Why cats won’t punish a stranger who harms you | Hacker News Reader

Why cats won’t punish a stranger who harms you

bbc.com

59 pointspseudolus86 comments

The answer to the title question was never scientifically answered. They described the experiment, the results, and then lead into a conclusion that didn't match the science. Then they finally reverted to anecdotal evidence to support the original claim which the scientific evidence does not support.

> title question was never scientifically answered

The title changes changes “who refuse to help their owners” in the article to “who harms you,” which is a big difference. The study [1] never uses the word “harm” with respect to cats; it does to reference a different study using infants. That specificity with the word should communicate what they tested for.

Anecdotally, I have had a cat and a dog. Both of them reacted, immediately and quite viciously, to people who raised their voice to me. (Growl and barking and hissing.)

[1] http://animalbehaviorandcognition.org/uploads/journals/30/AB...

This bbc article is not reporting what the study actually found. They changed the question of the original article so that they can get a click-baity title. That's so annoying...

You are right to critique the article, but I think you go too far.

They suggest an unsupported conclusion as a possible reason for the observed behavior, but they clearly don't make any actual conclusion and suggest more study is needed.

Yeah that was not a great article. They even mention that cats were domesticated more recently than dog but don’t say how recent.

The article title asks “Why cats won’t punish a stranger who harms you”, but the experiment that the article discusses has “helper”, “non-helper”, and passive actors. Maybe cats do not make the same association that dogs seem to do in this experiment that not helping is the same thing as harming?

The question of reacting to harm incurred by a human companion would be better answered if the action that the animals observe appeared to be harm such as a mock assault where the companion appears to be in pain as a result of the active participant e.g. the active participant appears to punch the companion in the belly without actually making contact such that the companion falls to the ground reeling in false pain. The Japanese study linked in the article discusses this possibility in its “Discussion” section.

> It is conceivable that the cats in this study did not understand the meaning or goal of the owners’ behavior (attempting to open the container to get the object inside). To our knowledge, cats’ ability to recognize others’ goals or intentions from their actions has not been investigated. But even if they did understand the owner’s goal or intention, they might have failed to detect the negative intention of the non-helpful actor (deliberately withholding assistance). Further studies would be valuable for testing alternative third-party evaluation situations and for clarifying whether cats recognize others’ goals or intentions. [0]

[0] http://animalbehaviorandcognition.org/uploads/journals/30/AB...

Agreed. I'm a big believer in animal intelligence and I've lived with both cats and dogs, and this setup seems to me to be difficult for cats to understand, too abstract and removed from cat's natural capacities. They made no effort to establish that the subject animal had any understanding of what was happening before varying the experimental parameters. Basically I would say this experiment is useless as it is; it's just not good science.

I don’t think it’s necessarily bad science. The null hypothesis is that cats would react the same as dogs, and the study suggests that’s not true. While this is not surprising to most people, it is still a more rigorous attempt to understand the differences between cats and dogs than simple intuition and anecdotal experience. I do think the experimenters should probably have done a follow-up study more attuned to cats’ natural abilities, but they likely feel the same way.

I agree. "Not helping" is a much harder cue to pick up than an actual aggression.

As the article mentions:

> " So we shouldn’t be too quick to conclude that our cats don’t care if people are mean to us. What’s more likely is that they just can’t tell."

Cat's social theory of mind is different from humans and dogs. Cats do understand 1-1 relations (between them and other people) but relations between other people are harder.

(On the other hand they know how to use the litterbox so...)

yes, cats are very curious and perceptive, constantly trying to figure out how the world works (and how to eat that bird outside the window!). just because they don’t perceive the human problem in this case doesn’t mean they don’t generally want to help.

cats are social, just not the same way dogs or humans are, and they form habits based on things they’ve figured out about the world (the litterbox being a good example, a hybrid instinct & learned social behavior). my cat has figured out that her human and her canine sister are harmless to her and she can relax and even play and cuddle with us. she’s also food motivated, so can be trained on that basis.

I had a cat who would become upset if my mother and I were having a fight. She would immediately begin "yelling" at my mother and once scratched her.

The scratching was especially funny given the situation: we had a rug that kept getting moved, my mother was convinced that I kept moving it, when I had not. She kept arguing this, the cat came over, yelled, eventually scratched her when that didn't work, then annoyed with the situation, decided to sharpen her claws ... on the rug, pulling it out in exactly the direction the rug kept mysteriously creeping without my intervention.

