Friday, March 31, 2006

The Einstein of cats

When I went up to go to bed last night, I saw that the top drawer of my dresser was pulled out about half-way, and there was underwear strewn all over the floor, plus, there was underwear on top of the dresser. It looked like someone had been looking for something, pulling things out of the drawer and just throwing them and letting them lay where they landed. I would have thought that I'd been robbed, but I'm pretty sure it was Dinah.

I went into the office and got Bob and told him that I wanted to show him something, just in case it was something that he had done for some reason. He said that he had done some of my laundry, and had put some things in that drawer, but that he knew he had closed the drawer, and he certainly didn't leave everything the way I found it. I should have taken a picture. It was pretty impressive.

Yesterday when I was in the bathroom getting ready for work, Dinah had been working industriously to open up the cabinet under the sink. She worked and worked and worked, and when she didn't have any luck on the larger cabinet doors, she moved over and tried one of the smaller ones for awhile. She wasn't successful, but I have no doubt that one morning we'll walk in and find q-tips and nail polish and all matter of things scattered across the bathroom floor.

We'd seen her working on my dresser before, but she had never before been successful in opening a drawer. I wonder if it was a one-time thing, or if she'll start doing it all the time. My guess is that now that she mastered it, she'll move on to something else.

Another thing she does is she'll go into the bathroom and pull my towel off the towel rack so she can lie on it. But she doesn't just pull it down, she has to pull it down just so, so that it falls around, and over, her. In order to accomplish this, she stands on her back legs and insinuates herself into the towel between the folds. Sometimes she doesn't get it right the first time--if she gets into the towel between the front and the back, it doesn't work right, it just falls in a heap.

If she starts to pull it and it isn't right, she realizes it and stops, comes down, and then goes back up again in the right place. She very carefully pulls at it until it starts to fall, then she crouches down on the floor and lets it billow down around her, then she curls up inside.

Pyewacket has tried it, too. She's seen Dinah doing it, and she tries to emulate her, but she doesn't really understand the mechanics of it. She can pull a towel down, but she just does it by brute force, then looks surprised when it doesn't do what it does when Dinah pulls it down.

Bob says Pyewacket is sweet, but not very bright. Dinah, on the other hand, is the Einstein of cats.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tux really got into the cabinets for a while, and it drove me NUTS. He would open the kitchen ones and get in there with the pots and pans, which made me grossed out of course because I don't want to be cooking on top of surfaces the cat has walked on. He'd do that with the bathroom cabinets, too. You'd be elsewhere and hear a bump-bump-bump of the cabinet door.

I had to resort to baby locks on the kitchen cabinets. He'd still try to get in them, though. That was the last apartment.

At this place, he's not been so bad. It's like when they get something in their little heads, they repeat it over and over, you know?

I think that's sweet about Dinah (and VERY smart!) to pull down your towel. It must be comforting to her to have something that smells like you wrapped around her.

Anonymous said...

Because the place I used to live was so tiny, the only reasonable space for the litter box was the restroom, right next to the commode, and right underneath the TP holder. At some point one of the cats (never could catch anyone at it) decided that TP was a more appropriate covering for her leavings than the sand in the box, and she used to bat the roll until she had several layers of TP folded up over them. I finally had to move the TP holder out of her reach.

Willa said...

I love that! Makes more sense than Dinah in the underwear drawer. :)