Why “Random Neurons”?
When we had our first pair of cats, we used to watch in the evenings. A cat would be pacing slowly through the house and then suddenly jump up and bat at something invisible, or start racing through the house at full speed.
So much of cat behavior seemed inexplicable in terms of external stimulus, but rather due to “random neurons firing.” So that became our catch-phrase to explain bizarre cat behavior.
Come to think of it, that could apply to a lot of human behavior, too.
Today we had the annual washing of the cat boxes. We have four cats and four litter boxes. The cat boxes are in the garage. There is a cat door between the kitchen and the garage so the cats can get to their litter boxes. The cat door is in the wall and not the door.
When the garage door is open, the cats can go in and out of the house whenever they want. This is not such a wonderful thing, because the one female cat turns out to be a deadly huntress, and she began bringing chipmunks into the house. Now it is one thing to find a Chipmunk carcass laid out at at the food of your chair — “Aww, she loves you! she brought you a present!” — but quite another thing when she lets them loose to run around in the house. The tally this spring and early summer: 2 carcasses and three live ones that I had to dispatch myself.
So now we keep the garage door closed.
