I love my cats, but sometimes I wonder if they love me back. Cats are not generally like dogs, who wear their hearts on their sleeves, if they had them. Those wagging tails and loving gazes usually get the point across.

But cats’ feelings are often harder to discern.

Take for example the morning I smelled gas in my home. That rotten-egg stink was emanating from the kitchen and I was surprised to see one of the burner nobs was on. Swearing silently at whichever kid left the thing on, I switched it off. But then it happened again, and this time I caught sight of one of my cats cruising atop the stove, teetering on the edge for no reason I could ascertain. He stopped and stared at me like he’d been caught committing a crime.

“I think the cats are turning on the stove,” I said to my sweetie pie.

“Why would they do that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think they’re trying to kill us?” He looked up from his phone.

“Why would they? They have a pretty cushy life here.”

As I didn’t want to die in my sleep of asphyxiation, I ordered a box of nob covers, the kind people with toddlers use to keep those little fingers from turning on the stove. Sometimes, when people visit they stare at those nobs, as if wondering whether I’ve squirreled away a three-year old somewhere. At which point I explain that my cats binged watched all six seasons of The Sopranos with us and perhaps picked up some very bad ideas.

I started to feel better about my feline friends, until they began smashing stuff. I heard a crash late one night, bolted from bed, and rushed to the kitchen. Both of my black cats sat placidly and stared at me, ignoring the shattered plate, now a stream of colorful shards spread across the tile floor. I considered going all detective inspector on them—we watch a lot of British murder mysteries—but it was clear they wouldn’t talk. So, while swearing under my breath and considering whether they’d fixated on the time Tony took a baseball bat to Angie’s new Cadillac, I cleaned up the mess and placed a heavy blue teapot in the spot where the plate had resided.

Two weeks later, while we were watching TV, said pot suffered the same sad fate as the plate. Again, my kitties were stone-faced. They plopped together into a chair and groomed one another as if I wasn’t even there, cheeky creatures.

Then there are the Kitty Olympic Games. At night, both my boys zoom around the house leaping on and over anything they can find as if practicing for some kind of kitty steeplechase. Somehow they mange to knock over my recliner on a regular basis.

Since I was interested in their feline motivation, I googled “What’s in a cat’s mind?” and almost 120 million results appeared, so it seems I’m not the only one wondering what’s going on inside their little noggins. I checked a few of those links and came to the conclusion that nobody really knows.

But I did find this: Humans domesticated cats about 10,000 years ago in what is today the Middle East to keep rodent populations at bay. But about a decade ago scientists discovered that your kitty is only half domesticated, which means our little bundles of fluff are in fact half wild and remain “predatory hunting mammals.”

That said, maybe letting them watch The Sopranos was a bad idea.

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