Smart Cats Strut Their Stuff - When They Want To

Smart cats strut their stuff - when they want to
By Sarah Newman
From the ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Fri 1/20/2006 6:28 PM
Dog lovers will say no. Cats are too dumb to learn tricks.

Cat lovers will say no, too. Cats are SMARTER than dogs. Cats not only learn tricks, they're smart enough to do them only when THEY want to - and when doing them makes some semblance of sense.

Take Tommy, the cat who called 911 after his owner fell out of his wheelchair. According to The Associated Press, Gary Rosheisen of Columbus, Ohio, had tried to train his orange-and-tan cat to call 911. But Rosheisen never knew whether the training worked - until Dec. 29, when police appeared at his door to find him lying helpless on the floor, with Tommy sitting calmly by the phone.

Before Labrador lovers call this feline phoner a fluke (or a fraud), consider the case of Tipper, a gray-and-white tabby who also called 911. In this incident, reported by The Associated Press in July 1996, the quick-thinking cat wasted no time using the speed dial to summon the Hillsborough, Fla., sheriff's department to come to his aid when he choked on a flea collar that had caught in his mouth.

Admittedly, Tommy could have used the speed dial, too. And both cats'
life-saving actions could be considered nothing more than coincidences. But one thing is certain: Cats are smarter than many people think they are.

Cats clearly are clever creatures. Some are even creative. Many like to paint, as pointed out by Heather Busch and Burton Silver in "Why Cats

Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics" (Ten Speed Press, 1994).

Then there are cats like the one who lives with "Hotcakes." In response to a query asking readers how smart their cats are, posted recently on the Pet Forum at STLtoday (www.stltoday.com), "Hotcakes" wrote: "I have a cat that I am trying to teach to paint, but he prefers to sculpt instead."

Cats commended in other forum responses, as well as in letters and e-mails to The Tail End, appeared less artistically inclined, although it could be that correspondents simply preferred to point out other aspects of their cats' intelligence. Or talents. To wit:

- Linda Babb of St. Louis spotlighted her cat's Academy Award-worthy acting skills. When Babb first saw the pitiful creature at the Animal Protective Association of Missouri in Brentwood, the cat was wearing a true hangdog look, "sitting in a hunkered-down position facing the back of her cage." If T-Shirt had not looked so truly miserable, Babb would not have adopted the 5-year-old Russian Blue, who is now healthy and beautiful, with a wide-eyed, surprised look and Mona Lisa smile ("further proof of her acting credentials," Babb says).

- A gray tabby named Lucy entertains Donald and Dorothy Rice of St. Louis every night "by standing on her hind legs and waving her front paws toward the kitchen." After she does this three times (the Rices do the counting), she leads them to the kitchen to collect a treat.

- A gray tabby named Patches has made a daytime ritual out of grooming her Yorkshire terrier roommate, Morgie, and a nighttime ritual out of playing fetch using knotted rubber bands. When Thomas Lanham of St. Louis retires for the night, Patches brings her self-designed toy to his bedside for him to toss into the tub in the adjacent bathroom, where she then runs to retrieve it, over and over and over. If she places her toy too far from his reach, Lanham will tell her to bring it closer, which she does. If Lanham stays up too far past his usual bedtime, Patches starts carrying rubber bands into the family room and dropping them at his feet.

- Della and Diva are such die-hard indoor cats, they won't go outside even when the door is left open. So when Della suddenly insisted on going out the back door one cold afternoon, Paul Scott of Springfield, Ill., was perplexed. When the agitated cat started to meow loudly, which was way out of character, Scott and his wife decided to let her go and follow her.

Della immediately bolted toward the neighbor's yard and jumped over the fence. Running after her, the Scotts opened the gate and found Della walking around their neighbor's elderly father, who had fallen off the porch and could not get up.

- When a kitten named Petey joined the household of James and Sandra Milsin of Kansas City, only-cat Oliver was not amused. When Petey discovered Oliver's toy box full of neglected catnip treasures, the lord of the manor was downright distraught. When the toys in the box began to disappear, the Milsins thought Petey was simply transplanting them. When the box turned up empty, a thorough search - conducted at ground level because Petey was too small to jump onto high surfaces - produced only one or two of the missing toys. When new toys were purchased, they, too, disappeared. Then someone removed a book from atop a high bookcase. Out fell several cat toys. A high-level search revealed more toys. Oliver obviously had not wanted to share his toys - or let the tiny intruder have any new ones, either. Today, three years later, the two felines are best friends who even share their food bowls.

- Casey, "an abandoned shelter foundling" pressed into service as a hardworking barn cat, is an audience-loving performer at heart. When Andrea Kern of Fenton took Casey into her home, he eagerly joined her in her stair-climbing exercises and enjoyed interacting with pull toys and games of hide-and-seek and chase. He learned to jump through a Hula-Hoop, and he loves to let Kern pull him around in a laundry basket, "so much so that when guests arrive, he automatically jumps in his basket and unfailingly performs his routine."

