10:59am November 29, 2013

➸ Cats recognise their owners' voices but never evolved to care, says study

youneedacat:

sissyprinxe:

nothatsnotdialectical:

A new study from the University of Japan has confirmed this, showing that although pet cats are more than capable of recognizing their owner’s voice they choose to ignore them….

In the words of the paper’s authors, they effectively “domesticated themselves”.

“Historically speaking, cats, unlike dogs, have not been domesticated to obey humans’ orders. Rather, they seem to take the initiative in human–cat interaction.” This is in contrast to the history of dogs and humans, where the former has been bred over thousands of years to respond to orders and commands. Cats, it seems, never needed to learn….

The study concludes by observing that “the behavioural aspect of cats that cause their owners to become attached to them are still undetermined.”

cat supremacy ^n_n^

I am attached to Fey because we’ve Been Through Shit Together. And because we love each other, which each of us communicates in a million different ways including a fierce protectiveness of each other. And I didn’t know that love and attachment were only possible to be shown by coming whenever called and obeying commands?!

exactly. whenever i come home, the little guy is waiting at the door for me;often with the older two even though they aren’t friends with him they sometimes put that aside to greet me. they can tell my footsteps from the footsteps of all the other humans who share this stairwell. Whenever i sneeze, three heads swivel in my direction to see if i’m okay. they choose to be near me when i’m at home even sometimes getting up from a patch of sunshine to come share warms with me. they learned my language. i never say “hey do this” to them. i say “if you want x, we could do that” and they say yes or no. we are friends and we love each other.

Yes this.

Also I made sure when I was raising Fey (and she was raising me, because I was barely more than a kitten myself, and she considered herself my mother from pretty near the start even though she was 6 months old and I was 19 years old)… that as hard as I would try I would make it so that she would know that she got to say who touched her, who picked her up, who approached her, anything, and if she didn’t like it she could talk back by running away or swiping with claws or whatever she needed because she is small and humans are dense.

And.

Because of all that “you don’t have to come when I call” and “you don’t have to do what I say”, being reinforced by as much of my behavior as I could handle (which isn’t to say I didn’t screw up constantly because humans are dense)…

She went from so terrified of human hands that she would dart away at the slightest sign of me moving a hand upwards, or the slightest sign of anyone unfamiliar entering the room at all.

To sometimes voluntarily greeting unfamiliar or only marginally familiar staff people when they come in the house.

She does that because I went out of my damn way to make sure nobody would touch her in a way that would upset her and that they knew all of her “no” signals and stopped (and if they couldn’t figure them out, they at least knew – even if it took me screaming at them – that her grabbing them with all four legs and biting them a hard as she could wasn’t “playing”, or at least they “humored me”. Again, I was lax sometimes, but even with the job I did at that, she got to trust people more because she knew she could decide not to do what they wanted.

I think at her previous house her only recourse was to run and hide, and from the way she reacted when I first brought her home (and some other clues) I have fears about what exactly they did to her if and when they caught her. But now she can hide, or fight, or give subtler signals, and most people listen to her, and she is confident enough that she can handle it when they don’t, and decide what to do.

She wouldn’t be there interacting with people and often enjoying it, and she would probably spend all of her time hiding under something, if I’d taught her that her job was to come when she was called and submit to any and all handling as well as commands. As it is, she’s a pretty happy cat and we fight sometimes but she trusts me enough to fight me instead of hiding all day terrified and stressed (and probably dead by now because she wouldn’t have let me dropper-feed her through a serious illness ten years ago, she’d have just hidden somewhere I couldn’t get to her and died out of my reach). Or she’d have run off and found somewhere else to live, or not and died.

But it’s so much more than that.

We’ve formed an amazing relationship that I’ve never had any one remotely like, with anyone, human or cat. She and Anne are the closest relationships I have in the world. We can communicate in ways that still totally astound me. People – many different people who haven’t heard each other say this – say that watching us is like watching people who are totally symmetrical with each other. And she’s a fourteen-year-old cat as happy as her temperament allows (which varies day to day but I think she’s pretty happy even though I can tell I bug the crap out of her sometimes).

