And the number of the counting shall be three

[lydy]

So, I bought a Kong for my cats. It's a slightly irregularly shaped ball that screws open and you put treats inside. There's a hole, and as the cat knocks it about the treats fall out. They promptly lost it, so I bought two more. Then the first one showed back up. It gives Arwen an interest in life, and she is incredibly cute about it. Ninja also thinks this is a fine game. I tend to fill them up morning and evening. I fill up whichever ones I can find, so anything from zero to three, depending. And when those suckers go missing, they really go missing. Cannot find them for love nor money. I genuinely cannot imagine where they hide them.

But for about a week, now, all three are consistently easily findable. Sometimes, they've been herded together, waiting for me. Which leads me to believe that the cats (in this case, Arwen and/or Ninja, since the other two don't care about the treats) have figured out that I don't fill the ones I can't find. This speaks rather well for their powers of deduction, and I wonder if it also suggests that they can count to three. No idea.

Of course, one of the problems with trying to measure the intelligence of cats is that, unlike dogs, cats don't really care what you think. Dogs will perform various tasks because they are anxious to please. Cats have a vast and deep well of apathy, and simply will not bother to do things that don't interest them. So designing intelligence tests for them turns out to be hard, it is often not possible to distinguish between incapable and disinterested. But treat balls? Boy is Arwen interested. Vastly, deeply interested.

Comments

[mle292.livejournal.com]

If you see three of something, you don't count them, you just see three. If you see fifteen of something, you probably count.

Somewhere I read that cats have concepts up to about sevenness.

[wookiemonster.livejournal.com]

This process is called "subitizing." We subitize up to five. But yes, cats can count and can tell who has more and so on.

[wookiemonster.livejournal.com]

They aren't "hiding" them so much as secreting them away to their secret lab for analysis. I'm guessing you haven't found the lab yet, either...

[laurel]

Cats are goofy.

We figure there must be portals only cats know about or something given the way they can hide certain items so completely at times. And also suddenly appear or disappear as convenient (to cats).

Today Isbjorn complained about the weather, as if I could control it. Or at least that's how I interpret the plaintive sound he made after venturing onto the porch for the first time today.

[guppiecat]

For a long time, we joked that my big orange cat was gay because he would put the differently coloured sparkley balls in the rooms where the carpets matched them best.

Many years later, I realized that he probably just didn't see them as well there and got distracted by something he could see better, batting it out of the room.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Aoife's response to a treat ball was to hurl it down stairs until it sprang apart, this being much more efficient than that tedious rattling process.

Since it also took her about a second and a half to leap for my hand, rather than the projected red dot of the laser pointer, I should not have been surprised.