james_nicoll

They have you trained.

+1

awwww!

Barry brings us paper sometimes. This was especially good when it was currency.

Yeah, it's pretty clear that one of the two cats is the serious, thoughtful problem-solver and the other one is the very, very pretty one who sometimes falls off the couch because he's too pretty to learn about edges.

(although Ophelia, no dummy, had an Edge Catastrophe last night where she somehow managed to misjudge the distance between my bed and window and step off into the gap)

You are living a live-action Two Lumps comic strip?

Has he brought you a lot of currency?

A half-dozen bills. Unfortunately, most of them were Chinese, so I have no idea what they're worth.

Also, we don't let him out, so he's just picking up bills that have been dropped on the floor. I'm trying to figure out how to train him to go through wallets and purses when people visit.

Have him watch Soupy Sales.

Moral: you have impractical Chinese friend(s)? Unless they're yours.

On the plus side, if someone overthrows the government of whichever China they're from, they'll be collectible. You should work on that.

Well...dang. Fiddler only brings me dead rats. Zoe brings me live frogs and snakes, but I still can't buy anything with them.

wait, did you inadvertently teach the cat to play fetch?

Someone got trained but I am not 100% sure it was the cats.

Zoe, the more vengeful of my two, once put a live cicada in my shoe. Cicadas, for the uninformed, buzz loudly and angrily when one goes to put on shoes they are in, producing potential heart attack moments for early morning and still not-quite-awake shoe put-er-on'ers.

Of course, her predecessor put a live rat in my bed, so I suppose I shouldn't complain.

You have exciting cats.

And the cats apparently wish they had a more excited human.

Apparently one live rat *or* live cicada has enough energy to move a human to a more excited state.

Nefer likes to carry a toy around and meow for attention--this is not an unusual cat behavior. We have found, however, that sometimes when we're gone, we will find the toy in front of the door to the garage, as if she sat there for a while and meowed for us to come home. My mom pointed out that she probably thinks we spend all day in the garage, since she never sees us get in the car and leave the garage.

Awwwwwwwww. :(

I know! I feel a little guilty every time I see it! (Luckily my husband telecommutes, so most of the time someone's at home to entertain the cats).

That's good then.

What you need to do is have the door remain open once when you get into the car and drive away. Someone should hold the cat, of course.

Alas, she haaaates being held in any way!

I've had a couple of cats who learned to play fetch--or rather, they learned that if they chased something and brought it back to me, I'd throw it again until they got bored and went off to do something else. Both of them figured it out spontaneously.

Nar does something very similar: when he wants playtime, he brings me toys. He prefers human-interaction toys, though (strings on sticks, generally), so if I throw a toy for him, he usually looks at the toy, looks at me, and broadcasts "Okay, now it's time for you to play with *me*, right?"

Pan, on the other hand, hides toys under the couch. All of them. It's like anti-fetch.

Yeah, I currently have a cat who plays fetch with q-tips, and used to have one who played fetch with baby carrots.

Congratulations to the cats on the success of their training methods!

Well done, kitlets!

I forget who it was (Dorothy Parker maybe) who said, "I don't understand why people get so excited about pets. A dog is a dog, a fish is a fish, a bird is a bird, and a cat is a person."

Awwwww!

I'm sorry, I have nothing more intelligent to say.

I suspect you are another victim of the following: http://xkcd.com/231/

. . . and the monkey gets another lesson.

to quote Eddie Izzard on the Pavlov's Cat Experiment:

"Day 33: Cat rings bell, I put down food."

Well done, those cats.

For a long time our Sparkie would play fetch. Some times she would initiate fetch by bringing a toy. A couple of mornings we woke up to the bed being covered with every fetchable toy in the house. After that she lost interest. A toy would be chucked, and she would watch it with a "hah, not falling for *that* again" look on her face.

But she *luuuurved* Sparkie Ball: a long hallway, a ball, and a person with a hitting device for smacking the ball up and down the hallway. She would zoom off down the hallway after the smacked ball, and then wait at the other end for the human to walk down and smack it again. Zoom. When she got tired, she would retire to one of the doorways along the middle of the hallway and watch the human walking back and forth hitting the ball. She would do that headroll and spinning eyeballs thing that cats do when something zooms by and they are interested, but she wouldn't actually pursue the ball. I think she was trying to see how many times she could get the human to go up and down the hall without her.

This whole comment thread is reminding me irresistibly of the old Siamese-cat books Doreen Tovey wrote. Unfortunately, I haven't read any of them for many years now, as they were at the East Cleveland Public library in the stacks, and I am no longer in East Cleveland and I understand those stacks are now not open to casual library users the way they were before the Internet started stealing random words out of books and posting them where the world could see. Or whatever the rationale was.

--Dave

It looks like the books are (back?) in print? http://www.amazon.com/Doreen-Tovey/e/B001HP6Y0C

I had a cat who would play fetch (with coiled pipecleaners).

Unfortunately, her version of the game was to bring it back slightly further away from me each time, to see how far she could get me to walk over to pick it up and throw it again.