A Sort-of-Common, Very Strange Cat Trick
The way my spouse likes to tell it, our cat Calvin was just about a year old when he revealed his love for fetch. One evening, my spouse offhandedly flung a yarn puff across the apartment and was gobsmacked when Calvin bounded after the toy and picked it up in his mouth—then trotted over to deposit it at my husband’s feet. In the months that followed, Calvin became obsessed with our new game. He began to demand the activity nightly after dinner, meowing and prodding at our calves; he started to jam his paws into our pockets, rooting around for objects we might toss. We marveled at our weird little man, so strangely doglike in his pursuit.
In truth, though, fetching doesn’t make Calvin that much of an exception. Cats that fetchminority, Mikel Delgado, a cat-behavior consultant at Feline Minds, told me. Although the data are sparse, in one limited study from 1986 that surveyed pet owners, reportedly fetched. Delgado, who herself has —Ruby, Coriander, and Professor Scribbles—is now poring over a newer and much larger data set, not yet published, that suggests that the retrieving percentage might be higher. (The methodology of the 1980s study may have also been wanting: “Fetch” was listed as one of several “tricks” that owners reported in their cats, alongside “interesting behavior” and “understand everything.”)
