I’ve had cats pretty much my whole life and they still confuse me. This is especially true of the weird things they find completely terrifying.
I bought a door tube thingamy. You know those sausage things you put in front of your door to keep a draft out? Yeah, that.
One of my cats sauntered into the room, saw the lumpy, cheerfully-colored snake of doom sleeping along the door and instantly jumped six feet vertically into the air.
She pelted out of the room and wouldn’t come out from under the bed until dinner time.
Needless to say, these days I just put up with a draft.
Another time, I was cooking and carelessly let a bulb of garlic roll along the counter and fall on the floor.
It was as though a giant multi-horned dog demon had suddenly materialized in the room and boomed, “woof!”. All three of my cats exploded in terror, skidding along the floor in their desperate bid to escape The Garlic of Destruction.
A few weeks earlier, the same thing had happened with an onion. None of them cared in the slightest.
Why? Why is garlic scary if an onion isn’t!
Then there’s my backup can-opener. To be clear, the main one I use they consider a perfectly harmless contraption. They have no grievance with it whatsoever and in fact greatly appreciate its ability to make food happen.
The other one though—the slightly different backup one I occasionally use when the other is still in the dishwasher—this, in their shared opinion, is a device of pure cat-hurting evil.
The moment they hear its slightly different crunchy can-opening noise they shrink back, as though I was handling a small but incredibly angry weasel.
These things are a mystery to me. How can creatures that can be so ridiculously brave, be so completely psyched out by such innocent objects?
All I know for sure is that my home is a door-tube thingamy free zone.