- When Paula Jo Anderson's sister moved in with her, her dog, Rolly, had trouble adjusting to Anderson's small apartment while the women were at work. He became noisy, restless and destructive - until Anderson's cat, Golda, began to turn on the radio.

The women noticed the change in Rolly's behavior. But they could not figure out how a radio that had been turned off when they left for work would be turned on when they returned. They finally discovered Golda's button-pushing act while watching through the window.

The noiseless apartment probably made Rolly nervous, so the conversation and music from the radio helped comfort him, wrote Anderson, of Springfield, Ill. She believes that the ever-observant, quick-learning Golda had noticed the difference in Rolly's behavior when she jumped up on the table to get away from him and accidentally hit the radio's on button.

- A California-born black cat named Cali from Florissant likes to track the fish on Debbie Rowe's computer screensaver. When a fish he is eyeing swims off the screen, "he walks behind the computer monitor and looks for it,"

then looks at Rowe "as if to say, 'Where did it go? I can't find it.'"

- Every evening Mark and Joyce Rockhold of Union put a dab of ice cream in a saucer and say to their cat, "Tankie, here is your ice cream." And every evening, Tankie gives them "a nice big yawn" of gratitude. Sometimes Tankie meows his thanks, but the meow always turns into a yawn, "which is even cuter."

- Diane Earhart of Belleville has a Russian Blue mix named Blue Max, who is diabetic and on a feeding schedule. Earhart is often on the computer in the evening when Max starts to beg for food. He doesn't react to such computer prompts as "you've got mail" or "file's down," but as soon as he hears "goodbye," Earhart says, "he's on his feet and meowing and running to his food bowl because he knows I'm right behind him to feed him."

- A kitten named Kali quickly learned to open cabinet doors by watching her big brother, a tabby named Rudy. Now age 2, the little Balinese still hasn't figured out how to get past the sliding door to the pantry, where the cat treats are stashed. But if Mary Fogarty of Chesterfield leaves the pantry door open before going to bed, Kali the cat burglar not only helps herself to a midnight snack, she drags the treat pouch into the bedroom "to show off her 'catch.' "

- Romeo, a sly Siamese who lives in St. Louis with Cathy Soete, was about 6 months old when he suddenly started an after-dinner exercise routine. He'd toss a potholder into the air, chase it, then toss it again. What Soete could not figure out was where Romeo was getting the potholders.

"I stored them in a drawer," she wrote, "and I knew he couldn't open the drawer."

At least that's what she thought until she spied on him and learned his trick. The clever kitten first used his paws to pull open the door of the cabinet beneath the potholder drawer. Next, he walked over the pots and pans to the back of the cabinet, where he stood on his hind legs and used his front paws to push open the drawer from behind. Then he walked back out over the pots and pans, jumped up on the kitchen counter and fished his potholder out of the open drawer.

- "Sunchaser," from the Pet Forum, has a cat that prefers to dine off place mats, and a grandcat that always starts to purr as soon as someone starts to light a fire in the fireplace.

- A clever cat belonging to forum user "Kevrab" digs plastic newspaper wrappers out of the trash and uses them to play slip-and-slide on the hallway floor.

- Molly from the Pet Forum has a new cat who walks around the house carrying articles of clothing, just "like a dog."

- "Saucy," another forum user, used to have a cat that liked to sit next to the phone, which was close to the stove, which was warm, which makes sense.

The weird thing was that the cat would "always meow and jump down about 2 seconds before the phone would ring."

- Jeanette Pratt of St. Louis has two cats, Buddy and Misty, who follow her wherever she goes. Misty also plays fetch using the plastic rings off orange juice bottles. Misty places the retrieved ring at Pratt's feet, and if Pratt doesn't pick it up right away, Misty jumps up and drops it in her lap.

- Mark Kowelman of St. Louis has a cat who "is so smart, he has three names he answers to." Wiley (aka Budzy and Pita) also plays fetch and keep-away, and he sits and rolls over on command.

- Two years ago, Derek Wineman and Julie Newton of St. Louis took in a pregnant cat and made her a bed in the living room at the opposite end from the Christmas tree. One of her three thumb-sized kittens was not well, and three days after it was born, the mother moved it to the end of the bed, where it later died. That night, before they went to bed, Wineman and Newton checked on their feline family and found a silk angel ornament from their tree lying where the kitten had been. They returned it to the tree.

The next morning it was back in the basket. And there it stayed.

"We decided that if the ornament somehow represented her missing kitten,"
the couple wrote, "the young cat could keep her angel there as long as she wanted."