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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

> Think of this differently, cats are like people, they consider themselves in a social relationship with you.

Definitely. Although I wonder if they think we’re all just weird, bald cats.

I do wonder about their theory of mind though. My cat knows how to close doors but not open them. Last time he closed the bedroom door while I was in there, and then realized he was trapped, so he came over to me, looked at me, looked at the door, and waited. I played dumb but eventually opened the door for him. So I wonder if he knew I knew what he wanted or was just hoping I did.

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Oh, cats definitely know you can open the door for them. When I feed our four cats, one of them (Inky) usually joins me in the cat bathroom to provide supervision services. Of course, this process must be done behind closed doors, otherwise there tends to be too much interference from some of the other cats.

Once he’s satisfied that everything is proceeding according to his plan, he looks at the door. And if I don’t open it immediately, he looks at me to try to figure out why I’m not already opening the door for him.

Every time.

He’s also the engineer who figured out how to open doors on his own, just by reaching up his longcat body, wrapping his forepaws around the door handle, and pulling. So, we had to childproof all the door handles in the house. Which is why he now has to wait for me to open the door for him.

His sister Mimi is also super smart, but she is too FOMO and doesn’t have quite the same methodical engineering mindset that Inky does.

Doubtful we'll ever know for sure, but sometimes it's difficult to discern with cats whether they know what to do but are just letting us do the work for them or if they genuinely don't know.

I suspect the answer is somewhere in between. Our cats have an approximate model of the house and if they see something outside the window, they'll run out the door and to that window knowing where the object of interest was in relation to the interior of the house. But, this comes from years of conditioning. They've been upstairs and have looked out the windows, but when I've spoken to them while they were immediately below the window they've sat on, they started crying apparently having no idea a) how I got up there and b) where in relation to their known "map" of the house I was. (In complete fairness this could be because they spend very little time upstairs since, unlike most cats, they absolutely love commotion and socializing with humans.)

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