stared into the cabinet with a look of amazement on his face. Seven years he has lived here and he is still discovering new places in the house to explore. He crawled cautiously inside, inspected the soap and toilet paper, decided it wasn’t all that exciting and sauntered back out. I closed the door, and immediately he wanted to go back inside.
Since then he yows at me in when I am in the bathroom, giving me significant looks and standing as close as he can to the cabinet door. As usual, I have created a monster.
Shadow is one of those cats where I can’t open a closet without him having to investigate. Several times I’ve left one of the cabinets in my kitchen open after getting something out and then going to close it later. I then eventually find the cat some time later, as I’ve managed to shut him up, yet again, in the cabinets. I think the funniest story is that the bathroom has one of those little built-in places where I can put a clothes hamper in and then just open a little hinged cover to put clothes in. Thing is, the big door for hamper access doesn’t actually lock shut (probably a safety feature). Anyway, one day I came home and found the bathroom door shut. Shadow had managed to open the hamper door causing the hamper to fall out and close the bathroom door. He managed to get himself stuck in there for several hours. On the plus side, that’s where I keep his litterbox.
Little grey Mere loves to jump into the bathtub. We have a transparent shower curtain, which is streaked with hard water deposits, so it’s not crystal clear. Mere GETS LOST IN THE BATHTUB. We have to open the shower curtain to let her out. She can’t find her way out on her own. If we don’t close the curtains, they get terribly mildewed.
Our cat Uno have a fettish with drawers. I swear she can hear a drawer being opened from half way across the house and must run to investigate what is in said drawer.
The house we live in has no closets and although it is a pain if we did have them I am sure she would get shut in them more times than I could count.
Fez enjoys playing a hearty round of I See You to make his evenings go faster. Fortunately, I am still the Grand First Cat, and can therefor just call out to him, “I see you!”
This, of course is followed by sounds of brr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-OW! as he runs into the room to congratulate me by allowing me to bestow my strokins upon him.
His sister doesn’t like to play the game, so she just pounces on him instead.
My cat, Raven, once managed to get lost in the house for over 24 hours once. My brothers and I had been pulling Christmas decorations out of the attic and hadn’t kept an eye out for her. She snuck in. Now, the attic wasn’t that big, and we heard her meowing, but we couldn’t find her.
Finally, I found that she’d climbed down into the eaves around the house. I hadn’t even known you could get to them through the attic. I had to show her how to get back out. I love my little cat, but she’s not the brightest bulb in the package.
Our Nixie liked to get into the fridge when it was opened. She would crouch on one of the shelves and stare at us. Coaxing her out rarely worked, and trying to grab her was a good way of flipping her from little sucky furball to Rabid Weasel™ mode. We would just close the door and come back in 5-10 minutes, at which point she was usually ready to casually leap out and saunter away. (At age 16, she’s more interested in warm comfy places these days.)
.
