Third Installment: Oh the Games Animals Play

The taunted Waffle.

Animals might be some of the trickiest creatures out there. They are always playing with each other and making sure that they are as sneaky as possible. Cats might be the most sneaky and tricky of them all. I think that people underestimate just how smart cats really are. I for one can attest to just how smart cats are.

Skittle as many of you read in the introduction is the smartest animal in the Owen household. He is white and orange with some tabby stripes. He is also the most observant of all our animals. Skittle knows all the right buttons to push with our two dogs Waffle and Tootsie. He has his bluff in on them. Skittle knows just how to get the dogs interested in a good play session and then he will make his swift exit. He seems to drive the dogs nuts half the time because they never actually get to play. He will make his exit before the wrestle session starts.

Skittle and Waffle have the funniest friendship of all our animals. Dog and cats interact with each other in the funniest ways. We never really knew what would come of Skittle and Waffles relationship. Skittle was seven years old when we brought Waffle home. She was so tiny compared to him and I do not think he ever really knew what she was until she started to rapidly get bigger.

Waffle is not trusted to be free throughout our house during the day, even though she is potty-trained, because she is a huge chewer. So Waffle essentially has her own room because we have a couple of baby gates that keep her in our large kitchen. Skittle being so agile is able to jump over the gates whenever he wants.

It drives Waffle nuts whenever Skittle decides to take a little stroll through the kitchen. She will try and chase him because she thinks he is coming to play with her. When really we all understand that he is just messing with because he knows it will get a rile out of her. Waffle is purely incapable of playing it cool when Skittle comes into the kitchen.

My favorite thing is when Skittle decides to stick around for a little play session. Their little play session usually includes Skittle crouching down towards Waffle and Waffle then getting excited and running circles around our kitchen island. Typically by the time Waffle gets around the island Skittle has already made his swift exit from the kitchen and that was probably enough play time for him for the week.

The trickster himself.

The second tale of Skittle and his tricks is all about the tricks he plays on us humans in the Owen family. As I have said Skittle is quite sneaky but he is also very intrigued by the world outside of the Owen house. We will often come home to open cabinet doors because he wants to explore inside the cabinets. He is so smart that he knows when a door is not latched all the way and that is when he goes into sneak-out mode. He is almost like a teenager trying to be as quiet as possible when they are sneaking out past curfew. I will never understand how he knows that the door just has not clicked all the way.

This past fall my mom and dad were at Costco which is about thirty minutes away from our house, with a cart full of stuff when my mom's phone rang. It was the alarm company calling to say that our alarm system was sounding and had not been turned off in the thirty seconds that you get as a buffer. My mom knew that my brother was at school so it was not him and we have had some issues with break-ins around our neighborhood. My parents went sprinting out of the Costco, leaving a full cart.

In the car my mom frantically called our neighbor who was two houses down and asked her to please go make sure our dogs were not running around the neighborhood or that the cats had not gotten outside. Twenty minutes and a lot of speeding later my parents made it home. There were two cop cars outside our house and no one was allowed to enter until the cops had searched to make sure there was no intrusion.

The door that had set the alarm off was the door from our house to our garage. The cops seemed to believe that the air conditioner had come on and pushed the door open. Well, little did they know my mom knew exactly what had happened. Skittle struck again. One $80 ticket later for not registering our alarm system and my parents were laughing about how this sneaky and intrigued cat had set off the alarm.

Author's Note: The story that I drew inspiration from was The Monkey and the Crocodile from The Jataka Tales of India by Ellen C. Babbitt. I wrote my story inspired by part one of the Monkey and the Crocodile. This story was about two crocodiles who would watch the monkeys who would come to sit by the water that they lived in. The mother crocodile wanted the baby crocodile to get her a monkey to eat, but the baby did not know how to go about that. The crocodile offered to take the monkey over to the fresh ripe fruit on his back because the monkey could not swim to get it. The crocodile tried to drown the monkey but he had said that when they wanted to eat him that they would need to eat his heart and he had forgotten it. The monkey had tricked the crocodile in taking him back to the tree where the crocodile thought the monkey was getting his heart for them to eat. Little did the crocodile know that the monkey never intended on getting back in the water. The monkey was a little trickster just like Skittle is in my story. I made my story much happier and more fun-loving to stick with my theme because the original story does take a bit of a dark turn. I think that the tricks animals play on each other are so fun to watch which is why I wanted to write about my animals and the tricks they play on each other. I also felt it necessary to include the story of the tricks Skittle plays on us humans to show just how smart he is like how smart the monkey was in the story to escape the crocodile.