My cats don’t appear to be interested in escaping to the outside world. The tunneling is from the living room to the closet or to the bedroom. What really scares me is that they have meetings at the door. Sometimes three of them will put their heads together. Then two of them walk away and Quicksilver starts with the digging. We’ve had this carpeting for 13 months, and it has been ripped up for half that time. So now we simply can’t close the doors.
However, the motorcycle thing…that concerns me. I’ll have Mr. K remove the spark plugs. You can’t be too careful.
Our cats do this with regular doors, as long as they haven’t been closed far enough for the latch to engage.
Midnight knows tha you have to turn the handle to open the outside door, but never got any further than batting the top of the knob. Now that there’s no longer a table near the door, and her back legs have gotten arthritic, it’s not likely she’ll try to go any further than that.
Exactly!!! they don’t “appear” to be interested in escaping to the outside world.
Well neither did Steve McQueen, Big X, James Coburn, etc, etc and we all know what happened there don’t we?
As for them putting heads together, this is easy explained.
The 2 that walk off are A) Scroungers B) Forgers whilst Q) the digger is obviously a decoy.
Keep your wits about you my friend and treble the guards.
At this stage manned machine gun towers should be kept in mind.
My Princess has learned how to be dignified about it–she’ll stand on her hind legs, put one paw on the doorframe to balance, and either push the door open with her paw if it swings outward, or curl her claws into the edge of the door and pull it open.
Of course Aleksandra is convinced she’s four-legged people, too.
My cat got really efficient at opening doors, I would come home to her sitting atop the aquarium gazing down at the tasty fishhies. I used small shock cords to hold the doors shut, so you could listen to the bump of her jumping up and hanging off the doorknob, then the click and clatter of the knob turning, then the frantic scratching with the hind claws against the doorframe. Then whne the force of the bungee overcame the cats ability to hold the doorknob, the simultaneous splat of falling cat and the slam of the door reclosing…priceless humor.
Then I moved, and I don’t think she has realized that the new doors work the same as the old doors. The new ones are painted white, not natural wood, like the old ones
Wow, you guys are depressing me with your stories of cats with two brain cells to rub together. My dumb kitty can’t even remember how to get through an **open **door. Seriously. We have two doors to our bedroom, and she ALWAYS stands outside the closed east door, meowing pitifully, rather than walk ten feet around the corner to the north door, which is always open.
:smack:
I have 5 cats. Three of the five have double paws. One, I’m convinced, has quadruple paws; they’re the size of catchers mitts and make her walk funny.
I live in fear of the day they learn to use those “thumbs” they have.
That said, they have yet to learn that while I don’t shut my door all the way, sometimes it is indeed closed most of the way. There’s a curtain hanging in the doorway, but running into it full speed is probably not the best way to ascertain whether or not the door is fully open.
One (the female) of them can open any door (except those latched by a handle), cupboard doors, and the outside screen door on our three season porch, are no issue, either in or out of the porch.
The other one, who is quite a bit more adventurous, will just stand there and look at the door. He’s watched her open it from both sides more times than I could count, but refuses to try to open it himself. He’ll stay outside the porch, in the pouring rain, and wail, but won’t nudge the door open to get some shelter. I used to think he was the smart one, but I’ve been proven wrong all too many times. He’s just brave, which I think is often a sign of stupidity!
We also had a smart kitty named Tybalt who could use a doorknob. For awhile we lived in a house with interior doorknobs that didn’t offer much resistance. We hadn’t lived there more than a month before the cat figured it out. He’d walk up to it, stand up on his hind legs, brack one front paw on the door frame and hook the other over the top of the knob. Presto! He didn’t have any claws, either.
I’ve got one who walks through the house…EVERY DAY…usually two or three times…mourning the “dead kitten” which really a silly little mouse-shaped toy. And eeeeeeevery day I tell her: “You were fixed. You never had kittens. It’s not really dead.” But she persists. Crying, pacing, carrying on. It’s sad, actually.
Opening stuff must be the cat IQ test. We have no Mensa candidates in our house - our smarter cat can pull open as well as push open partially open doors. Our not-as-smart cat isn’t going anywhere if she can’t headbutt it open. It a good thing they’re so cute, the little muttonheads.
One of the houses my family lived in when I was growing up had the “lever”-type latches, where you just have to push a lever above a grip to open the door. We had three cats when we lived in this particular house, but only ONE of the three cats (the youngest, who was actually born in the house) figured out that he could open doors by jumping on the thumb lever at the top.
Mr. Kiminy and I acquired a cat soon after moving in together, but the first apartment we lived in with said cat didn’t really have any internal doors. When we moved to a new apartment, she learned very quickly how to open doors that weren’t completely latched (by using her claws to pull open the door from the bottom of the door). She lived with us for almost 18 years, in several different apartments and a house, but she never did learn how to turn door knobs. (I’m sure she understood the concept–she was an exceptionally intelligent cat–but she never figured out how she might be able to overcome the lack of an opposable thumb.)
We have two cats now, but neither of them have even learned how to pull open a door that isn’t latched shut if they are on the “in” side of the door. One of them can push an unlatched door in to the room he wants to enter, but the other is completely clueless if the door appears to be closed.
