I Gave My Cat to a Robot
by Matthew J.X. Malady
good news, i’m officially the kind of guy who buys his cat a robot
Rob! So what happened here?
Like anyone afflicted with toxoplasmosis, I care about my cat. His name is Fernando. We share a one-bedroom place, and I felt like he was getting bored with his small arsenal of feather wands and self-articulating lasers. He used to do these huge, four-foot X-Games backflips going after the feather thing, but those kind of stopped once he realized climbing up a chair would give him most of the benefits of jumping.
He was getting a little lazy, and I wanted to get him back some edge, you know? Fernando was a rescue but not like a mean-streets rescue; someone had left him and his littermates in the basement of a nice Upper East Side building before calling the Upper East Side of animal shelters. It wouldn’t shock me to learn they’d nursed him on tiny bottles of almond-butter smoothie, like the protagonist of a children’s book sold exclusively at Barneys.
Anyway I’d heard about Sphero, a (you guessed it) spherical toy robot that rolls where you tell it to with your iPhone. I liked Sphero for Fernando because its creators had made a promo video of spooked cats casting side-eye as it rolled past them — and when a cat is properly suspicious of something, it takes over their brain and leaves them incapable of creating their own mischief. Which seemed, at the time, like more than enough reason to spend $120 on a robot for my cat.
The first time Fernando saw his Sphero light up, he cocked his head a full 45 degrees, which I’d never seen him do before. He pawed at it a couple times, shrunk back when it moved, then batted it HARD against the wall. I was pretty excited, it was every bit of the cat-versus-robot dystopian struggle I’d dreamed of conscripting my pet into.
Once I got the hang of navigation — the app is pretty clever, you calibrate the sphere to orient it towards you, then swipe in the direction you want it to go — he liked chasing it under things and especially liked bolting after it when I’d make it leave the room. He could not abide the idea of it going somewhere without him, less out of affection than fear it would plot against him.
In short: This was a rousing success, for about a month, until Fernando got sick of it. Now it mostly lies dormant on its charging cradle, so I’m grateful Sphero does not yet feel human emotions.
Would you recommend this thing to other folks who have cats? And, if so, do you have any advice or suggestions to share?
It’s worth a shot. You can do more than just move the thing around, and it comes with little behavioral “programs” that make it dance, sprint into walls, change colors, etc. All of which flipped Fernando’s world the first time he saw them, then a little less the second time, with returns continuing to diminish until he would just strut by Sphero to rub his butt on my pants.
I’m hesitant to write it off entirely, though — Sphero has what appears to be a robust, programmable API that grants full control over its many internal sensors, motors, and functions, so there’s hope yet that someone will find a way to turn it into the kind of nuisance my cat can’t stop caring about.
I’d also definitely recommend it to anyone who, like me, had considered a second cat; this is better, there’s less disgusting wet food to handle and it won’t double the animal waste collecting in a box in your house.
Lesson learned (if any)?
Fernando’s backflips have nothing on the mental gymnastics I will perform to rationalize buying a robot.
Just one more thing.
Cats aside, Sphero is tremendously entertaining to humans. There were times I would try to nail some trick — peeking out from under the couch, or transitioning from full speed into the weird jitterbug it does when you press the button with the crab icon (?) — only to realize Fernando had been in another room for several minutes playing with a single Lego. So there’s definitely a reading of this where it’s more like he got the robot for me.
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