That was just due to the luck of timing but it was very funny just the same.

my cat absolutely believes she can talk. she yells at me when she wants to eat, asks for reassurance and protection when she’s feeling uncertain (like during supervised outdoor time), seeks forgiveness when she’s feeling guilty, and scolds me when i’m off-schedule (especially around treats and playtime).

Yeah - my conjecture is that cats understand that we’re somehow communicating by vocalizing, but obviously don’t understand the whole language thing, because they’re cats. They don’t really grasp any difference between their meows and human speech.

My Siamese - a notoriously talkative breed - and I regularly have extended “conversations”. Especially with the whole pandemic stay-at-home thing, she’s become the centre of my social life. To an onlooker we undoubtedly look and sound utterly insane.

that's cute! sometimes i mimic my cat's meows back to her, though she seems completely unfazed by that, as if i'm an american trying to speak french, and she just wants me to switch back to english so i stop embarrassing myself.

Oh man thanks for the good laugh!

there's also the obvious fact that a cat isn't a credible threat to a human. there's no point in "punishing" a creature that weighs 15-25 times as much as you do. would you try to "punish" an elephant if you were unarmed? conversely, any creature that a cat can credibly deter is not a lethal threat to a human. I imagine a large dog understands, at least on some level, that it can actually win a fight against a human. small dogs seem to believe the same thing, just incorrectly.

it would be interesting to study how/if cats defend other cats against roughly cat-sized threats.

> it would be interesting to study how/if cats defend other cats against roughly cat-sized threats

fiercely: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EEa6jZv-Khc

that is an interesting video, thanks for sharing. as much as I want to view it as the cat heroically defending the child, I have to wonder if that was the real motivation. the video seems to take place in the front yard a house that the cat presumably lives in. I wonder if the reaction was more defensive (of the child) or territorial. on the one hand, it seems the cat doesn't react (not in the frame, so hard to say) until the dog actually bites the child. on the other hand, the cat disengages at almost exactly the point where the dog clears the edge of the driveway. then again, who knows if the cat recognizes human customs well enough to align the border of its territory with the property line?

Prolonged engagement would probably not end well for the cat.

Actually up to a weight for weight match or even more in the case of lighter humans, a single dog is trivial to defeat in combat unless it is properly trained to never fully engage and only to tear and dash.

If a person reacts aggressively and not trying to escape, a dog is easily defeated. Just have to protect your throat and keep facing the dog. Allow it to grab you on a limb , preferably a hand or arm, and you have control. Humans have three mouths , dogs only one. Force your hand / arm into the dogs mouth and do not pull away. Use the other hand to control the snout and remove the eyes. Use your mouth to destroy the snout and associated bone structure. If you can get your hand into the mouth reach for the lungs and asphyxiate the animal. Two Dogs gets tricky. Three dogs is deadly.

I can't tell if this is a serious comment or not, but if you're being serious this is horrible advice. Some dogs bites are strong enough to crush bones, and they aren't even 100 pounds. You want to willingly give them a limb so they can actually snap it in half?

Sure, if you're fighting a 50 pound Australian Shepherd, have at it. If you're fighting a 150 pound German Shepherd, you're going to die.

yeah I've seen a chessie crush a deer's skull in his mouth, seemed pretty casual for him too. I'm certainly not gonna try this with any guard breeds.

A Neapolitan mastiff I lived with was swimming next to me, he wasn’t super comfortable in water and as we were swimming he bit into my forearm and hit bone.

He didn’t mean it at all. I don’t even think he knew it happened. He was pretty dumb, but that is beside the point.

OP’s advice isn’t actually awful. If I actually had to fight Ben Dog, I would have no option but to go into the mouth. Same for grizzlies. But.... I would not want to do this and am certain I would take a lot of damage.

This would be a case where the only way to win would be to avoid.

I'm not sure that plunging my arm down its throat and choking it with my fist would be my first instinct if I were attacked by a dog :)

Amen, brother! But that's why you have to practice, practice, practice! Hit the dojo! Hard to find dogs, bears or sharks willing to spar though! Maybe a rubber bear?

This is the weirdest comment I’ve ever read on HN!

Never before have I heard "reach into an animal and grab its lungs from the inside" as a defense strategy. That's a new one.

As poorly conceived as it sounds. It’s not wrong. It’s the same advice for grizzly bears. You need to straight up break the animals instincts from attack to protect, and a non-armed way to go that is to attack eyes or mouth and eyes are hard to go to. Bears specifically have strong gag reflexes, IDK about dogs.

