‘It’s a good thing she didn’t overreact’: Cat loses her mind when she falls for an evil prank involving a paper doppelganger

Cats are funny little critters. There’s just something about our feline friends that makes them so great to be around, in fact, it’s like having a little brother or sister. Actually, I’ve seen enough videos to convince me that cats have human level intelligence, but just choose to play dumb so they don’t have to pay taxes. That might explain why it’s so fun to play pranks on them all the time.

Cat pranks are a favorite pastime for humans and they make for some hilarious content online – of course, we’re talking about harmless pranks. After all, videos featuring cats being bamboozled are the bread and butter of an app like TikTok. One particularly devious prank set up by user @mells_99 involves placing a cardboard print-out of another cat and placing it somewhere their pet will see it, and then recording their reaction.

In Mel’s case, she made a very realistic looking cutout of a cat and placed it in a conspicuous spot – peering through the glass window of their back door. Mel chose the perfect audio to make the video even funnier too with the Cardi B “oh my god what is that” sound, which just makes the video all the more hilarious.

Mel’s cat (whose name is Figgy, by the way) certainly took the bait, jumping face-first into the window pane in an attempt to fight off the perceived intruder. To be fair, it’s a pretty realistic cut-out and one commenter even admitted to believing that it was the actual cat, “Not me thinking I was looking at your cat waiting for the paper cat to pop out.” Another quipped, “It’s a good thing she didn’t overreact.”

Believe it or not, this is actually a fairly popular prank on TikTok, with plenty of videos featuring a cardboard cat cutout and the results are more often than not the same with the real cats going wild. 

To be fair to Figgy, this isn’t the first time she’s seen another imposter cat in her backyard, and what’s worse, the homeless cats in her neighborhood have been stealing her food! It’s no wonder she’s so aggressive towards any other cats she sees outside.

In another video, we can see Figgy still trying to paw her way through the glass pane to get at the other cat, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it’s not real and that it hasn’t moved in the slightest. I think we need to see Figgy’s reaction when Mel opens the door and reveals the other cat to be a flat picture, would she understand that she’s been duped?

I wish I could laugh, but I’ve been in Figgy’s shoes before. In fact, my old housemate used to have a Danny DeVito cutout and no matter how many times I’d walk past it during the day, I would always forget about it and it would always make me jump out of my skin at night. So I don’t blame the cat for falling for this old trick, as we’ve all done it at least once.