Thieves go for specific items. Day after day, they hung out in the neighborhood and then went home to dump their loot. Before long, they had a huge haul: socks, underwear, baby sweaters, gloves and more socks.
It’s not uncommon for cats to bring dead or petrified rats and birds, but showing up with random items is harder to explain. Researchers suspect a variety of reasons, but tend to agree on one: The stolen items were not present.
“We’re not sure why the cats behave like this,” said Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist at the Nature Biodiversity Center Museum in Leiden. “Cats do this all over the world, but it’s never been studied.” He now hopes that will change.
A mother and her two children in the small town of Frigiliana, Spain, committed a costume crime spree this year that put a damper on neighborhood dynamics for their keeper, Rachel Womack Awkward. But for scientists like Himstra, it provides new impetus for studying animals. “I want to know exactly why they did it,” he said. “Documenting cases like this could be the start of more research in the future.”
Himstra heard about the burglar cats from the Dutch visual artist Anne Jean, a friend of Womack’s, who mentioned the cats’ antics. Out of curiosity, Gene flew to Spain to photograph the harvest of a book called “Low Hanging Fruit.” Hiemstra, who studies contentious areas of conflict between animals and humans, noted in his introduction: “This is their collection, their criminal record. But why would a cat collect such a trophy?”
For Womack, the more pressing issue was how to return what had been stolen. Daisy, Dora and Manchita can bring in over 100 items each month. The most recent arrival is a little stuffed bear. Before that, it was baby shoes. It’s not easy to return an item without knowing its owner. “She was just angry,” Gene said. “It was so much that she didn’t know how to give it back.”
The three Frigiliana cats made repeated mistakes, but they weren’t the only ones getting scolded. Charlie, a rescue cat from Bristol, is known as Britain’s most prolific cat thief after bringing home plastic toys, clothespins, rubber ducks, glasses and cutlery. His owner, Alice Bigge, once woke up to find a plastic diplodocus on her pillow, one of many captured from a nearby nursery. It reminded her of the infamous scene in The Godfather. She placed the items on the outside wall for the owners to recycle.
Another cat, Dusty, from San Mateo, California, has more than 600 known thefts and once brought home 11 items in one night. His haul included Crocs, a baseball cap and a pair of swimming trunks. Luckily, the bra found in the house is revealed in the film as Dusty comes in.
During a brainstorming session, Himstra and Dr. Claudia Vink, a behavioral biologist at Utrecht University, came up with some drivers that might be fueling cats’ antics. They may be seeking attention or wanting to play; prolonging their foraging and hunting behavior, like a cat bringing an animal home; or wanting to remove particularly smelly items from certain areas, such as worn socks or Freshly laundered socks that smell like detergent.
Cats have small stomachs and tend to bring prey to the center of their territory to eat when they are hungry. The same instinct may lead them to take items home, and the reaction they receive encourages this habit. “When you pay attention to a cat, you’re reinforcing the behavior,” Vink said.
Dennis Turner, a private instructor at the University of Zurich, agrees that attention is key, but adds that cats are attracted to some wool and plastic items because they contain lanolin. To break this habit, he recommends quietly leaving the room when the cat drags something into the room, and throwing the object out when the cat continues to move around.
“Animals, including humans, respond to very simple stimuli,” said Daniel Mills, professor of veterinary behavioral medicine at the University of Lincoln. “Objects blowing in the wind may trigger hunting behavior. After “catching” some strange items, the cat may well decide to bring them back. I don’t think they consider them gifts. Here are the simple rules of life for how the cat brain works.
Jemma Forman, a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex who studies cats playing fetch, agrees that pets don’t come with gifts. “The usual explanation for cats is that they’re doing it for themselves,” she said.
