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Feline Intelligence - Tiger Displays His
With Love, Tiger's Mom
by Suzanne Savatteri

Long ago in a home in Queens, a neighbor handed me tiny plastic children's barrettes belonging to my daughters. She told me she thought my daughters were throwing them out the window through the cut in the mesh of the screen. Then to her surprise, she saw a tiny paw pushing these barrettes out the window screen.

A few days later, I was about to enter my daughter's room and saw our cat, Tiger, about to leap up onto the bureau. I quietly watched. He leaped up and put his mouth into her plastic container with the barrettes, took one in his mouth and leaped across to the window sill. He then dropped the barrette onto the sill and pushed it out the cut in the screen down into my neighbor's driveway. She was right! Tiger was doing it!

Some years later, we moved to another county and a newer home. My daughters and I sat in the kitchen and talked about how Tiger used to throw the barrettes out the window in our other house. Tiger was not in the room, in fact, he was somewhere upstairs in the house. The barrettes were no longer in my first daughters room. Tiger must have heard us talk about him, he came downstairs with one of the tiny plastic barrettes in his mouth and dropped it on the floor in front of us. He sat and looked at us. We were dumbfounded! He had gone into my other daughter's room, and into her closet where she had a Barbie doll case containing these barrettes from so many years ago. He took one and brought it down to us as if to say "I know what you are saying", and to prove it.

Cats are so intelligent. Tiger and my other cat, Snuggles both tried to alert me that my neighbor's house was being robbed. The robbers were on my patio and the house door to my patio was open. I heard a aluminum chair slide on the concrete and thought it was the cats. I used to let them out on leashes tied to the chairs. I figured they made the noise. The cats were not outside, they were inside with me. Still, I did not think anything, since I was so used to them being outside. Both cats came to the top of the stairs of my basement, where I was cleaning. They meowed and meowed at me and then looked at the back yard. They kept walking back to the patio door to look and meow and hiss, then back to the stairs to meow to me, and look at the back as if to tell me something was wrong. It was only later on that evening, that I knew what they meant. I saw my neighbor's backyard door torn off and her house was robbed. The chair scrapping on the concrete was not my cats but the robbers. They were on my patio too.

Another time after my husband was mugged in the parking lot of Adelphi University, Garden City, NY and his car was taken after he was beaten up. The robbers had my house keys and a week later, we had someone try to enter the house late at night. Tiger heard the storm door open, as I did. Tiger jumped down off the top of the couch where he loved to lay. He stood facing the front door and blocking it waiting for someone to enter. The person must have known someone was awake, ran back to the car waiting for them and drove off.

Tiger has done many other things to display his intelligence. We would watch him whack his tail on the couch/chair late at night. We would hit the chair the same number of times as he did. Then we would change the sequence of the number of times and he would copy it exactly. We switched all around to see if he was really whacking his tail the same number of times as us, and he did it exactly as we did. It was weird.

After seventeen years with us, Tiger became ill with cancer of the jaw. His beautiful face was now a mess from the cancer. Our hearts were broken. The wonderful vet told us about an experimental medicine which worked like a miracle. But after a short time, tiger exhibited the same horrible symptoms. He stopped eating and lost lots of weight. The cancer was moving behind his eye and into his head. We had to put our wonderful loved cat to rest. On 8/10/01 @ 12:35pm, we said good bye to our very much loved family pet Tiger. We will miss him very much an always love him.

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