The cat that sat in a taped square over there: Trick spurs viral feline fun

Forget cat in the hat.

Meet cat in a square.

Timelines are littered this week with photos of cats sitting inside taped-off squares on floors.

Here’s the single tweet that started the craze:

Here’s the backstory.

Julia Serblowski of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada home-schools her 10-year-old son, Leland. Monday was a lazy, cranky day, she told The Hamilton Spectator, so they tried a fun experiment she’d seen online.

“I’d heard something about this once somewhere, that a cat will sit in a square,” she told the newspaper. “So I told Leland. It’s like a science thing. And he liked the idea.”

She taped off a square shape on her floor and, like magic, the family cat Finn walked over and plopped down inside it. “The tape was hardly down and there he was,” she said.

She sent a picture to her daughter, Danielle Matheson, who shared the experiment with Twitter.

It didn’t take long for cat owners to break out the tape and start experimenting.

Here, kitty kitty.

Gonna need a bigger box.

The Nebraska Humane Society in Omaha sent out series of tweets about its experiment.

For skeptics - those are just a bunch of posed cats! - there is incontrovertible video proof that this works.

For skeptics, there is also evidence that this doesn’t work on every cat.

Are dogs smarter because they won’t fall for the trick?

Cat owners are convinced this works because cats are innately curious and like to explore new territories - like squares taped on floors.

“It would be interesting to know the science behind it, why they do it,” Serblowski told the Spectator.

This story was originally published April 14, 2017 at 9:59 AM.