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Many Animals Can Count, Some Better Than You (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The story of the frog's neuro-abacus is just one example of nature's vast, ancient and versatile number sense, a talent explored in detail in a recent themed issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, edited by Brian Butterworth, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, C. Randy Gallistel of Rutgers University and Giorgio Vallortigara of the University of Trento. Scientists have found that animals across the evolutionary spectrum have a keen sense of quantity, able to distinguish not just bigger from smaller or more from less, but two from four, four from ten, forty from sixty. Orb-weaving spiders, for example, keep a tally of how many silk-wrapped prey items are stashed in the "larder" segment of their web. When scientists experimentally remove the cache, the spiders will spend time searching for the stolen goods in proportion to how many separate items had been taken, rather than how big the total prey mass might have been. Small fish benefit from living in schools, and the more numerous the group, the statistically better a fish's odds of escaping predation. As a result, many shoaling fish are excellent appraisers of relative head counts.
I have a pair of very large monitor lizards that can count.
They know when feeding time is (Pavlovian learned response no doubt there) and if I give them, each, 10 food items, they are happy.
If I give one 9, and the other 11 for example, the one with 11 will eat 10 and leave the other one. The one with 9, will hunt for a 10th food item, and won't stop until he finds something to eat.
This happens regardless of food item size (to a point, they cannot eat 10 full sized rabbits, for example, but 10 rats is easy to do)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I took an animal psych class back in college and at the time it was believed that most animals could count to at least 7 linearly, and beyond that were excellent at estimating logarithmically. The smarter the animal, the further it could count linearly, in general.
Cats generally don't do things like this if you spend a little bit of time playing with them or exercising them. I once had a cat that liked to get up to all kinds of similarly mischievous deeds until I eventually figured out that it was just bored. After spending 20 minutes having it chase around a toy mouse on a string or a laser pointer, it wouldn't engage in other types of destructive behavior.
Cats don't need a lot of attention. They're more than happy to spend most of a day sleeping or lying in the sun. However, they are predators and are wired to stalk, chase prey, etc. Satisfy those behavioral needs and they're not going to go around trying to find other ways to scratch those itches. It also makes the cat a lot more friendly towards you as well.
I know a number of guys who got a bonus-cat with a relationship. They tend to have accidents far from home. However, in my favorite case, my buddy got blamed for disappearing a worthless misbehaving cat but he pled innocent. He really had no idea what happened to ol' Frisky until one day a fireman came up to the door with an animal control officer. They related that they'd just raided the nest of an owl and found about two dozen cat collars. His wife's cat had been nailed at about 180 MPH from the sky by a big owl and learned she wasn't quite as tough as she was when she was scratching and biting everyone in the household. Talons + beak > domesticated claws + teeth.