Burglary is defined as “the illegal entry of a building with intent to commit a crime, especially theft”. Quite a few domestic cats are feline fridge burglars although, of course, they are not committing a crime. Cats can’t commit crimes. It is natural behaviour. They are simply exercising their intelligence, challenging themselves, and hunting down food. Perhaps a lot of the time when domestic cats break into fridges, they are simply expressing their hunting instincts. They might not be hungry. This may happen more often with full-time indoor cats because they have less opportunity to hunt.
The video on this page shows a tabby cat, Cola, who has developed a sophisticated way to get into the family’s fridge and manoeuvre around it. Cola lives in Ukraine. The usual magnetic closing mechanisms of fridges allows cats to do this. You can see him forcing his nose between the door and the body of the fridge. That’s quite impressive because he has to push pretty hard and it may be uncomfortable for him. Cola then uses his athletic abilities to climb the interior of the fridge door.
His human companion said: “He learned to open all the stuff in my kitchen. He especially likes to visit my fridge while I am in another room. He is not hungry, just a tricky, smart cat.”
As I said, Cola is probably entertaining himself because he’s slightly bored. I reckon he’s a full-time indoor cat. Perhaps he would stop this (if his owner wants him to) if he was played with more or allowed to go outside but that may be unsafe.
Judging by the number of Internet videos of cats breaking into fridges there are quite a good number of feline fridge burglars on the planet demonstrating their super skills.
Note: videos on this site are typically made by people other than me and held on YouTube servers or the servers of other businesses (not the server storing this website). Sometimes the videos are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened I apologise but I have no control over it.
SOME MORE ON FELINE ATHLETICISM:
