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Comment by gHosts | Hacker News Reader

Bollocks.

My cats regularly imagine a future in which I'm going towards the fridge to provide them with food......

...when the reality is I'm going elsewhere and just going to trip over them.

Different take : the cat is trying to coerce you into an early feeding, because it recognizes that you as an entity have the power to make such things happen for it.

I think my cat can count to two.

He only goes outside a leash, and we walk together 2-4 times a day.

The harness has two plastic clips, and he will sit still until the second clip is secured. After that second sound, he will stand and walk to wait near the door.

Cats can count to much more than two. If there are treats on a shelf and our older cat knocks them down, she'll remember how many hit the floor (from the sound) and then not stop looking for them until she's found that many. I suspect being able to keep track of distinct objects is useful when hunting if multiple small prey animals disperse in order to confuse the predator.

I had a mother cat who failed to move one kitten from one nook to another. Is counting a common behaviour?

It might be food/hunting related. I only have a sample size of two cats.

This raises the question what counts as counting (sorry). It could be that the cat interprets two actions not as the multiple of one (thus counting 1 → 2), but as a single event with that exact pattern of sounds (thus interpreting "no event" → "event").

This had me curious. From a brief look it seems counting is not so clearly defined as mathematic skills expected by various milestones. [1]

For example,

> Pre-school - Kindergarten

During this stage, children should begin to:

- count aloud

- compute the number of objects in a group

- understand that a particular number of objects has a fixed value despite the size or nature of those objects

- understand relative size and be able to sort objects by size and shape

- follow a sequence of two- and three-step commands

- be able to perform simple addition and subtraction computations

I believe my cat Pip only can only do the “follow a sequence” ability of these mathematical skills, so even if he can “count” he has a ways to go in developing his math skills.

Fortunately, lack of mathematical skill does not get in the way of my adoration for the animal.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/misunderstoodminds/mathbasics.html

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