3 ms·

Not to discredit cows, but I wanted to insert an anecdatum about my cat: she was terrified of leaving my apartment, which I found out once when a friend carried

Not to discredit cows, but I wanted to insert an anecdatum about my cat: she was terrified of leaving my apartment, which I found out once when a friend carried her outside and let the door close. The cat ran to the door and immediately started leaping to try to manipulate the door handle. She failed, of course, but she could only have known how it worked by observation, and I'm sure that with a bit of time and a body physically capable of manipulating a handle she would have gotten it.

EamonnMR 5y ago
I have a similar anecdote about my cat. He tried to twist the handle but couldn't get enough traction with his paw pads (it was a round handle.)
nonameiguess 5y ago
I have a weight against my door right now because my cat can open it. And I definitely never intentionally taught him to. He has also gotten through a bungy-corded cabinet door when there was food behind it, opened a Talenti screw top container once to get the leftover ice cream inside. The last one was in the middle of the night so I have no idea how he did it without opposable thumbs, but don't underestimate food motivation in some of these animals. I saw him figure out how to open a screw top large food bin made for holding pet food, one where the screw top was big enough that you don't need thumbs. He just kept trying, over and over and over for hours, until it worked. And that was just the time I saw, not counting however many months before he had done exactly the same thing when I wasn't around. We now need to use a food container with a padlock. He can't get into that. But he still tries. Kicks it onto the floor, pushes it around, pulls at every pawhold that can be pulled on. There's a sort of infinite monkeys thing where they can just try every possible approach until something works.
praptak 5y ago
There was a hacker story about cat getting around the security of an automatic cat feeder, which shows that cats can be very clever when they have the motivation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230904

EamonnMR 5y ago

I have a similar anecdote about my cat. He tried to twist the handle but couldn't get enough traction with his paw pads (it was a round handle.)

nonameiguess 5y ago

I have a weight against my door right now because my cat can open it. And I definitely never intentionally taught him to. He has also gotten through a bungy-corded cabinet door when there was food behind it, opened a Talenti screw top container once to get the leftover ice cream inside. The last one was in the middle of the night so I have no idea how he did it without opposable thumbs, but don't underestimate food motivation in some of these animals. I saw him figure out how to open a screw top large food bin made for holding pet food, one where the screw top was big enough that you don't need thumbs. He just kept trying, over and over and over for hours, until it worked. And that was just the time I saw, not counting however many months before he had done exactly the same thing when I wasn't around. We now need to use a food container with a padlock. He can't get into that. But he still tries. Kicks it onto the floor, pushes it around, pulls at every pawhold that can be pulled on. There's a sort of infinite monkeys thing where they can just try every possible approach until something works.

praptak 5y ago

There was a hacker story about cat getting around the security of an automatic cat feeder, which shows that cats can be very clever when they have the motivation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230904