Last Updated on March 24, 2026 by admin
Brianna Terry’s kitchen faucet had been running.
She’d left the house dry. She always did. But sometime between when she walked out the door and when she came home, the tap had been turned on. Not dripping—fully running. And Brianna already knew who was responsible.
Tofu is an orange cat with three legs. He is also, by his owner’s own accounting, not the brightest animal she’s ever met. “He really doesn’t have a lot of brain cells,” Brianna said when the story went wide. “So for him to figure out how to do that, I’m like, ‘wow.'”
That is a fair reaction. Tofu taught himself to operate a kitchen faucet.
He walks up to the sink with the particular confidence of a cat who has thought this through—which he almost certainly has not—reaches up with his one working front paw, and hooks the handle. The faucet runs. Tofu watches the water for a moment. Then he walks away. He doesn’t even drink from it. He just turns it on. The turning-on is apparently the point.
A video of Tofu doing this first surfaced in late 2025, when CTV News caught wind of the clip and reported that this three-legged cat had been caught working the sink faucet when his owner wasn’t home. By March 2026, Tofu was appearing on ABC News broadcasts, and every orange cat owner in the country was nodding at their screens.
Orange cats have built a specific mythology for themselves online—a reputation for chaos, for low intelligence deployed against household objects, for looking directly at their owners and knocking things off shelves anyway. Tofu fits this profile while simultaneously undermining it. He lacks a leg. He found a workaround. He applied that workaround to the kitchen faucet for reasons that remain unclear to everyone except Tofu.
Brianna’s response was also reasonable: she wrapped the faucet handle in a headband. This is the level of engineering required to stay ahead of a three-legged orange cat with a faucet agenda. Whether the headband has held is not confirmed. The available evidence suggests it has not fully resolved things.
The comments that piled in after WSVN’s coverage of Tofu were mostly people identifying their own cats in the situation. One had a cat who would only drink from a running tap and had trained the entire household accordingly. Another’s cat had figured out the bathtub faucet and had been discovered sitting in an inch of water, looking unbothered. A third said their cat had given up on the faucet entirely and had simply taken to sitting in the sink basin and staring upward until someone arrived to serve them.
Cats and running water have always had a complicated arrangement. Veterinarians note that many cats instinctively prefer moving water—in the wild, running water is less likely to carry bacteria than standing water, and this old preference has followed domestic cats indoors, into kitchens, into arguments over faucet handles. Tofu has simply resolved the argument on his own terms.
What people responded to wasn’t really the trick. Plenty of cats have faucet fixations. It was the nonchalance. The way Tofu walked up to the sink with no apparent effort, operated it, and left—as though the missing leg was never a variable in the calculation. As though the question “can I reach that handle?” had already been answered, long ago, in Tofu’s favor.
He is missing a leg. He has full control of the faucet. His owner has a headband around the handle.
Tofu does not appear to consider the matter settled.
Does your cat have a thing for the faucet—or some other household object they’ve decided belongs to them? Tell us in the comments 🐱