Late this past spring, I read a blog post in the New York Times titled, Is Your Cat Normal, which generated over 400 comments. Being a cat person, I read them all, and as I read, I kept shaking my head and saying to myself, “Those cats sure are weird.” However, my cat, Karim DeSantis, who is now ten years old and who has lived with me since he was a kitten, can hold his own when it comes to weirdness.

Here are two of his odd behaviors:

• He loves to munch on crinkly things, like plastic bags and tin foil. In fact, I no longer cover my stove burner drip pans with foil because as soon as he finds them, he’ll shred them (of course, if he doesn’t spit out the pieces of foil, he throws them up).
• He loves running water, both water gushing out of the tap and also going down the drain. Once when I had left hand-wash soaking in the bathroom sink, I saw him put his paw in the water and reach underneath the hosiery to pull up the stopper, just so he could hear the water gurgle as the sink drained. Here is a photo of him playing in the sink.

Karim is playing in the bathroom sink

Karim might be right-pawed, though I haven’t actually experimented on him. He’s quite dexterous, at any rate. I know he can open doors by twisting the doorknobs, and I had to give away the automatic cat feeders I bought for him because he figured out how to defeat the mechanism. I believe he used his right paw to pop the lids off the food dishes. There isn’t much information on the Internet on this subject: the first numbers I came across, that 40% of cats are left-pawed, 20% are right-pawed, and 40% are ambidextrous, seemed quite suspect. The best (or only) scientific study I could find was carried out last year at Queen’s University Belfast School of Psychology. In a complex “get the tuna out of the jar” task, “Male cats overwhelmingly used their left paws to try to scoop out the tuna snack (only one of the 21 seemed to be ambidextrous), while 20 of the 21 females almost always used their right paw for the task, ” as reported in this LA Times article.

Karim has also survived a fall of three stories without injury, which is a near-miracle.  One summer morning some years ago, he dashed onto my deck when I went out to water the plants; then as he scrambled across the roof, he lost his balance and fell to the flagstones on the first floor patio.  I ran downstairs, wrapped him in a blanket, and carried him back to my third floor apartment.  Panic-stricken, I called the Rowley Animal Hospital in Springfield (now closed).   They asked if he was breathing, which he was, and then told me to keep an eye on him.  It didn’t appear that he had broken any bones, and as I watched him over the next few hours, he ate and drank normally.  The next day I Googled “record for cat falling from highrise” and read a number of the top-ranked articles.  The consensus seems to be that the record is 26 stories without injury, with an asterisked record of 46 stories.  The most cited scientific study was J Am Vet Med Assoc 1988 Feb 15;192(4):542, a study of 132 cats over a 5-month period.  The authors observed that cats falling from between 2 and 32 stories who were treated at a veterinary hospital had a 90% survival rate.

Finally, after reading Christoph Niemann’s blog post Unpopular Science last month, I realized that my cat, like Schrödinger’s Cat, is not subject to some of the fundamental laws of classical physics.  As blog reader D Derbes noted in a comment, “Cats have evolved an internal mass adjuster which they can move up (if they want to lie on you) or down (if they want to jump),” thus defying the law of the conservation of mass.