CAT UNDERSTAND WHAT I SAY AND CAT FOLLOW WHAT I SAY

I never really paid much attention to what words my cat knew as she was nine when I got her and rarely did anything at all that displeased me except to turn up her nose at cat food she didn’t like (she pushed it away and shook her paw at it as if she were saying “Nope! Not for me!”), or near the end of her life when she would throw up around the house (I thought it was hairballs, but her system was shutting down which undoubtedly contributed to it), and for a while I ignorantly scolded her for it. She did know the word “remedy” when I gave her hairball medicine she loved the taste of, “wanna get combed?” (she was a tuxedo longhair and loved getting combed) and all the other familiar words others have listed. (After falling out a second story window when a screen she was snoozing against gave way, she NEVER went outside—you couldn’t even carry her outside without a fight, so there was no real reason to learn any of the words connected with going out or coming back in.)I did change her name early on when she was learning to live in a new house and I was trying to become her friends. She was “born” MacKenzie, but my brother called her Mac (in a home with two other cats and five dogs), which I changed to Kitty, because I read that cats and dogs responded more favorably to the soothing sound of “ee” at the end of their names, and Kitty was generic enough that she’d obviously heard it many times before. She responded to it as her name for the eight or nine years she lived with me, and I think I made the right call. None of this is impressive at all. But I think she was very impressive in one aspect: she actually learned to SAY “Hello.”I work at night and around the third or fourth year of her life, she would greet me at the door when I came in in the morning. Sometime after that, she would greet me with a perfectly pronounced “Hell-o,” always just once a day, and always when she first saw me in the morning. She would meow and purr the rest of the time, but it never sounded anything like that “hello” in the morning. So, not only was intelligent enough to learn the word, she understood the CONCEPT of the word. And I think that’s incredibly perceptive, especially since I—despite my alleged superior intellect—never ever managed to learn one word she said in Cat | global-selector | Caterpillar an addendum, it’s probably not news that my dog Cindy (a blond terrier-dachshund mix) learned plenty of words herself. But in addition to all the normal stuff, she absolutely HATED the word “shit.” Whenever she heard it, she knew that there could be anger, shouting and mayhem coming soon, and she would growl, and if she heard it repeated, she’d begin barking till she was sure everything had returned to normal. She was sensitive enough to figure that out, perhaps because, at heart, she was a singer. If you pulled out a harmonica, you would be accompanied by her harmony for as long as you had breath. She was similarly affected whenever she heard the particular opening bass line of THE FLINTSTONES TV theme whenever she heard it. By contrast, Kitty was a real fan of the DOCTOR WHO theme, either from the actual broadcasts or me whistling it, though she never managed to figure out how to sing along.

THANK YOU FOR WATCHING