Cats are stupid. Not your run-of-the-mill dumb, not dim, not thick, but stupid. Eggplants and doorknobs beat them all hollow for intelligence. I have a toothpick with more cranial capacity than the average cat.

You might be confused here: I mean really stupid. Dumber than you’d be if you stuck your tongue on top of a Tesla coil to see if it was charged. Look, in case there’s any ambiguity left, let me be explicit: If an IQ could get as low as zero, cats would rate negative.

Every night when I come home from work, Ki’y runs up to my car to greet me. First mistake. I’ve almost run over her three times in the past week. She mewls a greeting and tries to jump into my lap as I’m getting out of the car. Second mistake. By the time she makes her jump, I’m already standing up and shutting the car door. I’ve almost caught her tail in the door twice now. So she rubs against me to express affection or hunger (same trope). Third mistake. I hate cat hair on my suit.

So we enter the house. She does her best to trip me as we walk up to the door. She has succeeded more than once. (And she expects me to feed her soon. Smart cat, eh?)

Once inside, she rushes straight to her bowl and howls. Her bowl is always full (I’m very good about that), and it’s always full of exactly the same thing. Last Christmas I bought a 20-lb bag of generic cat food. We have 15 pounds to go, and she knows it. There are no surprises here. I’ve discussed it with her, at great length, every night. But she acts surprised, disappointed, and hurt.

She makes a great show of being finicky. She sniffs at her food. I rub her neck and make encouraging noises. She nibbles daintily, then spits it out. I make more noises; I cajole her. She ignores me and begins complaining that I am starving her to death. I tell her to eat the damned food or get a one-way ticket to the pound. She ignores the warning tone of my voice and begins to complain in earnest.

She howls.

She begs.

She whines.

She gives me The Look.

She makes a great show of being finicky.

Every night, it’s the same routine. Every night, she just won’t eat what’s in her bowl. Every night, I threaten to have her euthanized, or to make guitar strings out of her. And every night, she refuses to eat it, and tells me at the top of her lungs that I am personally responsible for all the ills of the world in general, and for her lack of suitable food in particular.

What choice do I have?

Every night I capitulate. I take her dish of food and dump it into a bag. Then I fill her dish with the food I just dumped into the bag and give it back to her.

She purrs loudly, and happily eats it.

Cats are stupid.

Story Notes

I've had several cats at one time or another. All are dead now, and most have been named Ki'y (short for kitty and pronounced like "key").

I once had a pair of identical kittens named This One and That One, which made identification easy. "Which one is that?" an unsuspecting guest would ask. "This One," I'd say, careful to pronounce the capital letters. Or, "This one," I'd say, leaving the capitals off. Hey, it amused me. Both of them were surnamed Either One and nicknamed The Other One. So, no matter which cat I referred to, it was always correctly named.

The Ki'y in this story was House Ki'y, a tattered old tom that belonged to everyone and no one. My brother's family made the mistake of feeding it, and it therefore adopted them. When they went on a two-week holiday one year, I took it to my house and taught it to live indoors (hence House Ki'y), and it liked the arrangement so much that it adopted me.