Are cats really domesticated?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I have had cats basically my entire life. But my current cats was the first time I had 2 cats from the same litter, and it has been amazing. The difference in how they interact from any of the cats I have had in the past is amazing.
In the future we plan on trying to stick with cats from the same litter and not separate siblings if possible.
But you're probably relying on them for rodent control, right? As a rule, I think all cats should be indoors, but this is a case where it's not so bad if some people get exceptions. Presumably there's plenty of wildlife habitat where small critters can escape your cats without getting in your house!
Why?
The notion is that they teach each other not to fight so rough, which is something. We are bad at teaching them. Most of the orneriest little shits I’ve known were singles.
I had one cat that was a single kitten from a feral mother. She was a spitfire. Loved kids, and me, and everyone else could fuck right off. Except my girlfriend, but only on Tuesdays. She had a special hatred of vets. She would probably have lived 2 years longer if she didn’t turn into a wolverine at the doctors office.
You immediately escalate, make a new loud noise, and perhaps bop them on the head, then walk away. Domestic animals are smart enough to know that this means they crossed a line. Do a consistently and the line becomes very clear
It does happen, and not out of malice. Source: father in law died over the summer, "Garfield" (sigh) was rescued after 3 weeks when FIL was discovered, coroner report mentioned "evidence of post mortem scavenging".
"Garfield" (sigh) is to all appearances just a well adjusted cat, if a bit of a whiner.
This article sort of undersells this in framing it as a recommendation, but at this point there is so much consensus that cats are indeed very social creatures, that many cat rescue operations have a policy of trying as hard as possible to only adopt kittens out in pairs or with their mother.
Not really. Depends on the cat.
When the article talks about the purr, is in addition to that. It even literally starts that section saying "And it’s not just the meow.".
As for the purr, they don;t refer to the "satisfaction purr" cats do when you pet then (or sometimes the agitated purr they have when they're stressed), that you knee-jerk assumed it does. The article links to the relevant research where they describe those "solicitation purrs" and the audio analysis they did on them:
"Here we report how domestic cats make subtle use of one of their most characteristic vocalisations — purring — to solicit food from their human hosts, apparently exploiting sensory biases that humans have for providing care. When humans were played purrs recorded while cats were actively seeking food at equal amplitude to purrs recorded in non-solicitation contexts, even individuals with no experience of owning cats judged the ‘solicitation’ purrs to be more urgent and less pleasant. Embedded within the naturally low-pitched purr, we found a high frequency voiced component, reminiscent of a cry or meow, that was crucial in determining urgency and pleasantness ratings. Moreover, when we re-synthesised solicitation purrs to remove only the voiced component, paired presentations revealed that these purrs were perceived as being significantly less urgent."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...
Before today, the only sort of "purr" I'd ever heard anyone refer to is a "satisfaction purr". What your quotation describes as a "solicitation purr" is what I reckon most people would call a "meow" or maybe a "yell". One of those cases where colloquial v. scientific uses of a word diverge rather severely, I guess.
Again, no. They refer to a different kind of purr that cats do when asking for something, distinct from a meow. A purr that most people might not even have noticed as it occurs next to (and between) meows.
And this special purr also has an embedded higher frequency component similar to a meow, as they explain, that they had to amplify and do some signal processing to hear properly.
It's funny how people are not willing to read the study (or read carefully), but would rather assume that scientists (and even worse: scientists studying cats) don't know what a meow and a purr is, and just use the terms incorrectly!
One thing they didn't mention was color vision. The immediate ancestors of the domestic cat were diurnal hunters with color vision. In domestic cats they not only hunt mainly at dusk or night, but the entire section of the brain related to color vision is much smaller.
AFAIK, the immediate ancestor has been identified as a wildcat which was most closely related to, and possibly the same subspecies as, the modern African wildcat, F. silvestris lybica, a mostly-nocturnal hunter.
all the ones i know go miaow.
> Scientists at the University of Sussex have shown that that bears some phonetic resemblance to a human baby’s cry.
have these "scientists" ever heard a cat purring, a chainsaw, or a baby crying? three sounds that could not be more different!
I'm pretty sure it depends on cats though, but I know exactly what they mean by a cat deploying "an insistent chainsaw-like purr that bears some phonetic resemblance to a human baby's cry". I have known cats that did that.
Similar to my cat (he is a loud purrer) who makes a Puurrrr-hurrr-purrr-urrrr kind of ebb and flow in the same way babies go WAAAAA-AAAA
The ones I've had/have (five in total) personally, they meow. And loudly at that. But I did also meet cats that trill and "burst purr" to signal they want attention - IIRC, many of 'em were former street cats unlike my other cats who all were "purely" domesticated.
Yeah, these people seem like they've never had cats before. Purring does not mean hunger.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(09)...
Your cat will cohabitate with you with no social interaction at all if that's how little effort you put into it. If you want a relationship with your cat, you have to spend time with it and learn to speak cat.
Note that this appears that I have raised a bobcat, I have not. but I have heard stories from them who have.
us destroying bird habitat and their food sources are far more an issue then cats but hey lets just focus on cats instead of those.
not to mention in many ares outside urban centres cats are pretty low down on the food-chain and are as much prey as predator so the main reason to keep your cat inside is so it doesn't become somethings meal
Cats do, too, unfortunately.
us destroying birb habitat and their food sources are far more an issue then cats but hey lets just focus on cats instead of those.
not to mention in many ares outside urban centres cats are pretty low down on the food-chain and are as much prey as predator so the main reason to keep your cat inside is so it doesn't become somethings meal
As we push back the date of first contact between humans and wolves that theory becomes more plausible.
We are chock full of adaptations to time and place.
In this case the article contents imply that the answer to the titular question is "kinda" or "at least to some extent".
There's less variation in how cats vocalise with one another.
Vaccinations, neutering, checkups in the first 18 months ran $900 in vet bills. That's $1800 for two kittens.
It's true: pets are expensive, particularly pet health care, at least in part because (as with human medicine, but perhaps more absurdly) we've allowed professional organizations to strangle supply for vets, both explicitly by limiting the number of schools/class sizes, and implicitly, by putting onerous requirements on getting into those schools and/or getting certified. I was interested in a second career in veterinary medicine, but learned that there's exactly one veterinary college in the entirety of Western Canada, located in the (lovely, but) cold and remote prairie city of Saskatoon, which accepts a total of something like 80 students per year. Absurd.