A Cat's Tribute?

I mentioned last week that one of my two cats died.  My other cat's behavior has been interesting to watch.  Some people say that cats can grieve deeply the loss of a fellow cat, while others consider that to be anthropomorphism.  We can't know completely what an animal is feeling, but she did something this week-end that might have been a sign.  I will let the reader decide.

Matty Bear, the one that died, played with his toys every day, and he had a lot of them.  Some time last week, I gathered them into a pile of about 15 kitty toys to see which ones his sister would play with.  She didn't touch them.  On Saturday or Sunday, I went through the pile, through away the 3 rattiest looking ones, and put some of the others away so that I can pull them back out when I have 2 cats again. 

Muffin doesn't play with them the way Matty did, but she sometimes "arranges" them.  At first, I thought somebody was playing a trick on me when I would come home in the evening and find a line of toys set out at equal distances from each other, and once even in a circle.  A couple of times, she has piled them together by color, all the red ones in one pile and all the blue ones in another.  One of the more common configurations I have come home to find is the mousie snuggle, with two toy mice either nose to nose as if kissing, or tummy to tummy the way two cats curl up together in the top of a kitty tree.  I am never sure how conscious or intentional her arrangements are.

Late last week, I went through old photos of my cat who died and put some of them on the mantle of my living room fireplace, together with Matty Bear's newest favorite toy, a brown mousie (toy #1 in the photo below).  She looked closely at a couple of photos that showed the two of them together several years ago, but of course I do not know whether she understood what the photos were.  This week-end, when I piled up the toys, I took the toy from the mantle and placed it in the pile of toys.

On Sunday, I noticed that a couple of the toys had finally been moved.  Two of them were a couple of feet away from the others.  At first, I thought those were toys she had played with, which would mean I would probably keep those out for her.  Then I noticed that those two were the oldest one and one that I had never seen her play with before.  So then I wondered if she had noticed that I had thrown a few old toys in the trash, and maybe this was her effort to pull out a couple of rejects of her own choosing.

Then I noticed a pattern in the remaining toys.  I numbered them here to explain what happened.  The #1 toy is the brown mousie that had been on the mantle in my own little memorial to Matty Bear.  The #2 toy is smaller, just as Muffin was about half Matty's size, and the two toys are in the "kissing" position that I have seen her set toys in before.  Looking closely, the #2 toy actually seems to be kissing the #1 toy on the head.

Then I noticed the other toys were in a row (#3 through 6) with the two smallest in the middle and the two larger ones on the outside, spaced about equally apart underneath the two "kissing" mousies.  I didn't know if she had done it on purpose, with the brown mousie representing her brother who had died and the smaller white mousie representing herself.  But it looked sweet.

At that time, the yellow and red chick (toy #7) and the red ball (toy #8) were not there.  I later found the chick in my bedroom, and I put it where it is.  Soon afterward, Muffin took the red ball (toy #8), which had been one of the two toys left out of the configuration, and she placed it where it is now.  The only other thing I did to it afterward was to turn the direction of the two outer toys (#3 and #6) so that they were facing the two "kissing" mousies.  Before then, they were facing more or less straight ahead rather than facing the other toys.

So how much of the pattern was just Muffin making another geometric pattern with a bunch of kitty toys, and how much of it was really a conscious tribute to her lost fellow cat?  I have no way of knowing.  But I think she may have understood that the photos on the mantle were a way of remembering her brother who is gone, and she may have wanted to do her own tribute. 

It wouldn't surprise me.  She is half snowshoe, a breed that has been called "almost too intelligent."  They have been known to figure out how to open the refrigerator door and help themselves.  I have never had that problem, but I have seen her copy my decorating before.  One Christmas, I came home every day to find ornaments taken off of the Christmas tree, and there was almost always one by the cats' food dishes.  Finally, I took a small ornament and tied it to the cats' food bowls with a red bow.  That significantly reduced the number of ornaments missing from the tree each day.  Somehow, she had seen that everything else was being decorated, and she had been decorating her dinner bowl. 

So it wouldn't surprise me now if the pattern that looks like a tribute to her brother really is exactly that.  But there is no way to know really.  I thought I would post it for those cat lovers who might, like me, think it just might be a cat's tribute to a well loved fellow cat who died.