> Humans have three mouths

What?

Guessing it's a metaphor indicating that a human hand can accomplish the offensive goals of a dog's mouth, and so can the human's mouth.

I'm picturing some sort of lovecraftian horror of human/dog/multi mouth dog hybrid

I showed this to my gal pal, an animal surgeon of 12 years.

She's still laughing.

Also: How does one shove their arm down a dog's mouth if the dog's mouth is already busy biting the non-free arm?

Good advice but hard to accept and harder to practice. I always carry a pocket knife and sometimes a walking stick or umbrella - animals haven't yet figured out umbrellas.

The average cat is more of a threat than the average dog. It just won’t bite.

The video linked by CraneWorm shows a cat (when acting on instinct) doesn‘t care about size differences. The dog probably outweighs the cat 4:1 yet the cat is able to stand its ground.

It's also a surprise attack from a full speed charge. I bet that helps a lot.

a house-cat can easily kill a human.

maybe via infection, and over a few days at that. unless the cat gets spectacularly lucky, it can't scratch you badly enough that you bleed out on the spot. cats typically kill by severing the neck vertebrae with their jaws. a house cat isn't strong enough to do this to a human.

Maybe a paralysed human.. really?

While I'd never want to try it a swift punt would end a cat attack surely

If you don’t get prompt medical attention for the likely infection from the bite, sure.

But that’s a bit of a delayed effect.

Soul killing doesn't count.

Yeah I‘d argue (as it always is) it depends. A lot of people know this video where a cat protects its hooman from a dog https://youtu.be/EEa6jZv-Khc so there‘s no general rule.

A more accurate title:

Experiment shows that cats are less aware of helpful behaviour between humans than dogs.

This is closer, although it’s possible the cats didn’t pity an owner as readily as a dog, or that the cats perceived the owner was faking the disability to open the box.

Disclosure: I think I have observed the latter behavior on many occasions.

Cats are domesticating us, we think we are domesticating them.

no mice are experimenting with us!

They don't bring the stick back either

Back in the 90s we had a cat that liked to play fetch. Every now and then it would come to you with a bobble (a hairy ball) and you were supposed to throw it and it would bring it back (it would even drop it to your open hand).

She also liked to eat cheese puffs.

My cats also play fetch: I throw the ball, they run over to where it landed, and then they sit still while they wait for me to walk over and throw the ball again :)

haha mine too.

She wasn't playing fetch - you were playing throw!

Every one of my cats liked to play that way. It was like a video game form of play hunting to them. I miss all of those furry assholes.

Yes, many of mine too.

Sometimes mixed in with their usual exercise I'll throw the toy (a piece of a padded envelope wrapped around a plastic straw) into some unexpected places and they seem to like the challenge of finding it. My one current cat that fetches will search for something for a few minutes even and carries it back every time.

I've seen a few cats that'll bring back toys you throw for them so you can throw it again.

Cats can be trained quite well do to activities and if you can understand them correctly. It is still very rare, tho. I've seen videos of cats doing skateboard and other things their human trained them to do, but he was a cat behaviourist.

I always wanted a dog growing up. My parents finally agreed to a cat, so I made do. She knew sit, shake, high five, would "play" the piano, and could be sent off to touch a mark. When my sister's cat came to live with us for a few months, I taught him to sit and to jog on the treadmill. The treadmill trick was no longer allowed after the day mom was running on the treadmill and he jumped on and ran up between her feet.

That's damn cute. While I've always grew with cats I've never been able to make one do things! They always loved me deeply (in their own ways, for example my first one was always walking me to school and doing silly things for fun on the walk, coming back at the pause, and coming back to search me when school ended).

I think I only accomplished any of that because I was a kid before kids having their own computers was a thing. So I had nothing but time to spend and all the patience an 8-15 year old could muster. Once I got a job and could drive places, I never really taught any more tricks.

My cats love it. In fact I've found that most indoor-only cats do, as they have to spend their energy on something.

I used to play fetch the ball with our cat, somehow I had managed to teach him to bring the ball back. And about 4 months ago we got a border collie and the cat now best best likes to watch how the bc fetches the ball, it's like he's watching a TV show.

I played fetch with my male cat with very few breaks for an entire sunday back in 2005, which i remember because we were watching NFL games for a considerable part of the time.

