Why does my very nice cat knock things off the table?

This is Bode.

She’s my baby. She’s also the nicest cat I know, and that’s not just me: Persians have data on their side. In a 2019 survey of 5,726 cats in Finland, Persians were among the breeds least likely to be aggressive, to strangers or to other cats. Bode fits the data. She is very nice.

And yet. Here’s how it goes.

She sits down next to something of mine. She looks at me. One paw goes out, and the thing slides a little. She looks at me again, to check I’m watching. Then it’s on the floor, and she looks at it like it jumped.

So I wanted to know why my very nice cat does this. Is she hunting? Bored? Doing physics homework? Is it personal?

I went looking for the study that answers it. There isn’t one.

Nobody has actually checked

I couldn’t find a single study on cats knocking things off tables. The writer Gwern Branwen went down the same hole in 2023 and called the question “unresearched as far as I know”.

It’s not just this one habit. Cat play in general is barely studied. In 2019, the cat researchers Mikel Delgado and Julie Hecht reviewed what’s known and said few studies have treated play as something worth measuring. Adult cats get even less attention than kittens. A 2022 review of play and cat welfare said much the same: we know little about how play affects a cat’s wellbeing.

So nobody has put 100 cats next to 100 glasses and taken notes. What does exist is research on the pieces: how cats play, how they hunt, and what they want from us. Put those together and you get three decent guesses. I’ll keep what’s measured and what’s guessed apart, and check each guess against Bode, who is a sample size of one and does not care.

Guess 1: she’s hunting

This one has the most science behind it, though none of it involves tables.

In the 1990s, Sarah Hall did her PhD at the University of Southampton on how adult cats play with toys, and published the work with John Bradshaw. The toys that got the most intense play were small, moving, and covered in fur or feathers. Basically, mouse-shaped. After 16 hours without food, the cats played rougher with a small toy, with more of the close-up moves they’d use to kill it. Hungry cats were also more willing to take on a bigger, rat-sized toy.

Hall’s conclusion: a cat playing with an object shares so much with a cat hunting that it may belong under hunting, not play.

The moves match too. Poke, bat, scoop, pounce, grab, bite. That’s how cats handle prey, and it’s how they handle toys. Bode has never had to hunt for a meal in her life. The moves came with her anyway.

What switches it on is movement. In a 2017 study, cats got three toys: a feather toy that someone wiggled, a toy mouse that sat still, and a feather toy that sat still.

23

cats liked the wiggling feather toy best.

5

cats liked one of the two toys that just sat there.

The 2019 review adds that something moving away from a cat is especially good at starting a chase.

Now here’s me joining the dots, so treat it as a guess. A pen on a table doesn’t move. Tap it, and suddenly it does. BBC Science Focus offered a version of this in 2024: a scared mouse will often freeze, so a still object might be worth a poke, just to see if it runs.

So when Bode pats my pen, she may be asking it a question. The pen never answers. It just goes over the edge.

Guess 2: she wants me off the sofa

Cats are supposed to be aloof. The research says many of them aren’t.

In that same 2017 study, 38 pet and shelter cats got to choose between people, food, toys and smells. Each cat’s favourite was whatever it spent the most time with.

• 50% picked time with a person.
• 37% picked food.
• 11% picked toys.
• 2% picked a smell.

And within “people”, being played with edged out petting and being talked to.

Cats also notice whether you’re paying attention. In a 2019 study by two of the same researchers, cats spent more time near a person who was paying attention to them than near one who wasn’t. That held for pet cats and shelter cats.

And cats learn from what happens next. That’s one of the classic ideas in psychology, and the most famous experiment behind it used cats. In 1898, Edward Thorndike put hungry cats in boxes with food outside. Pulling a loop or pressing a lever opened the door. At first they got out by luck. With practice, they got out faster and faster. Thorndike later named the rule behind it the law of effect: what pays off gets repeated.

Now think about what I do when something hits the floor. I jump up. I say her name, loudly. I walk over, pick it up, and put it back on the table, which is to say I reset the game. By Thorndike’s rule, I’m the treat.

1PushMy things go over the edge

2PayoffI jump up and say her name

3RepeatNext time, she pushes sooner

This is the theory cat experts lean on. Mikel Delgado told Inverse in 2018 that many cats learn knocking things over is a quick, easy way to get their person’s attention. The cat behaviour consultant Marilyn Krieger writes on PetMD that owners can reward it without meaning to, and that the reward can be as small as a glance. Those are expert opinions. They make sense, but nobody has measured them.

A glance. If a glance counts, I never stood a chance.

