What cats can teach us about how to live | Hacker News Reader

What cats can teach us about how to live

newstatesman.com

86 pointsHooke77 comments

> Marra and Santella make some attempt to appeal to cat lovers by suggesting that cats be kept indoors and allowed to work off their excess energy on feline versions of hamster wheels.

Huh? A cat isn't a hamster, no way they will run in a hamster wheel. If you want your cat to run, you'll have to play with it.

> “they can get a leash and walk their cats as tens of millions walk their dogs”

Well.. cats can walk on a leash. I happen to do so on a daily bases, but it certainly is not comparable to walking a dog. The cat walks and sniffs around. It is the cat who determines where we go. Not the human. It is more often standing still as it is walking. Spending half an hour on walking 200 meters is not uncommon.

For the rest I'm not sure what the title on the article has to do with the content of it but OK. :)

are you sure cats won't run in a wheel? https://onefastcat.com/

"Cats in cubes"? Any sensible cat will demand a full office.

Some people even let their cats go furniture shopping at Ikea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQU6OXTkM0

Their price tag is interesting. They initially display $250 to get you start thinking about its value, then about a second later animate its drop to $199.

When I first saw it, within a split second I judged it was probably worth $250. The drop to $199 left me feeling like I just saved $50. Somehow it was more effective than the "but wait, there's more" bit you always see in infomercials, perhaps because it was unexpected.

If that thing has a BOM cost over $20, someone is doing it wrong.

Haha I was just thinking 20 bucks in wood and carpeting and you could build a really cool wheel.

Anchoring. It's a standard tactic in negotiation, and it's used everywhere from supermarkets (SALE! Frozen peas are normally $1.50 but they're now 99c!) to car yards ($35,599 drive away, but we can give it to you, you special customer you, for only $29,999 which is our actual target price!)

LOL, thanks for sharing that.

Amazing, never seen that before.

I'll just let him run free in the house though. Getting him to exercise enough does mean having to play with him, like rolling a ball over the floor which he can then hunt down. He is a bit spoiled that way.

I actually got that wheel two weeks ago. I was very skeptical of whether I could train either of my cats to use it. Took pretty much exactly a week to train one of them to use it and now he uses it all the time.

He still runs around the house and plays when excited but running on the wheel has become his baseline activity when he wants to do something but I'm working and the other cat is uninterested in playing with him.

I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to keep their cat indoors and exercised.

It'd be good if they could do something to improve the aesthetics though, the exterior of the circle is just bare injected plastic. http://onefastcat.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9d...

How did you train them to use it?

Found this video from the company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=563&v=02FL092Qk_...

> A cat isn't a hamster, no way they will run in a hamster wheel. If you want your cat to run, you'll have to play with it.

There's precisely one condition under which a cat will run in a hamster wheel type thing, and that's if you really really don't want it to and try to stop it at every opportunity.

You basically just described Cat Programming 101.

Or if you insert the hamster, too.

I have a cat that plays fetch and walks on a leash. Or more like he's willing to lead me while he's on a leash.

We tried walking our cats on leashes.

It would have been fine, but our timing was terrible. It coincided with an airshow at the local airport. A B-52 buzzed our apartment complex right as we got outside.

We eventually pried the little guys out of the bushes, and they haven't willingly gone outside since.

Ha my spouse decided to try this once.

Emphisis on _Once_.

We took our cat outside and she stayed at the door for about 20 minutes. Then she walked about 15 feet to the bicycle rack and stayed there for another 10 minutes before we took her back in.

> Huh? A cat isn't a hamster, no way they will run in a hamster wheel

The cats at the shelter I volunteer at love their giant hamster wheel. So there's that.

> It is the cat who determines where we go. You can train your cat to walk with you. Even without a leash. (Downside? Obedience rate will never exceed ~95%. The rest of the time, happy cat chasing ;)

Don't you have to train your cat almost everyday? And a 2 week break and the cat "forgets" almost everything? I have a cat and dog and I've trained them both. Getting the cat to come to us has been far more difficult than teaching our dog 10+ tricks (and he remembers if we don't do the trick in over a month). After about a week after we stopped giving snacks to our cat when we called her over she decided she doesn't want to come sometimes (and sometimes she came). Anyways, I gave up training the cat because I don't have the time.

Cats are bastards, you may always have to give a good reward. Not necessarily food, but something. The key to long term training, for cats or humans, is to repeat often, and then gradually lengthen. Don't teach daily for a month and then wait 3 months. Train daily, then weekly, then monthly, etc.

I think it's highly dependent on the cat's personality. We have two, a brother and sister pair. The male cat (Curry) will follow my snapped and pointed finger every time, and responds immediately to voice requests (I use "requests" instead of "commands" intentionally, as any cat owner can attest). If I say "jump down" he'll quickly leave whatever roost he's warming with his bum. His sister Sage, on the other hand, will offer a sassy mew if you snap your fingers at her, and otherwise ignore any requests. She is no less intelligent than her brother, she simply doesn't share his desire to cooperate with her human pets. Curry will also, if he's starved for attention (or out of food, or just bored) come up to me at my computer desk and gently tap-tap-tap on my elbow until I stop what I'm doing and attend to his needs.

Some other interesting activities they've displayed: At night we confine them to their own bedroom in the house, so they aren't constantly scratching at our bedroom door for attention or running up and down the hallway waking us up at 3am. They know when bedtime is, and while Curry is perfectly content to go to bed on his own or with minimal prompting, Sage will find a place to hide before we even realize what time it is. She absolutely refuses to go to bed of her own accord, and we must resort to trickery to get her to go in their room. We can only use the same trick once though; like a Jurassic Park velociraptor, she remembers.

The gourmet food trick worked for a few days but then she would lay her ears back and squint at us as if to say "I see what you're doing there", and run the other way. Next came the catnip-stuffed mouse toy, which she fell for exactly once and never again. Ditto the laser toy; chasing it into the bedroom only to have the door close behind her worked the first time but no more. It seems the only way she will come of her own accord anymore is if we start lavishing her brother with attention; she will come to see what the fuss is about and we'll shut the door behind her. Jealousy in a cat? Perhaps, or just feline curiosity and nothing more.

Wrt the bedtime thing cats are territorial and some will get a lot of anxiety about not being able to access their whole territory for patrol, etc. So if you're putting them in a room at night closed off you may be stressing your cat out and that's why she's fleeing. If I put my cat in a room too long the escape attempts and complaining are epic.

It's not for everybody but I kind of find that "pal, you don't _own_ me" look when my cat knows what I'm asking but doesn't feel like it endearing.

She's definitely the more primal of the pair. She has been known to "drown" her toy mice in their water bowl. My wife finds that particularly disturbing.

We've tried allowing them to run free in the living room and kitchen areas at night, but broken pictures and turned over lamps make that an impossibility (things that they don't do when we're home and awake, oddly enough). Our cats are why we can't have nice things, but we love them anyway.

If you "forget" to give the cat any treats, it's not surprising it will "forget" to perform the trick. You're not describing a break. You're describing a period of retraining.

It turns out cats are really good at intermittent reinforcement, too :)

I don't know about tricks, or teaching cats to go somewhere they don't want to. I do know that it was fairly straightforward to teach our cats that kitchen surfaces are off limits. Taught them when they were ~2-3 months old, and they never forgot. For 20 years.

Same goes for "humans are not climbing posts".

It seems in general easier to train "don't" than "do".

I also take my cat out on a leash fairly frequently. The standing around part is hilariously true. I often have to give it up because I get too bored :)

1) Cats hunt alone but in the wild they live in colonies, and there is a pecking order. Much of cat behavior stems from colony life; for example, cat feces are a scent-marker of who's boss in the area. Cats bury their turds to disguise their scent, so that the dominant cat won't see them as a challenger.

2) Dogs have an instinctual tendency for symbiosis with humans that cats do not have. Accordingly, if you want a cat to stay with you, you have to earn its respect. For this reason a human-feline relationship can be extremely rewarding.

How do you earn cats respect?

Feed them.

Play hunting oriented games with them.

That depends on the cat. For starters, feed them, play with them, keep them company, keep them and their living area clean, don't mistreat them, etc. That's a good start. Jackson Galaxy may be a better source than I on the fine points of feline respect. All I know is it can take some time and effort -- sometimes much of the lifetime of a reticent cat. Totally worth it in the end, though.

Wait so you saying that alpha cats don't bury their poop?

(well ok ddg agrees, did not know that)

I volunteer at an animal shelter and sometimes see cats that have neurological problems or have lost a limb or an eye. I always admire how little this seems to matter to them. They don't get depressed or sad, they just carry on playing even if they are so wobbly they can barely stand or so hobbled they have to awkwardly hop everywhere.

I have a missing limb cat. She doesn't let it slow her down, not even a little. She even somehow manages to routinely use the scratching post upright with her only front leg. She just takes everything in stride.

Opened up article, was met with politically charged ad asking me to subscribe, closed tab.

Yeah, luckily Google has promised to start punishing this, but it does feel like growth hacking has made my browsing much less pleasant.

Opened up article, was not met with anything because I use an ad-blocker.

Opened article in different browser to see said politically charged ad. I would say it's a decent ad, it just states the facts (Trump is president, thus his era began, role of media is to keep power in check), not sure why it offended you, and said publication is pretty fair and balanced in my view.

One can dislike advertisements without being offended by them.

Calling it out like that for being slightly political comes across as being offended to some extent.

Not sure if you saw something different, but I think slightly political was an understatement.

Hacker news is one place I go where to try and get away from all the political noise out there.

I'm running uBlock Origin, but the ad popped up. Which ad-blocker are you using?

uBlock Origin + BetterPrivacy + Disconnect + Privacy Badger + I don't care about cookies.

One of them did the job.

Privacy Badger and Ghostery dislike something in this version of Pale Moon, and I haven't gotten around to trying to fix things. I wonder if one of them would've caught it.

it brought one of my cores to 100% usage =|

Please don't try to make cats vegan or vegetarian - and please stop anyone that does - I'm surprised the author didn't bring this up.

Seriously. This kills the cat.

That and curiosity.

So true. My cat really wanted to head outside to check out a bobcat and the Coyotes that were hunting it recently.

And may I suggest if you are vegan and want to adopt an animal companion, consider a rabbit (a bonded pair if you can). They are wonderful loving creatures who will cuddle next to you while you sit on the couch, and their diet is naturally 100% plant-based. They make a perfect DINK pet too since they sleep during the workday. Unfortunately many end up in shelters after someone's kids grow tired of them.

Do they chew on furniture? This is a serious question. I would like to have a non-meat-eating pet after our dogs are gone. I used to have rats but I couldn't take them dying every 2 years.

Rabbits live 3 years. And they eat cables.

Rats too. They also like sweat pants and bed sheets.

Rats can chew through concrete and anything you love.

Rabbits, properly cared for (i.e., kept indoors with space to run and unlimited hay), live 7 years.

Split loom shielding is a cheap and effective way to protect cables: https://www.amazon.com/Install-Bay-Split-Loom-Inch/dp/B005V9...

Depends on the rabbit. Our (thinly upholstered) couch has two bite holes in its corner, but the rest of our furniture is quite intact. They're much more likely to chew things on the floor like rugs or cables, and then only if they're "in the way".

Bitter apple spray works well to keep them from chewing carpets and rugs: https://www.amazon.com/Grannick-Bitter-Apple-Ferrets-small-a... and split-loom shielding protects cables: https://www.amazon.com/Install-Bay-Split-Loom-Inch/dp/B005V9...

Beside "housekeeping", rabbits chew to keep their teeth short. Apple twigs and compressed hay cubes work great to meet this need and prevents them from seeking other things to chew.

Rabbits live around seven years, properly cared for. Ours is in her fifth year.

Our vet has said that the thinking these days is that with proper care, 8-10 is reasonable for our minilop. Ours is 8 this year, and going strong!

Also, the chewing does depend... quite a few scarves that my wife has from when our bunny was younger don't have the tassels that were designed on em, and he did modify a laptop power cable that we later named "Shocky". Now that he's older, he's much more respectful of our things.

I try to look at the upside – our rabbit recently got behind my recording equipment and scissored a ¼″ balanced audio cable. Just so happens I needed a ¼″ TRS jack for a project so it saved me a purchase…

What about their waste? Can they be trained to only go outside?

You will not find any luck convincing a rabbit to go for a walk like a dog :) They are about as obedient as a cat.

