I've long held that the nine lives of a cat are not a sequential thing, but a quantum superposition of the cat. Just as Pavlov selected dogs for his classic experiment in psychology; Schrödinger - understanding the quantum nature of cats - selected a cat for his thought experiment.
A cat lives nine simultaneous lives. This explains many of the phenomena that one observes with cats.
First off, there's the classic "that looks like my cat" from the internet, that other cat could very well be a parallel instance of your cat.
Second, there's the perceived goofiness of cats as they chase imaginary things when they're forgetting where their bodies are at a given time. One instance of the cat could be locked in mortal combat with the elusive red dot while the other one is jumping at what looks to the humans around him as zoomies or greebles ( https://www.reddit.com/r/greebles/ ).
Kittens are especially prone to being confused by their quantum nature and prone to those activities.
The easiest way to pay attention to only one self-instance for a cat is the simplest, sleep. This is why cats have been reported to sleep 12 - 16 hours, and kittens up to 20 hours per day ( https://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/why-do-cats-sleep-so-much ).
Wave function collapse isn't caused by an observer, but rather "does the cat care about this?"
I have often been called a kook myself. I feel my Schizoaffevctive disorder is expressed because the quantum state most people express is not the same as mine.
I put that in so that readers start off with the expectation that this is something to be played with and engage the author rather than worrying if I'm a crazy cat dad with claims of enlightened understanding who's comment should be quietly collapsed.
If I was seriously claiming that cats live multiple lives and that the ultimate observer of the universe's entangled wave function was a cat playing with a cosmic ball of yarn... I think they could rightly call me a kook. I make none of those claims except in jest.