Comments on: The Mystery of Cats

By: WereBear

WereBear — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:29:32 +0000

I don’t think your cat scientist was too far wrong. I love the way my cats often regard me as an Inadequate Cat.

By: Kidspeak

Kidspeak — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 05:37:34 +0000

I had the pleasure of working with a genuine “cat scientist”, who frequently pooh-poohed that sort of dim-witted article. His lab cats were plenty smart, (and plenty spoiled, too). As he said “we think we’re training them and not succeeding, but as we try and fail to understand them, they’ve trained us to pat them, feed them goodies, play on demand, and pretty much get us to do their bidding.” He once told me that he figured his cats saw him as this large, mostly hairless, loveable but rather clueless odd-shaped beast.

By: Abby

Abby — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:58:19 +0000

They need to meet my cat, who I taught to bat a bell whenever she wanted my bedroom door opened. And apparently they’ve never seen a toilet-trained cat or a cat who can open a door.

Have these people never seen YouTube videos?

By: WereBear

WereBear — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:45:14 +0000

So much wisdom in The Onion. And I agree with Bill; this is lousy science.

By: Oldcat

Oldcat — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:22:46 +0000

The Onion did a parody of this kind of study a while ago: “Babies are stupid”

By: Bill the Splut

Bill the Splut — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:00:31 +0000

“Cats weren’t cooperative in our study, so we can’t study them”? WTF kind of scientist is that? “And toddlers with cancer can’t fill out our questionnaires! Therefore, toddlers with cancer don’t deserve chemo.”

Maybe they should try the experiment with pet rodents, like guinea pigs. I’ll bet that they too score low on the “do what we want them to do in a lab” quotient. “The gerbil did NOT fetch the frisbee! We rate this pet: terrible!”

I have no idea which, if any, pets the guys who did this study have, but they either have none, or have ones that bark, drool a lot, and need their poop picked up.