And… none of that relationship could even existif either I demanded her to obey me, or she were cowed into doing it. We do what we want together and we are apart when we want to be apart (either one of us can decide that and it’s mostly respected – mostly – by the other one) fight when we fight and we get along when we get along and that’s just what we’re like.

The idea that she doesn't care is ridiculous. She doesn’t like my voice. At all. She’s never liked my voice. Even when I could talk she urged me not to talk. I think she realized it was bad for me. Now I just vocalize, rather than talking, but she doesn’t like that either and tries to shut me up. She lashes her tail when I talk to her. But she loves me. I’m not my voice, I’ve never been my voice, and she was one of the first people to notice that from the moment they met me. She used to bite me if I talked. She loved me but she’d bite me if I talked. She’d bite my throat. Or swat my throat. She doesn’t ever do that if I don’t talk or vocalize in some way. And she chose me, not the other way around. I just accepted.

Anyway, what we have is love and if there’s researchers who can’t get their heads out of their asses enough to realize that cats aren’t dogs and you can’t judge them by dog standards, that’s their problem. By the way, plenty of cats do enjoy learning “tricks” and other kinds of “dog stuff”. Even Fey used to like following me around everywhere if I went outside when we lived in the country. And they hear you when you call, they just come when they want to, just like humans do for that matter. It’s mostly dogs who come every time, and even then not all dogs. (Animals do have personalities even if there’s generalizations. There are cats who do come every time.)

What I do worry is what would have become of Fey if I’d gotten there two minutes too later. A bunch of rowdy frat guys wanted to adopt her. No they didn’t want to adopt her. They wanted her. I remember them yelling “WE WANT BABKA! WE WANT BABKA!” (That was her old name.) And being terrified that maybe I hadn’t signed the adoption papers fast enough.

And over the years, I’ve only gotten more terrified that I didn’t sign them fast enough, and that in an alternate universe she lived a short life among them and died terrified and alone. (She doesn’t get along well with cats or dogs, so she wouldn’t have made animal friends, and the guys who wanted to bring her home were not her type at all.)

Or maybe they got tired of her hiding and brought her to someone else who could actually fit with her personality and needs. Because unlike animal hoarders and other generally scary people, my problem isn’t just that she wouldn’t find me, it’s that she wouldn’t find the right person in general, of which there are many. If anything happens to me, Anne is in charge of finding her a home where she can live out the rest of her days with someone who respects her.

My greatest fear for cats like her is that they live out nervous lives hiding under a couch in terror and only coming out when they have to, for food, only to be attacked from all sides with “love” she doesn’t want, at which point she claws them and runs off and gets called “mean” and “skittish”, but doesn’t get to do anything she wants, nor enjoy love when she wants it. Or that she’s forced into compliance, like so many cats I’ve seen, until her eyes go dull and she goes limp whenever anyone tries to pick her up and she endures it until it’s over and then hides and they think she’s sweet and cuddly and take pictures with her where she looks terrified out of her mind or deadened to the world.

Mind you, there are cats who love that kind of life. Not because they’re touched when they don’t want to be. But because they are such complete cuddlebugs that they don’t care if it’s sometimes on someone else’s terms. There are a lot of cats who want nothing more than constant attention and they aren’t too picky about how they get it.

But that’s not Fey. She’s capable of deep love and affection. She loves attention, but she wants it when she wants it, no other time, and it’s intensely painful for her to get it when she doesn’t want it. (Sometimes literally painful – she’s got a bad leg that’s hurt since she was young, and I can’t imagine how the nerve/joint pain affects her experience of being petted the way most people pet cats. I can tell on her bad pain days just from the look she gets when things brush up against her.)

Anyway, really long response, but now I’m in a position to be rambling and not really doing anything, so I did.

Notes: