Category: Cats

Her new favorite hiding spot

On the windowsill, behind the couch, above the heater...ahhh!

E.K.P.

I think our cats have Extra Kittenly Perception - that special sixth sense that tells them the moment the cleaning ladies leave. See...they’ve brought home and dismantled birds exactly twice in the last month, and the carnage happened to coincide with the days the house got cleaned. As gross as it is, I can’t imagine the cleaning ladies would clean the entire house and leave the feathers. The cats must bring home their prize as soon as they are gone.

Imagine how weird it is to come home to an immaculate, lemon-scented place of refuge...with a spare beak on the bathroom rug.

She did not just do that…

Cat logic: If I can’t work the hook, I’ll just pull it off the door.

[Arrggghh!]

Next step will be to screw the wooden block onto the door. 

More insight into what living with Bentley is like

Every night Bentley gets a little scoop of wet food. We started doing this when he was little as an incentive for him to come home. And it works too: bang a spoon on his little Spanish terracotta dish and he sprints faster than a rabbit running from a greyhound to the kitchen.

Other times, when we forget to feed him his scoop of wet food, he stands in the kitchen, meowing like a Siamese in heat, until we give up the goods. I live in fear that the day we totally ignore him, he’ll resort to drastic measures like the kitty in the above video.

We may not be smarter, but we have opposable thumbs

Our cats are smarter than the average feline. Sure, most pet owners say that about their animals, but ours have figured out how to hook a claw under the cat door when the latch is set on “in only” to pull it open. They’ve also learned how to trip the latch when it’s completely locked so they can go in and out as they please. And if we cover the door with tape to thwart them while we’re on vacation, they understand that the only thing between them and freedom is some flimsy packing tape. No problem. Just remove it!

All of this has been mildly frustrating, especially since we like to exercise some control over when they are allowed to go outside. We hadn’t really made up our minds, though, to do anything about it yet.

Then Saturday morning arrived…

At 4 a.m. Bentley burst through the door and proceeded to growl at something in the kitchen. I got up, wondering what might have him in a dither. Surprise! Surprise! I found the cat door unlatched and a bear-sized raccoon peering in at me. I hastily latched the door and resolved to “fix” the situation.

This is where the story gets somewhat surreal. Picture Nick and me standing in the lock aisle of the local hardware store on Saturday afternoon discussing the relative cat-proofness of one locking device over another. “No, the cats could get a paw under that one and just unlatch it.” “This deadbolt might be harder to undo, but it’s only a two step process to unlatch it. They’d figure it out eventually.” “What about a combination lock?” “As long as they never learned the combination, we’d be fine.”

We settled on a “safety hook” - the only easy to install device requiring two hands to operate. We may not be smarter than them, but at least we have opposable thumbs.