On Mon, 16 Jan 2017 12:14:36 -0500, jmcquown wrote:

Apparently cats can smell through the can.

This.

The morning of Christmas Eve, I couldn't decide on a vegetable to make with
dinner later - so I ended up letting Minnie choose. I took out a can of corn, a
can of carrots, and a can of green beans and lined them up in the middle of the
kitchen floor about ten inches apart, then I went and sat at the kitchen table,

Minnie emerged from her favorite kitchen hiding place - a cardbox box she
adopted after I brought groceries home in it, but that's another story - and
looked up at me for a few seconds as if to ask, "Okay, human - what are you
trying to pull now?" She then went over and sniffed each can it briefly, went
around to the other side and sniffed them again in the reverse order, but I
noticed that she did pause to peer over at me for a few seconds as she was
re-sniffing the can of corn. "Hmmm...was that it?" I thought, as she went and
laid down on the throw rug in front of the kitchen sink and sat there waiting to
see what I was up to with all this.

After a few minutes of silence, I said to her, "So, Minnie...pick one of those
out, will you?" Somewhat to my surprise, she immediately got up and stepped
straight up to the can of corn and sniffed it again while looking at me as if to
say, "I already did, silly human - how did you manage to miss it?" Then she
walked away and into the dining room to indicate that her verdict was final and
there would be no possiblity of appeal.

"Alright," I called after her..."I got it that time. Corn it is!"

The thing is, it has turned out that so far, corn seems to be the only vegetable
Minnie will eat. It doesn't seem to matter to her if it's kernel or cream corn,
but she consistently declines all the other ones I typically buy such as
carrots, green beans, peas, potato...and so it did occur to me to wonder if she
could indeed somehow smell the contents right through the cans.

John D. Kasupski
Niagara Falls, NY