“Your cat may be even smarter than you think” read a rather alarming headline on the Hill’s pet food website.
Only up to a point, dudes.
Stringing me along
Luna looked at me indifferently as I dangled a string in front of her.
“Come on, girl,” I urged. “Let’s play with your string!”
She yawned. “I haven’t been playing with it. I was using it to test string theories.”
“Oh really,” I said, humoring her. “I didn’t know, Luna, that you’re interested in physics.”
“One must keep abreast of the scientific issues of the day,” Luna opined, rolling over to display her own marshmallow-white breast.
“I’d already rejected Bosonic,” she continued, “because of the tachyon issue, but what of the other four theories? After deep thought and complicated calculations, I’ve come down on the side of IIA.”
It was time to call her bluff. “Which is … ”
“Supersymmetry between forces and matter, closed strings only, and massless fermions spinning both ways. That is, nonchiral,” she added kindly, to make it more clear for me. She rolled back onto her belly and began licking her left front paw.
To bee or not to bee?
“Oh. Well, how about this?” I reached back into her toys basket and pulled out a stuffed bee on a black elastic string. “You used to love playing with your bee.”
“Only as an aide-mémoire while I pondered Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ from The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Why did he opt to punish musicians with those nearly uninterrupted runs of chromatic sixteenth notes?”
“I’ve often wondered that,” I lied.
“And the lyrics – ‘Ну, теперь, мой шмель, гуляй, судно в море догоняй’ – absurd! A bee couldn’t possibly follow a ship at sea! And then I remembered that Nikolai was an officer in the Imperial Russian Navy. He loved the sea, so he’d be keen to work that into his operas, and as a military man, he was doubtless used to punishment.”
“Yes, of course.” I dropped the bee in the toys basket, silently resolving to look up Rimsky-whatis on Wikipedia at the nearest opportunity. “Well, Luna, you still need some exercise. How about I put on your leash and harness and take you outside?”
“I don’t think my harness will fit you.”
When she’d finished laughing at her own joke, I got her buckled in and we strolled out into the front yard.
Snail mail
“Your Viburnum macrocephalum isn’t flowering,” she remarked. “Have you checked it for Botrytis and Verticillium wilt?”
I was beginning to feel a bit peeved. “Why don’t you do that now?”
“I’m a cat, not a gardener. Ah, here’s the mailwoman, reliable representative of one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the U.S. Constitution. She comes most carefully upon her hour, as Francisco says in Hamlet.”
The mailwoman handed me a PG&E bill, a magazine, and a couple of Netflix disks.
“Cute kitty,” she said. “Cats are so adorable, aren’t they?”
“Brrr,” purred Luna, rubbing against her leg.
“Not as smart as dogs, of course, but – ”
I yanked at the leash before Luna could bite her.
Journalism
“She is unfit to serve in the organization for which Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General,” sniffed Luna, as the mailwoman walked off to continue her appointed rounds. “So, what’s in this week’s New Yorker?”
“Let’s see. Adam Gopnik’s done an article about the backlash against neuroscience.”
Luna’s tail switched impatiently. “The argument for the plasticity of neural networks has much to recommend it, but cut to the chase: how many cat cartoons?”
I flipped through the pages. “Centaur, whale, two vultures, two anteaters, and a dog. No cats.”
The tail was lashing now. “I must write to Remnick again. Journalistically, the Tina Brown years were a bit of a wasteland, but at least she never rejected a cat cartoon. I should know. I submitted most of them.”
Nipped in the bud
“Let’s go into the back yard,” I suggested. “I’ve done some new planting there – I’d like to get your opinion.”
“The time to get my opinion is before you plant,” admonished Luna, padding along behind me. “I could have told you not to plant an Hydrangea paniculata in the shade. How much money did you waste on that? Enough to keep me in Greenies treats for weeks.”
I opened the gate and we walked into the back yard. Luna hadn’t been there for quite awhile. “There,” I said, pointing. “Where the bush with the red flowers used to be.”
“The Pelargonium hortorum? Another of your failures. You didn’t fertilize it enough. I told you — What’s this?” She walked up to the new foliage and began sniffing.
That was six hours ago. I just checked, and she’s still lying in the bed of Nepeta cataria, singing “Roll me over, in the clover, roll me over in the clover and do me again.” And giggling.
Even a smart cat can be outsmarted.
