Channel-surfing through Netflix recently, I stumbled upon a documentary called "Inside the Mind of a Cat." It's an hour-long excuse to watch cute cat videos while world-reknowned cat behaviorists try to answer questions like: What are cats thinking? Are cats intelligent? Do our cats love us?
I learned a great deal from this show. Primarily, I learned that "cat behaviorist" is my new dream job and a racket I'm up for joining. It looks like they get paid a decent amount of money to hang out with cats and come up with new and exciting ways to state the obvious: cats are weird.
NO ONE can tell what cats are thinking. I'm pretty sure cats don't know what cats are thinking. I sometimes wonder if cats are even capable of thinking.
I have two cats who are gracious enough to allow me to share their house. Isobel is about to turn 19. Being a geriatric cat, one might assume she's full of wisdom and grace. Nope. She's every as bit as doofy as she was the day I adopted her. My other cat was a neighborhood stray who casually walked through my door one day like, "Oh, hi. I live here now. Food, please."
By and large, my cats are pretty boring, and I'm cool with it. Izzy's old and prefers snuggling to playing. If I dangle a toy in front of the other one, she just looks at me like, "Get real, dude. I lived outside chasing REAL mice for years. Don't insult my intelligence."
Are my cats smart? It's up for debate. Are they weird? Absolutely.
Isobel has never touched human food in 19 years, not even milk or tuna. All she wants is standard Cat Chow, which she methodically removes from the bowl one piece at a time and politely eats. She's a dainty girl -- until yesterday.
Last night, I made pasta and paired it with a baguette and a small plate of olive oil, parmesan, and cracked pepper for dipping. I took everything to the table and went back for some water. I turned around in JUST enough time to see Izzy diving headfirst into the dipping plate. By the time I could even react, she turned to me with a face COVERED in olive oil and just sauntered off like this WASN'T the weirdest thing she'd done in years. She then spent the next hour in oily cat heaven, trying to lick her own face off while purring louder than I've heard in years. Positively inexplicable, but I figure she's made it to 19, so she's earned the right to dive headfirst into whatever she fancies.
As for my OTHER cat, purring and meowing aren't in her wheelhouse. When she wants something, she opts to make ghoulish noises that fall somewhere between squeaks, gasps, rasps, and wheezes. Imagine if Gizmo from Gremlins was a chain smoker, and you'd be close. I once asked my vet, "is this cat broken?" "Nope," she reassured me, "she just has a VERY unique meow." She's a perfectly normal, affectionate cat who just happens to sound like a demon.
But then an odd thing happened. She jumped onto my lap one day, looked me square in the eye, and let out a perfectly normal meow. "Umm," I exclaimed in open-mouthed shock. "You can meow?" She looked at me again and meowed like a normal cat. Then she barfed all over my lap. All this time, I thought there was something physically wrong that made her sound like a demon. Nope, she CHOOSES to make those noises. If you come over and my cat meows at you pleasantly, you are about to be vomited on. She only sounds like a normal cat right before she pukes.
I'm typing this from my couch. Six feet away, my cats are sitting on opposite sides of the living room, cold staring at me. It's as if their brains are in the OFF position. They've been at it for fifteen minutes now, and it's officially become awkward. I have no idea what they want. Food, water, and litter are provided. I have offered skritches to no avail.
The only thing I can surmise is that they're judging me. Perhaps my cats are world-reknowned human behaviorists. Maybe when I'm at work, they're off giving lectures to other cats about whether or not humans are capable of love.
"When you allow your human to eat, make them work for their food. If you don't, your human could become overweight and have difficulty navigating through tight spaces. Next slide, please. In this image, you see our overweight human. He is neither stalking prey nor marking his territory. Instead, this poor creature spends most evenings lying in a prone position, struggling to sharpen his claws on a scratching post he calls a 'Microsoft Surface Pro.' He doesn't even make normal human sounds. He usually just giggles and in a high-pitched squeak refers to us as his 'widdy biddy kitties.' Humans are weird."
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