You can name a cat whatever you’d like, but they all think their name is “Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty”.

Cat owners and dog owners are equally passionate about their chosen pet, but since I own one of each, I feel qualified to make the observation that cats are smarter than dogs.

Oh, sure, you can train a dog to answer to their given name, catch a Frisbee, fetch a paper, slippers and other such things, but cats have managed to train people.

Think about it. A cat is the only pet that can convince a human to repeatedly get out of their chair and let them back in the house two minutes after they were just let out. This can occur three or four times and the human responds each time without complaining. I suspect that cats do this for their own amusement.

The bottom line is that people own dogs, but cats own people.

Our cat, Spooky, came with the house.

When we purchased our home in summer 2003, I arrived with the first load of boxes and began to stack them in the garage. Suddenly, a beautiful, but mouthy, black cat appeared and began winding between my feet as I tried to work. She talked to me loudly, but I didn’t understand what she wanted. I finally realized that this cat was hungry.

It was after-hours, so I drove to the nearest convenience store and bought an overpriced box of Little Friskies. I returned home, poured some food into a makeshift container made from a small cardboard box, and the cat finally quieted down. “Good,” I thought. “Now, this cat will go home.”

Nope.

She hung around for a week or so and then one day, a blonde girl who appeared to be about 12 rang the doorbell. “Have you seen my cat, Spooky?” she asked. She explained that she was one of the previous residents and that she thought maybe her cat had come back here.

By now, we had become attached to the cat; so letting go of her wasn’t easy. But, we returned her cat to her and she left, one happy little girl.

Two days later as I was unpacking boxes in the garage, I hear a familiar mewing behind me. There was Spooky. This was her house and she was determined to live here. Once again, the little girl returned later that day, retrieved her cat and left.

The next day, the cat came back. But, the little girl never did.

Spooky had told all of the humans what she was going to do, and that was that.

In 2006, a dog we didn’t recognize showed up out of nowhere at our back door on a hot, June day. We welcomed him into our home. You could see where he’d had a collar, it had been removed, and he’d obviously been abandoned near our home. No problem, he would now live with us. He needed a place to stay.

Spooky didn’t like the new company and she disappeared for three days. But, eventually, she came home and slowly warmed up to Bert The Dog. They’re now best buddies.

Spooky is now showing signs of age. She’s not as quick as she used to be at catching the mice, moles and other things cats do to earn their keep. She has to eat a special food, and she sleeps a lot more than she used to.

Cats call the shots in their lives, and humans could learn a lot from them. Like cats, we should listen more to ourselves than to what others tell us we should do and how we should do it.

However, I don’t want to sound as if I think cats are completely selfish. That’s not true at all.

After all, Spooky has allowed us to live in her house for 11 years now.

And she still thinks her name is “Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty”.

©2014 John Moore
For more of John’s musings, visit johnmoore.net/blog