Our Siamese cat absolutely loves to fetch and fetches more reliably and to your hand far better than our German Shepherd ever did.

mine does! it seems to be an inherited trait, since you can see some of his ancestors marked as "fetchers"

playing fetch is normal for kittens

My cat fetches, very consistently. Most days I make him run and leap over things to fetch a throwing toy that he likes. I've known two others that do too.

My cat defends me too, or at least fights off the local strays at the door. But he just likes to fight in general.

I’ve been amazed by how playful and responsive some cats are on YouTube. I noticed one thing common in all these videos, or streams also on Twitch : you can see that these cats receive attention and are loved very much, they are treated with respect and get lots of interaction.

A cat is like a mirror. You get what you put in to a cat, most of the times. Treat it with love and respect, it will return it. Treat it like an annoyance, it will treat you the same way!

My take is this. Dogs are pack animals who defend threats to the group. Cats are colony animals who respond to threats to the zone.

I'm fairly sure both consider their owners to be one of their own species.

> I'm fairly sure both consider their owners to be one of their own species.

At least for dogs, I'll have to disagree here. Dogs have a complex political structure among themselves, and humans never take a part in it. You are not the "alpha" of your dogs pack, you are something completely different.

or of their own pack, at least it seems here

The experimental setup seems a rather subtle social interaction, difficult to parse and pretty far away from "a stranger that harms you".

My cat would be the first to run away haha. And she only lets me pet her and pick her up, she's very wary of other people and animals.

I think it's more about realizing there is nothing she could do about, well, any danger. I did chase some bugs and a mouse once and she actually joined in.

Datapoint : one of our cats was born feral and will definitely intercede in any bickering.

I think the 'why' isn't really explained in the article. 'Cats are less social aware' seems to be the tldr summary followed by call for more research.

Somewhat explained: because they were solitary hunters before domestication, unlike dogs who hunt in groups.

Is it? There is some sociability in feral cats.

The article points out that cats do clearly have some sophisticated social behavior with humans, it just does not seem to be as well-developed as it is with dogs.

It makes sense that cats in the wild would be “somewhat social” for grooming / shelter / care when for kittens, and feral cats do form somewhat matriarchal colonies. But there isn’t anything like the hierarchical pack structure of feral dogs.

Feral cat is an un-owned domestic cat

I think "feral" here refers to cats completely unaccustomed to humans. I know from experience that they will run away or bite and scratch the shit out of you until you back off, and they have no interest in getting to know you.

If you give them food, they'll wait until you're gone, then take it and run. I guess not many people have witnessed them. They're not sick, that's just how they are. They probably can get accustomed to humans after a while, but it would definitely take longer than with feral dogs.

I have owned, if you can call it that, a couple ex feral cats. One we only managed to pickup a couple times. And if it was feeling really social it might hang out within 2-5 meters. And it was constantly aware and would run if anything unexpected happened. In this case, I think it was both feral and treated poorly, so that made its behavior even more un housecat like.

They do feel rather wild, and it is interesting to see how shallow domestication really is, even in ourselves.

As bserge said, it was what I was referring to. But maybe theses abandonned cats, over a couple generation, still get the "socialization" ? I have no idea to be honest. I was referring to herds of cats in Russia or some other country, saw a documentary about it a couple of years ago -- they developed quite a society.

> 'Cats are less social aware'

That seemed like speculation in the article ("what seems most likely").

Your "social aware" is very different from they are not "social pack" animals like dogs.

The tldr isn't what you just made up. It's we don't know. It's literally summarized in the last paragraph:

> Despite their popularity, we still know relatively little about how cats think. Future research might show cats’ understanding of humans is even more limited than we currently realise. Alternatively, it might turn out that cats are better able to recognise human social dynamics in different contexts.

But if I were to judge a cat as a little furry human. I wouldn't find that much sympathy for someone that imprisoned me. I guess we have different understandings of how we define little furry humans to begin with.

Sort of a misleading conclusion given the title.

My anecdata: the Maine Coon brothers will meet strangers at the door and stare at them. If the stranger enters, the cats will start to hiss. If they come further inside, the cats will attack.

When we're expecting our HVAC folks, we lock up the Mainers in a bedroom.

Meanwhile, the Siamese look inquisitively at the strangers and then run away.

TLDR: "Cats aren't indifferent to human behaviour, they've just been domesticated more recently so can't pick up on social cues and so are indifferent to human behaviour!"

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