Test Your Cat - E.M. Bard

...of those books is called Test Your Cat; The Cat IQ Test which was gifted to me by a friend presumably after she had taken the 10 minutes to test her cat and thought giving it to me was a way of making room on her bookshelf for something better.

The Cat IQ test is a small hardback book with an attractive picture of a cat on the front. The book is only 120 pages long, most of those pages contain a single question with room to record your ...
...the end of the test and you will discover if your cat is an undiscovered genius. Questions ask about your cats behaviour, your kitty gains points for being able to swivel his ears round to listen to sounds more clearly, getting the attention of the humans he owns and requesting food on a regular schedule. The cat also loses points for falling into the toilet or stepping in his food bowl.

A practical test gets you to touch the inside ... more

This is the time of year when all of the tacky presents appear in the shops that the recipient will feign great appreciation for on Xmas morning and send to the charity shop in the new year. As well as tacky toys and gadgets the bookshelves are filled with all the latest z list celebrity biographies and other rubbish books that no sane person would surely buy for themselves. One of those books is called Test Your Cat; The Cat IQ Test which was gifted to me by a friend presumably after she had taken the 10 minutes to test her cat and thought giving it to me was a way of making room on her bookshelf for something better.

The Cat IQ test is a small hardback book with an attractive picture of a cat on the front. The book is only 120 pages long, most of those pages contain a single question with room to record your response by ticking the box, add up the scores at the end of the test and you will discover if your cat is an undiscovered genius. Questions ask about your cats behaviour, your kitty gains points for being able to swivel his ears round to listen to sounds more clearly, getting the attention of the humans he owns and requesting food on a regular schedule. The cat also loses points for falling into the toilet or stepping in his food bowl.

A practical test gets you to touch the inside of your cats ears and show it a rubber band amongst other things to see how the cat responds. Of course any cat owner will know that cats are fabulously fickle and will only perform when they feel like it so this section isn’t really of much use.

Me and my daughter spent all of about 10 minutes assessing our little fur baby using the book and he was disappointingly average even though he regularly manages to sit in his food bowl and certainly gives the impression that he is pretty dumb. There were a couple of pages giving tips on how to improve your cat’s IQ which amounted to telling you to play with your pet. They had some dodgy looking statistical tables showing the predicted distribution of cat IQ scores, note nobody has actually tested cat’s IQs on a large scale so they have just copied a bell curve data into the book!

The book costs around £4 from Amazon and supermarkets but really it is not worth the money. I know non cat people buy these books for cat owners as a lazy no thought gift but I really wish the would stop, I’m sick of getting cat related tat for presents! Ok, the book will bring a few minutes of fun and put a small smile on your face but the book will soon end up in the charity shop if you buy or gift it.
 

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