Animals with A Sense of Humor When we think of animals, most of us never think about them having a sense of humor. I guess most people would think it was ridiculous to ever believe they do. I never gave this much thought in the past. Oh, I knew some animals were very smart and occasionally did things which really surprised me, but play a joke on me? After all, even if an animal did have a sense of humor, how would we know what it considered funny? I can tell you this, I personally experienced at least two 'animal jokes'. One was by a cat named Fudge and the other by a dog named Shanna. The cat was mine, he was a black cat of no particular breed, but he was very smart. He was one of three that lived with us and had the freedom of the streets. When my wife and I would go out for a walk, the three cats would always come along. It was like a parade as they walked single file behind us. One thing they did which I didn’t care for was they would sometimes stop and poop on someone’s lawn on the way which would not endear us to the neighbors, but here is the part that was very strange and was definitely cat humor. When I would come home from work the three cats would see my car and come running over to where I was parking and wait for me to get out. As soon as I got out, the cats would greet me, but Fudge would always slap me on the leg and run around the tree in front of the house trying to get me to chase him. This was his little joke. Another thing he did was go up to my wife and press his nose against hers when she was asleep, waking her and scaring the heck out of her. When one wakes this way, it is very creepy to say the least. He is gone now but will never be forgotten.
Shanna was a large dog, mostly Shepard. She belonged to my daughter, I had a little black dog mostly Terrier, named Rico. One day I decided to bring my dog over to my daughter's house to play with her dog since both dogs were very gentle. My daughter and myself were sitting on the couch in the living room talking. My dog came up to me and was soaking wet. I thought this was very strange since we were in the house and there was no source of water for the dog to get in. We decided to watch the dogs for a second to see what was going on. What happened next was something we couldn't believe. Rico was sitting on the floor in the living room and Shanna came up to her, opened her mouth and dropped a whole mouthful of water on Rico. It seems Shanna was going over to her water dish, filling her mouth with water and dumping it on my dog. If this isn't a dog practical joke, I don't know what is. There is the story of the drug sniffing dog who was taken on a practice run. A guy volunteered to let the dog practice on his van. The dog was brought to the van and when he got to the driver's side the dog promptly sat down. This was the signal that drugs were smelled. The van owner became very embarrassed and red. The dog handler said let’s end this exercise, but the van owner said he wanted to find out what was going on and if there were drugs in the van, since he had purchased it second hand. The dog handler agreed and tried the exercise again, and again the dog sat down when it got to the door on the driver's side. This time the van owner opened the door and the dog jumped into the back seat and retrieved a ball owned by the van owner's dog. The van owner swore he could see the dog smiling. A man had a huge horse that was very lazy. One day he was feeding him and the horse bolted and jumped up and down. He managed to calm it down, but this happened again. As a matter of fact, it kept happening. The horse's owner couldn't figure out what was going on until he looked up over the horse's head. There was a tree branch about four feet above the horse and on that branch was a small cat. The cat was taking pleasure by scaring the horse. He would jump and make a low noise and then the horse would bolt. This was a little more cat humor. A rabbit in a cage was not thought to have a sense of humor, but this particular rabbit must have had. When the baby of the house crawled up to the cage and pressed his face against it, the rabbit did a sideways kick which made the baby laugh. While the baby laughed, the rabbit jumped up into the air and the baby laughed harder. Next the rabbit ran in circles making the baby laugh again. Over and over the rabbit did silly things to make the baby laugh. The baby laughed so hard it was out of breath and the parents finally had to stop the spectacle. They were worried about the baby and the rabbit. A woman had several dogs. One of the small ones had a trick he would love to pull on one of the large dogs. He would go to the window and bark and make a fuss until the big dog would get out of his bed and head to the window to see what was going on. When the big dog would get there the little dog would run to the big dog's bed and lay in it. So, you can see by all this humans are not the only ones blessed with a sense of humor.
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