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Comment by i80and | Hacker News Reader

My calico understands that the laser pointer is the object that causes the red dot to appear, and would paw at it when she would want to play with the red dot.

Cats pay attention and put things together!

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I had a cat who would actually pick up the pointer with her mouth and bring it to me when she wanted to play.

My most recent one never bothered with that - intuiting when he wished to play and fulfilling the resulting obligation was my job, and it doesn't do to get too indiscriminately familiar with the help - but he did learn not just what the laser pointer was and looked like, but what the tactile switch under its "on" button sounded like. I liked to sneak the dot up on him when I could, but it very soon became a game of "how quietly can I actuate the switch?" versus "how faint a click can he hear?" - a game I rarely won, especially once he further learned to recognize the distinctive rattle of the batteries moving in the laser pointer case! There are probably bombs easier to defuse than it eventually became to retrieve and activate the laser stealthily enough for the dot to come as a surprise - if nothing else, it was a great opportunity to find out how much I've really learned from a lifetime spent mostly in company with cats.

The thing about tact switches, though, is that they all generally sound quite alike, and he was used to not immediately seeing the dot when he heard one. So, through the latter decade or so of this cat's life, it was quite common for the following sequence of events to play out several times a day:

- I adjust the volume on my phone;

- the cat glances excitedly around the floor, then expectantly at me;

- I hold up the phone for him to see;

- the cat and I simultaneously settle back to what we were doing before.

Confused the hell out of a boyfriend one time.

The key word in the above three posts might be “she” - my two female cats seem much more intelligent and playful than the male ones. (Perhaps because as adults they have to mother and train kittens, unlike more the solitary males?)

I’m puzzled the above comment is being downvoted. Wild feline species are often social for groups of females, and solitary for males. They’re instinctual rather than (like us) cultural animals - it’s entirely possible that male and female domestic cats exhibit different types of social intelligence and playfulness with respect to each other and to humans, and as I said, my (five!) do.

I have an automated feeder for my 2 cats. One has a better time sense than the other and would camp out and devour both bowls when it dispensed.

We got a timer and set it to chime when the feeder went off, which helped.

The feeder has an app that triggers an alert on my phone and now if my phone makes that alert sound, they perk up and bolt to the basement.

So they’ve also learned to associate the alert sound to food….

Tulie does the same thing. I used to keep the laser pointer at the side of my desk mixed in with a pile of USB sticks and such. She would get pretty excited when she saw me reach over there. If I was just grabbing a USB stick she would walk away.

Eventually she started jumping onto that corner of the desk to knock the USB sticks on the floor. After all, if I wasn't going to play laser tag with her, a USB stick makes a mighty fine cat toy!

Interesting that yours is a calico. Tulie is a tortoiseshell, which is basically the same thing without the white background.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortoiseshell_cat

My dog and both cats still like to play with the laser pointer, but all of them know exactly where it comes from. Thankfully it's just like playing fetch with the dog. Totally repetitive and predictable but still entertaining enough that the pet will keep it up indefinitely.

Please, never use a laser pointer to play with dogs. This can cause anxiety, OCD and ultimately lead to serious harm. A frustrated dog may keep searching for the pointer for weeks after. There is a name for the condition, "laser pointer syndrome". Laser pointers are fine with cats but a big no with dogs.

Heh, my dog has never gotten that wrapped up in laser pointer chasing. She knows it's me, she stops when I say 'Done'. Now, when it comes to chuckit balls on the other hand, she's dangerously close to real OCD.

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