Is this the cleverest cat in the world?

Border
Cumbria
Animals
Monday 25 January 2016 at 2:56pm

Pinky the cat Credit: ITV Border

A woman from Barbon near Kirkby Lonsdale says her cat could be the cleverest cat in the UK.

Pinky, a Somali pedigree, knows where her food lives and devotes much of her time to the quest to get it.

She's now become a master at thinking her way around problems. She can open tins, cupboards and the fridge.

She jumped onto a high shelf where I've always kept cat treats in a tin, which has been unviolated by many cats over many years until Pinky. And she worked out how to nudge the lid off the tin, grab the bag of treats and head off under the sideboard to eat them. We actually caught her doing it - we didn't know until we saw her coming into the lounge with a bag of treats in her mouth. So we put two heavy boxes of cat food on top of that tin either side of the handle so she wouldn't be able to do it so she jumped up to the shelf - we watched her - and she sat there and looked at it for a minute and then with her paws and her shoulder she pushed the boxes off the lid, opened the lid and got the treats and I thought, 'that cat is really smart', because most other cats would have just done what worked before. Since then we've watched her learn how to open the fridge door; how to undo zips with her teeth. If there's something she wants inside she'll work out how to get into it. We've had to put locks on the cupboard doors so she can't get into the cupboards to steal things.

Pinky's mother Poppy is clever too. She belongs to one of the best breeders of Somali cats, a local lady in Sedbergh, but after Pinky sailed through a cat IQ test, Carol is convinced she's smarter than her mother.

Here's Carol's tips on how to test your cat's IQ:

Put a cloth over their food while they're eating. A lot of them just sit there and look at you and don't know what's happened. Pinky moves the cloth out of the way and carries on eating.
Put a board between them and their food. A lot can't work out how to get to their food, Pinky just walks straight round it.
Do they eat with their tail on the floor? I don't know why that means she's intelligent but apparently it does.
Put a mirror in front of them. Pinky will immediately walk behind it to see if there's a cat there.

Pinky can unlock zips Credit: ITV Border

Four of Carol's six cats have won awards. Her most decorated cat is Sonya, a silver Olympian, who has won so many awards that she and her sister are considered the best Somali cats there's ever been. Pinky is a Champion too, though she's quite small for her breed.