[treeman79]

Mine has trained the family that when he is hungry he starts slamming covered doors opening closed repeatedly.

Started off that we kept food in there. So of course he would try and get in. This lead to him being fed when was trying to get in. So now it’s a signal.

We have been well trained

[richrichardsson]

A bit O/T, but presumably you meant "cupboard" doors. What I'm curious about is was this just a stretch of an autocorrect, or if English is a second language, as I could see that it might be a plausible approximation of cupboard if you'd only ever heard the word. I find this kind of thing fascinating, as when I'm trying to learn another language it's all too easy to hear something and switch it to another word that's close enough phonetically.

[treeman79]

I had a series of strokes. I mix up words a lot since. Cupboard is correct.

[wholinator2]

One of my relatives has a similar thing. I hope things are goin well for ya my dude.

[UncleOxidant]

One of ours jumps up on top of our printer and reaches up on the wall and starts pawing at a poster when he's hungry.

[ratww]

What's on the poster?

[UncleOxidant]

A waterfall. I think he's basically just saying "Nice poster you've got there, be a shame if something happened to it"

[throwanem]

Could be the paper makes a distinctive rattle, and he's learned it will elicit a distinctive response. Cats' theory of mind for humans isn't all that thorough, I think, but they have a very solid grasp of cause and effect. Honestly, I think they mostly think we're simple.

They definitely aren't, though, at least not all of them. My guy used to fight like hell any time I tried to trim his claws, so eventually I gave it up and let him look after himself, thinking, well, he's a cat and he's got plenty of carpet to scratch, he'll do fine. That lasted till he got an ingrown claw, so I had to trim that back, debride and disinfect the wound it'd made in his pad, then trim enough fur on his foreleg short enough to get a bandage to stick where he couldn't shake it off.

He really hated that, for all that it only took a couple of days to heal - they're better at that than even we are, and in a week you couldn't tell except by the missing fur that anything had ever happened. Well, by that and one other thing: for the balance of his life, when I went to trim his claws, he never put up much more than a token struggle. Where before he'd fight his way to the top of my head and leap clear, this was just enough of a fuss to make sure nobody thought him a coward, and no more - he'd learned it was worth letting me look after him a little, so he didn't need me to look after him a lot.

[ratww]

> Could be the paper makes a distinctive rattle, and he's learned it will elicit a distinctive response

Yep, I think that's the answer! The cat discovered the dog clicker!