Rabbits (which ought to live indoors, away from cold, predators, and fright) are easily litter-box trained. You'll find that most at a shelter already are. (Our rabbit's habits are impeccable, though not all are.) The best litter is compressed wood pellets (e.g. wood stove pellets), which traps odor quite well. They will sometimes leave individual cocoa-puff-sized poops in strategic locations to mark their territory, but these are hard so they don't stain or smell.

I'm not really sure what I was supposed to learn from that article or to be more specific: From cats? Because the vast majority of points made apply to pretty much all non-domesticated animals that live in close proximity to humans and probably also those in the wild.

The author also seems to consider himself a mind-reader of cats, while never even considering the possibility that other, non-domesticated, animals share these very same traits. Are pigeons busy looking for a "meaning in life"? Are squirrels not "at peace with the world"? Can raccoons suffer from depression? And who really knows if cats can't suffer from it?

This reminds me a lot of how wolfs eventually became domesticated into today's dogs. It was covered nicely on an episode of Cosmos. The path they took was not unlike what is described here for cats.

Worth seeing their darker side as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/do-cats-c...

It's funny how we attribute human qualities to animals that literally lack the neurological capacity. Sharks are not ferocious, dogs do not love you, cats are not independent.

There's nothing wrong with reasoning by analogy, and to be perfectly honest I don't know enough about animals to argue convincingly that cats don't, on some level, want to be alone, but we should understand that having this discussion is mostly just anthropomorphism.

Love is not exactly long division.

i agree, i think love is actually a low level emotion available to most animals. though i'm not an expert on neither love nor animals

Some evidence that cats and dogs do love (or some approximation thereof) their owners:

https://mic.com/articles/104474/brain-scans-reveal-what-dogs...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/its-finally-pr...

We don't. We, as humans, share the qualities of other animals, in our own species-specific mix and flavour, of course.

I have no idea where you picked up the notion that "dogs do not love you" or "cats are not independent". Why shouldn't they do or be? Don't or aren't you?

If dogs don't love us in the deepest way available to a mammalian neural architecture, then people don't either.

You don't know enough about animals to make a convincing argument, but you feel comfortable enough in your knowledge of both animals and neuroscience to say that they are neurologically incapable of being ferocious, loving or independent? That doesn't make a lot of sense. I think you may be a little bit blinded by your biases here — it sounds more like anthropocentrism than reason.

>dogs do not love you

care to explain where between our common - for dogs and humans - ancestors and us you think this capability for love appeared? In particular - did Australopithecus had it? Or did we get it after Australopithecus? Or do you think dogs lost it?

To me your position looks to be exactly the very clear expression of that typical religious dogma of "only humans have soul".

I think this sort of argument is inherently troublesome because it assumes that our experience of consciousness is totally unique and no non-human animal shares any part of it in any amount. If you fail to draw that line precisely between humans and everything else, then you can't draw it anywhere else either. I think it is not possible to do the former (some animals clearly demonstrate significant cognitive capabilities), so it follows that there is no line that can be drawn.

I think it is good to keep in mind that the majority of non-human animals likely see the world through a very different lens than we do, but I think we must also keep in mind that we are related to the rest of the animals and not maybe as special as we think we are.

Also, the idea of "anthropomorphizing" emotions in animals (like love) is IMO kinda silly since I'm not sure we can precisely define or quantify just what it is we are supposed to be experiencing that animals definitely aren't.

Not trying to be hostile; just registering my two cents.

While I agree, anthropomorphizing is still a problem when it comes to relations with animals. I mean we are a wee bit special and we tend to expect too much from other animals. They really are simplier beasts in comparison.

But then again sometimes we can't explain how or what we feel to ourselves, let alone what other fellow humans do. So I belivie it is presumtious to say "animals do not have emotions like we do!" or "they do!". The best we can do is being "optimistically cautious" I says!

Edit: also the article is a great guide on how to drive your cat insane.

All I know is that when a cat walks his paws up my leg, insistent that I grasp him under the armpits and lift him into my arms, and subsequently puts his paws over my shoulder and purrs at the top of his lungs once I indulge his wishes, he derives some form of succor from my having been there; and that is no small thing indeed!

Spoken like someone who's never interacted with a shark, dog, or cat.

Dogs most definitely do feel love. Watch videos of soldiers returning from their tours. Watch how their children react. Then watch how their dogs react. Dogs have been bred to have strong emotions and empathy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com