Echo’s birthday!

Echo’s birthday! from Bashed

There was a special reason why I invited this photo to the Cat-A-Log Group and that is because it reminded me of the time, about 20 odd years ago, when my old Tom and I moved into a first floor maisonette.

We’d only been there a few days, when there was a knock at the door so, I went downstairs to answer it. There was “nobody” there, but the cat walked in and slunk up the stairs. The door, like this, had a letter flap in it, just a bit lower than half way, with a flap on the outside that lifted.

Thought no more about it, until it happened again a day or so later. Same with “nobody” at the door, but the cat walks in. This had to happen several times, before I really suspected that the cat was flapping the letterbox.

Bear in mind that this requires a quite train of thought, where the cat realizes that not only does this make a sound upstairs, while he’s downstairs, but that it is going to cause a human to come and open the door for him.

He’d only been there a few days, so it wasn’t something learned from much repetition, nor could he have seen anyone else doing it and, he was around 6 or 7 years old and had not had a similar letter box at other homes.

Finally, one day, I caught him doing it when I came home and was outside and, yes, just like this, Tom was standing up on his hind legs, reaching up to the letterbox and flapping that flap like crazy. Smart little bugger.