#Clever cat plays piano to tell his owner when he’s hungry

Are your cat’s incessant meows for food not noisy enough? Try teaching it to play piano.

Kate Nyx, from Philadelphia, has trained her cat Winslow to rap on the keys of a miniature piano when he’s hungry. Since then, the 7-year-old tabby has taken up tickling the ivories for various other needs and whims, such as litter cleaning or affection.

“He used to run around screaming all the time and I was like, ‘this is no good’,” said Winslow’s owner Kate Nyx, from Philadelphia, who had hoped he would make music rather than meow.

“He started showing interest in the piano when he was a baby,” said the 29-year-old musician, who purchased the tiny upright on Ebay more than a decade ago. She told SWNS that Winslow explored the instrument by “playing the notes and looking underneath trying to find where they were coming from.”

That’s when she decided that the dissonant pinging of the toy piano might be an improvement on the cats on vocalizations, which she described as “screaming bloody murder.”

“It became some kind of hunting reward,” said Nyx, explaining how she trained Winslow to use the piano as a means to achieve gratification. Though he’s usually just playing for snacks, she also called the piano a “tool express himself … for attention.”

“It’s his alarm system in general,” she said.

Now, Nyx’s dreams for Winslow have outgrown the pint-sized piano to include a punk rock pet persona and a feature on her new single “Bean Gotta Scream,” now available on streaming platforms. (And — much like Winslow’s piano technique — it slaps.)

Nyx found the clamorous kitty at just eight weeks old in her cousin’s backyard, allegedly picking a fight with their dog. “He was a rambunctious kitten and he’s transformed into a chaotic gentlemen,” she said.

“He was scarred up, covered in dirt, we had to teach him how to eat dry food and he had a serious case of ringworm,” said Nyx, adding that both she and her then-boyfriend later caught the dermal parasite from Winslow.

“I was like ‘do you think you’ll do this with anyone else?’ And he was like ‘nope’ and so that’s how we go engaged,” she said. “We call that our engagement ringworm.”