Hair Ties, Cats and the Nature of Intelligence

On a recent night at four in the morning, my cat decided to poke under the covers of my bed with her paws (one and only one claw extended, mind you, positioned precisely to inflict maximum pain to my leg with exquisitely minimal effort) in an attempt to wake me up and feed her. She has me well trained, sad to say. I duly went downstairs, emptied half a can of cat food into her bowl, and stumbled back upstairs to go back to sleep. That’s when I discovered the hair tie.

A few days before, I’d shipped my eldest daughter off with a friend to the wilds of Denver, and in the whirlwind of packing, a striped hair tie had somehow slipped out onto the floor. Not too long thereafter, the cat had declared it a new cat toy. As any cat owner will attest, cat toys are very seldom the things that humans get them to keep their feline companions amused. Instead, they are most typically things that a cat can comfortably carry in its mouth, such as a puffball, a small plastic figurine, or, you guessed it, hair ties and pipe cleaners.

The last time that I had seen this particular (and very distinctive) hair tie, it was in my cat’s food bowl. Again, this is behavior that most cat owners will recognize, and I have seen it interpreted as a sign of territoriality. However, I’m beginning to doubt this interpretation, as that hair tie was no longer in her bowl, but…