Only someone who doesn’t have a pet can say that pets are not smart. Dogs, cats, ferrets, and even fish sometimes do things that seem totally mind-blowing to us humans.

We at Bright Side are huge fans of stories about the heroic deeds and little things that pets do. And it would be totally unfair if we didn’t share a piece of our huge collection with you.

My cat doesn’t like our robot vacuum. She watched it for a long time and realized that if something gets stuck in it, it stops. So, she just thought about it — and started bringing toys close to it. They’d get stuck and the robot would stop moving around. I had a ferret named Caramel. She really loved playing in the bathtub, but she didn’t like swimming. She loved it when the water was there, just above the surface. We put her in the bathtub and turned on the warm water. She ran around and enjoyed it, but when there was a bit too much water, she would take the plug out and bring it to the other end of the tub. The water level would go down and she’d put the plug back in. Luffy is a border collie/golden retriever mix. Once we were at the park and he pulled his leash free from my hand in order to run to stop a 2-year-old human child from wandering into the lake, while his mother was busy with the child’s brothers. I’ve got a few big, old black moor goldfish that I’ve had for years now. When I got them, I thought they had a 5-second attention span, but no no no. I usually feed them when I get off work around 5, but if I forget, by 7 those guys start splashing water out of the tank.

That faker cat

Chispa found me when she was about 10 weeks old. Once, at about 2 a.m. — I was 7 months pregnant with my first child — my husband and I were sleeping, when I suddenly woke up to Chispa standing on my chest, with one paw in my face meowing loudly. As I opened my eyes, I noticed a thick layer of smoke covering the whole room about a foot above us! I woke my husband up, picked up Chispa, covering her and my face, and I got out. My husband was able to put out the fire with the help of a few neighbors. We were all fine. The kitchen was burned out completely and if Chispa had not woken us up, we would probably have suffocated long before the fire had actually reached us. My cat sits with me when I am programming, staring at the screen, looking at the details as I type. She has gotten so smart, that every time I make a syntax error, and the code becomes highlighted, she says “meow.” If I don’t pay attention to the screen, I have a vocal cue of the bug. I give her a treat when she alerts me to each bug. Robbie is smarter than most people I know! If I tell Robbie that I’m going grocery shopping, he will sit patiently by the front door waiting for me or my wife to return. When I walk in, I lean out the door, pop the back hatch on the car, and tell him, Robbie, get groceries! Robbie will calmly walk to the rear of the car, and one by one, grab the grocery bags and bring them to whoever’s in the kitchen. My cat figured out how to fill up my bathtub. He learned how to close the drain, would turn the water handle, and would just sit there and watch the tub slowly fill up. It took me weeks to figure out what was going on.

One of my cats learned how to turn the internet off. I mean, he realized everybody goes crazy when he goes behind the TV stand and messes with the wires. So when we’re not paying enough attention to him (usually if we’re on our phones or our computers), he just unplugs the router. I don’t think he knows how much power he has. My cat could heal me. After I was involved in an accident, my arm hurt for a long time. Every night, my cat would lie next to that arm, he would totally stretch to cover my whole arm, and he slept like this the entire night. The pain really did disappear. I have 2 “dogs”: a tabby cat and a Pekingese. They adore me and they hate it when I go on business trips. When I’m preparing for a trip, the Pekingese jumps in the luggage and imitates a death by torture: he barely breathes, drools, etc. And the other “dog” is also “dying” next to him: he lies on his back and starts groaning.

Your pet is probably also very smart! Maybe you have your own amazing stories that you can share with us?

8