Guess 3: she’s bored

Cats get bored of the same thing fast. In a 2002 study, Hall, Bradshaw and Ian Robinson gave cats the same toy in three play sessions in a row. After those three, play had nearly stopped. Then they swapped in a toy in a different colour, and the cats played hard again. They weren’t tired of playing. They were tired of that toy.

Vets take this seriously. In 2013, two cat vet groups, the AAFP and the ISFM, put out guidelines listing five basics for a healthy cat home. One is a chance to play and hunt. They point out that even well-fed cats hunt. They suggest moving a wand toy like prey, hiding food so the cat has to find it, and rotating toys so they stay new.

There’s a hint that play helps. A 2014 survey asked 277 cat owners about toys, play and behaviour problems. Owners who played for at least five minutes at a time reported fewer problems than owners who played for one minute. The number of toys made no difference. It’s a survey, so it shows a link, not a cause. Still, five minutes of feather for a safe table is a deal I’ll take.

Does she understand gravity?

Probably not the way it looks. But cats do have some sense of how things behave.

In a 2016 study led by Saho Takagi at Kyoto University, 30 cats in Japanese cat cafés watched a person shake a closed container. Sometimes it rattled. Sometimes it was silent. Then it was turned over, and an object fell out, or nothing did. The cats stared longer when the result didn’t match the sound. A rattle, then nothing. Or silence, then an object. They seemed to expect a rattling container to drop something.

But cats also flunk simple tests of cause and effect. In a 2009 study, 15 cats faced a treat tied to a string, out of reach. With one string, every cat pulled it in. With two strings, only one tied to the treat, none of them reliably picked the right one.

So Bode probably isn’t running a physics experiment. My guess, not a study’s: she’s asking a simpler question. Will this thing move? And will he?

So what did I learn

The honest answer is that nobody knows for sure, because nobody has checked. Every article on this, mine included, is built from research on nearby things.

What I actually took away:

• The best-supported idea is hunting. Cats play with objects the way they hunt, and movement is what switches it on.
• Attention is the other strong guess. In one study, half the cats picked time with a person as their top choice, and cats notice when you’re watching. Experts think a big reaction teaches the cat to do it again. I am a big reaction.
• The vets’ advice fits both guesses: give her something better to hunt. A wand toy moved like prey, food she has to find, and toys swapped out before they get boring.
• Also, move the good glasses. That one doesn’t need a study.

She’ll do it again tomorrow, and I’ll pick it up again tomorrow. That’s the deal. Honestly, for the nicest cat I know, it’s a good one.

Sources (17)

• Hall (1995). Object play in the adult domestic cat (Felis silvestris catus). PhD thesis, University of Southampton.
• Hall and Bradshaw (1998). The influence of hunger on object play by adult domestic cats. Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
• Hall, Bradshaw and Robinson (2002). Object play in adult domestic cats: the roles of habituation and disinhibition. Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
• Delgado and Hecht (2019). A review of the development and functions of cat play, with future research considerations. Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
• Henning, Fernandez, Nielsen and Hazel (2022). Play and welfare in domestic cats: current knowledge and future directions. Animal Welfare.
• Vitale Shreve, Mehrkam and Udell (2017). Social interaction, food, scent or toys? A formal assessment of domestic pet and shelter cat (Felis silvestris catus) preferences. Behavioural Processes.
• Vitale and Udell (2019). The quality of being sociable: the influence of human attentional state, population, and human familiarity on domestic cat sociability. Behavioural Processes.
• Salonen, Vapalahti, Tiira, Mäki-Tanila and Lohi (2019). Breed differences of heritable behaviour traits in cats. Scientific Reports.
• Thorndike (1898). Animal intelligence: an experimental study of the associative processes in animals. Psychological Review, Monograph Supplements.
• Ellis and colleagues (2013). AAFP and ISFM feline environmental needs guidelines. Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery.
• Strickler and Shull (2014). An owner survey of toys, activities, and behavior problems in indoor cats. Journal of Veterinary Behavior.
• Takagi and colleagues (2016). There’s no ball without noise: cats’ prediction of an object from noise. Animal Cognition.
• Whitt, Douglas, Osthaus and Hocking (2009). Domestic cats (Felis catus) do not show causal understanding in a string-pulling task. Animal Cognition.
• Branwen (2023). Why cats knock stuff over. gwern.net.
• Paoletta (2018). Why do cats knock everything over? Science explains. Inverse.
• Krieger (2025). Why do cats knock things over? PetMD.
• Pilcher (2024). The (quite adorable) reason your cat loves knocking stuff off tables. BBC Science Focus.