The piano that taught my cat to play for her supper

The pianist sits before her instrument. She carefully extends a front paw, pressing gingerly on a key. She presses again, and again. She is composing some soul music, because something terrible has happened to her: The vacuum cleaner has come out of the closet.

Yes, my cat is a tortured artist. When Jeeves is moved by something that upsets her — say, I have gotten up when she was comfortable sitting in my lap — she goes to her piano and plays a brief melody. And then the piano dispenses treats. At night, she prefers to sleep on me. If I wake up to pee, disturbing her, my bathroom visit is accompanied by a moonlight serenade.

She hasn’t mastered chords, though I don’t think the Pet Piano supports them. Really, her cat-sized instrument/smart feeder only has slightly more than an octave for her to work with. And she is prone to simply pressing the same note over and over, since I don’t think she’s really mastered an ear for melody. Nonetheless: My cat plays the piano.

As far as I can tell, the piano is the work of a YouTuber who has spent years training cats. (Yes, cats can be trained. It’s just more work than dogs.) Jeeves is especially trainable, as she is especially food-motivated. So far, besides the Pet Piano, she knows “it’s time to feed the cat” means she’ll get wet food; she comes when called; and she begrudgingly tolerates having her nails clipped because she gets the best cat treat of all: meat go-gurt.

Jeeves does sometimes try to lift the piano lid and get into the basin where her food is stored. Fortunately, the piano is well-enough designed that she hasn’t broken in.

The idea behind the Pet Piano is that, like all auto-feeders, it can limit how much a cat eats. (This is not a problem for Jeeves.) You can, if you want, schedule feedings. It also adds enrichment for bored pets, giving them something to entertain themselves with. Unlike most other auto-feeders, it’s also nice to look at. Occasionally guests entering my home will squat to play the keys and discover, to their surprise, they are being rewarded with cat food.

Training Jeeves to play was pretty easy. The app that comes with the piano — because, like everything else now, the cat piano has an app — has a “training mode,” where it requires an increasing number of key presses to dispense treats. Jeeves has maxed it out. The hardest part of getting her to play the piano was getting her to press on the keys at all; I managed to get her to make the initial association by putting a treat on a key. When she swiped the key to get the treat, the dispenser also dispensed a treat. Once she figured that out, she was off to the races. She now plays melodies of eight notes to get her food.

I could, if I wanted, auto-tune what she’s playing, but I’m not interested in that. I like Jeeves’ weird little compositions. They’re never the same twice. Some days, she simply presses the same key eight times. But I’m more interested in the times when she moves her paw up and down the keyboard. What is she thinking? Why does she sometimes play different notes, and other times simply repeatedly press on the same one? What is it like to be a cat who plays the piano? What does music even sound like to her?

That was when I noticed the times she was likeliest to play. Sure, she sometimes will just play in the middle of the afternoon, because she’s hungry. But if she’s agitated, she consoles herself with the piano. Or, more likely, with the food it dispenses. My beautiful daughter is eating her feelings.