My Kat is a kleptomaniac

[SamIam]

or something

Here's the deal - My cats have a large ceramic bowl which I keep filled with crunchies and which resides in my kitchen on the floor right beneath the counter.

A little while back, I discovered some safety pins - fortunately closed - in with the kitty crunchies. I thought maybe I had absently minded left a few pins on the counter and one of the cats had jumped up and knocked them down into the food. I removed the pins from the crunchies and made sure the counter was clean. I put the pins with the others in a box in a closed drawer.

The next morning there were 3 more pins in the food. I removed them also. A couple of days later there were 5 pins! This went on until I noticed one of the kitties, Flicker, slithering under the chest of drawers in my bedroom. She pawed around under there a bit, then emerged with a large safety pin in her mouth and headed straight for the kitchen to drop it into the bowl.

I pulled the dresser out and saw that quite a few safety pins had spilled on the floor behind it - Flicker's secret stash! I swept the remaining pins up off the floor, restored them to their box and thought the episode was over.

Until I put my Christmas tree up and ornament hangers began to appear in the kibble bowl. Not the ornaments themselves which I'd think a cat would find quite tempting - just the hangers. I feel concerned about the hangers because a pointy piece of fine wire with a hook on each end might cause some damage to the feline who accidently swallowed one. I looked everywhere for Flicker's hanger stash and never found it.

Yesterday Flicker moved on to dimes - seriously! There were 3 in with the kibble yesterday evening. I removed them. When I got home tonight there were two new dimes waiting. I'm pretty sure that Flicker gets the dimes from a small basket containing spare change on my coffee table. But why only dimes and not nickles or pennies?

And why does Flicker drop the dimes and those other things into her food? Is she leaving me tips? Making offerings to the kibble gods so that more and better crunchies keep coming? Anyone have an explanation for this wierd feline behavior?