My 13 year old son, Aaron, needed my help with a science project. The project was simple — It wasn’t like we had to build a volcano or anything.

In this experiment, which he selected himself, he was to determine whether cats prefered the color red or the color green. The setup was also simple. We took a length of red yarn and a length of green yarn and dangled it in front of one of our cats. Whichever piece of yarn they pawed first was to be the “preference” for that experiment. Aaron was to run the experiment 10 times and record the results.

We started with our black cat, Sierra. Sierra was the youngest cat and she would attack anything that moves. . . or so we thought. Sierra, the cat who wakes me up at night when she attacks my feet that are moving under my bedsheets, would have nothing to do with a piece of yarn that was dangled in front of her. Regardless of the color. She made a half-hearted swing at the green yarn twice, which we took as a positive read for green, but she wouldn’t even look at the yarn after that.

Next, we tried one of the twin tiger cats, Yin (can guess what her twin’s name is?). Yin was slightly less bored with the task and actually managed to swat at the yarn through 4 different runs of the experiment (she attacked 2 reds and 2 greens) before giving it up for a bad career.

We spotted Yang, the other twin tiger cat, but she ran for cover as soon as she saw us coming at her. We went back to Sierra and tried to trick her. We layed the strings across the bedroom doorway and closed the door, with her on the other side. Aaron stayed on the other side to observe while I pulled on the strings through the door (so Sierra could see the strings moving, but couldn’t see me). She swatted at them a couple more times and then gave up.

For the next half-hour we tried to get the cats to play with yarn — a task that you wouldn’t think would take much effort, but you would be wrong. In frustration, Aaron gave up and said he would just “fudge” the last two data points. Being a man of science who understands the importance of accurate data. . . I told him that if he did that, I didn’t want to hear about it (okay, I’m a bad dad, but I was awefully frustrated too. .. stupid cats!).

And so, scientific progress goes on.