If they don’t want to be found, you won’t find them. The cat we have now is a rescue cat we got from a no-kill shelter. They have six cage rooms, which auto-locking doors that require a human sized hand and fingers to open, with multiple cats in them. Each night the shelter does a cat census of each room, and the same each morning. Consistently, when they got there in the morning, one room was a cat shy, and another room had an extra cat.
This count discrepancy bugged them for months. It didn’t matter who did the counting, or how many times it was checked. The next morning one room would be short a cat and one room long a cat.
] This mystery was finally solved of the miscounted cats when a donor gave the shelter a video monitoring system so they could set up an on-line video system for donors to watch cat antics on the shelter’s website. Each of the six rooms had its own video feed.
People watching the feed left emails about a talented escape artist cat!
Every night, about two hours after the volunteers left, one particular little flame-point mitted rag doll cat would wedge her way up to the door handle of her room and then work at the lock mechanism until she got it unlocked. She’d then push down on the handle and get the spring loaded door opened enough so that she could squeeze through and drop to the floor! She’d then go to another room work her way up to that room’s door lock and work on it, . . Only pulling it open enough to squeeze in! She’d then visit with the cats in that room, quite nicely, never fight, just visit. . . For a while. She sometimes switched rooms two or three time a night, never going back to one she’d been in already.
They changed her name from “Lulubell” to “Houdini.” My girlfriend and I adopted Houdini. The doors at our place aren’t lever handled. . . Just knobs. . .
But the first week the cat was at our house, I got accused of leaving the toilet seat up, something I never do. . . Until my girlfriend spotted Houdini putting the seat up to get a drink; she hadn’t quite gotten to trust us that her water bowl would be filled with fresh water. We got her a fountain and the toilet drinking behavior stopped. However, she can tell time and is a great alarm cat, waking my girlfriend up for work every morning at the proper time (unfortunately, she’s not too aware of day differences for weekends) but she adjusts for changes in daylight savings time in just a couple of days. Now if she’d just learn how to read the calendar and turn on the coffee maker. . .
Best cat story EVER!