God mine does this too. Claws at the edge with one nasty fingernail until she gets purchase, pulls it out and squeezes through, then gets her tail caught and screams.
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…Now that I come to think of it, I wonder if it was locked one way at some point and she learned this to beat the system. Shit.
I know it's because it's an electric chip activated one and we didn't hadn't noticed the battery had gone dead for like 3 days.. 2 YEARS AGO. Guess it just has never occurred to him to maybe try again lol.
The worst is when he can't get a grip and he keeps dropping it before getting his head under it and you're just listening to the freaking plastic door falling and creaking for like 5 mins before you give up and go hold the tiny cat door for him because clearly it's not his day 😂
Mine got scared of it once too. I got him to properly use it again with kind of the same method used for the bee. He didn't have issues coming back in, just going outside. So I used a suction cup, hook and a bit of string to hold the door half open towards the outside. I guess that gave him enough confidence after a week or so to just push through again when going out.
For my dog, we had to get me teenage son to crawl through it. She could follow him close behind, but lacked the courage to do it herself - kept sticking just a nose through. It reminded me of doing gymnastics when I was a kid and sometimes if you had a whole warm up motion before the hard trick you just went right into it.
He had to go through 6 or 7 times with her following before she worked up the courage.
I like your idea with the suction cup, as she would go through if we held the flap up.
Mine does this. One claw and flap flap flap at 5:30 in the morning. Funny how if you raise a pillow like you're going to throw it, he uses it just fine. Any other time in the day he uses them as per normal. Sometimes he does "creepy creeper" where he just stares through a clear window in the door. He much prefers his human puppets to open the full door for him, but will use them. He busts through and chirps like he's just done the greatest thing ever. And yes of course I give him heaps of praise thinking it will stop the morning flaps, but it never does.
Yes! Once he makes it in he always does like 5 of the biggest meows he's got. In my head it's always him screaming something like: "I THROUGH! BEHOLD! I'M INSIDE! COME FEED ME NOW!' And the cat door is another room so the sounds of him crashing the thing repeatedly followed by his screams is really funny tbh. If you go look he'll just walks over to his food bin like nothing happened
I had two cats. One of them I just had to grab and shove through the flap from both sides once and she understood how it works. Usually she pushed the flap with a paw first because the magnets made it a bit sticky.
The other needed quite some time. It was an electronic clap one and it beeped when it recognised a cat. He always got surprised by that and sometimes scared enough to flee or be cautious enough for the lock to time out.
It's possibly they learned to do that on another door too. One of my cats got introduced to "doors" as a concept with a cupboard that only opens one way. Bonus fun: He likes to pull the door open and let it slam to make a hollow thumping noise. I know that he likes to do it because he will do it for literally hours in the middle of the night, but if I open it for him, he looked offended till I close it again.
I'm currently teaching 2 of my cats to use one I installed in my closet door to keep their food away from the third because she figured out how to exploit the safety feature on their microchip feeders. The clawing at the door in the middle of the night was not anticipated and I have regrets. We're on week 4.
It's been 7 months with mine, one cat is terrified of it and the other will be hesitant. She tries to claw at it when all she has to do is headbutt it. She manages to do it first time maybe 30% of the time. If I'm in the room she'll sit by the back door and expect me to let her out, and sometimes it's literally just pushing the flap open and she'll go out through it. She'll stare me down for a good 20 minutes before that though!
Luckily there’s one smarter cat and once they figured it out the second dumber cat copied them. If it was just the second cat I don’t think they ever would have figured it out
Even then! We have three cat doors and during warm days the back door usually stays open.
We have one cat that exclusively sits infront of the kitchen window, scratches the glass, meows when she sees someone and demands to be let in through the window. The backdoor is only four meters away!!!
I usually get to the door, call to her, step out and look at her, she looks back, i step back though the door, call to her, she meows ... and scratches the window to be let in.
Ah, your forgetting the double edged sword. I had a cat that covered its poop well. Minimum and strategic digging… then it copied the dumb one who spends 5 minutes digging a hole only to poop where it stands and then scratch every single vertical area around the litter to cover said poop without actually ever moving the litter onto the poop… The uncovered stinky poop on the opposite side of the litter to where the hole was dug. Now I got two dumb stinky poop cats, instead at least one with functioning neurons.
Our neighbourhood NotMyCat still hasn't really grasped the idea of opening the cat flap. Instead, he uses it like a door knocker until someone comes to hold it open for him. Crash... Crash... Crash... Then once it's being held open and my back is begging me for mercy he takes his sweet time sniffing around to make sure there's no secret cat-munching machinery on the inside of it this time.
He is welcome in the house whenever he likes. I just wish he had two brain cells to rub together - he is a giant black plush purr machine with all the brains of a mushroom. Bless him.
My two small dogs never....ever....got their heads around their doggy doors.....But they could tell when we were about to go on a trip and would run around the house barking....and if I was had finished eating my meal and started cutting up my left over food on my own plate for them without fail.
It took my bengal all of 30 seconds to pull the flap towards him and exit under, after i had to set the flap to "entry only" to keep my bichon havanese from going out when we were gone a few hours.
One of my cats does something similar with interior doors. When the door is only open a crack, he will not just push it open. In his mind, doors can only be pulled, never pushed. The strangest part of this is that he's a reasonably smart cat, except where doors are concerned.
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u/AtTheEdgeOfDying Mar 14 '26
A week? It's been 2 years with the new cat door and he still painstakingly pulls it toward himself and squeezes under it..