Genius Cat Removes Wooden Bar, Unlocking The Door For Owner Stuck Outside

NailTamie Mart 09, 2021

The differences between dogs and cats have pretty much everyone thinking that the first ones are loyal companions, willing to sacrifice everything for their owners while the latter are lazy, selfish manipulators who simply pretend to care and only when there’s something they want and can’t get themselves. Sounds pretty polarizing, doesn’t it? Well, the world isn’t just black and white, and Gabby Tropea from Austin, Texas has the story to prove it.

Image credits: gabbytropea

Recently, Gabby left her cat Boko at home, so she could walk her sister Isabelle to school. When she returned, however, there was a tiny detail that came back to her. She forgot her keys. And Isabelle had locked the door behind her.

“I got to the front door and Boko could hear me trying to get in,” Tropea told The Dodo. “He started crying and scratching at the door.”

“He started rubbing his face on the stick and I was encouraging him to mess with it. I was coaching him to lift it up,” Tropea said. “He understood what I was trying to tell him and he started lifting it up!”

My sister accidentally locked me out of the house so I went to check if the back door was unlocked and this happened pic.twitter.com/2zkjeyFJk5
— Gabby Tropea (@gabbytropea) February 18, 2019

“He was so proud of himself when I got in and I gave him a couple treats,” Gabby added. “He was all clingy and snuggly after that for a good while.”

Image credits: gabbytropea

Everything lasted only about 10 minutes, but Gabby successfully managed to record the culmination of the ordeal, and her video has already accumulated over 6 million views on Twitter.

So, while Boko might not go down in history as the most famous cat (let’s not forget Félicette, a feline that was sent into space by CNES (the French government space agency) and Unsinkable Sam, a furball that is said to have survived three separate shipwrecks during World War II), he definitely made his mark.

Tropea said she found Boko under a bench at her university one night, and they’ve been inseparable ever since.

If you want to build a similar bond with a cat that Gabby and Boko share, however, there is no one formula. As Dennis C. Turner from the Institute for applied Ethology and Animal Psychology noted, “Humans and members of other species may also be incorporated into [a cat’s] social group and responded to with affection if they were encountered by the cat when it was young. Despite a basic ability to respond socially towards people, adult cats and kittens show considerable individual variation in their friendliness towards humans, whether familiar or unfamiliar, and even kittens from the same litter can differ considerably in their friendliness.”