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Cats "Exploit" Humans By Purring
An anonymous reader notes a BBC report on research recently published in the journal Current Biology, indicating that cats manipulate humans by adding a baby-like cry to their purring. "Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans. Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a 'soliciting purr' to overpower their owners and garner attention and food. Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a 'cry,' with a similar frequency to a human baby's. The team said cats have 'tapped into' a human bias — producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore."
I seem to be 95% immune to my cats when they pull tricks like that. My cats know damn well that I'll feed them before going to bed. It can happen anywhere between coming home and right before actually going to bed.
My cats are persistent, make no mistake, and my wife can be very annoyed with them, but I usually wait until I happen to feel like feeding them. So if their mewling is comparable to a baby's cry I shudder to think what kind of dad I'd make ;).
I should mention, though, that they have dry food available at any time so it's not like they're hungry when I feed them. It is actually a very interesting way to learn to not give in to annoying behaviour.
Well, as a cat owner I'm not surprised at all. My cat learned quite a few different sounds since I got her, initially it wasn't more than the common meow, but now she uses quite a few different purrs and grunts for different occasions. Like in the morning when feeding time takes too long it's almost like a dog growling in really short bursts, while when you get home it's a more like a high-pitch grunt or purr. I'm sure dogs have similar ways to show their feelings or try to communicate stuff. Cats know damn well what they can and can't do and what will happen when they act some way or another, so it's not a big step from different sounds for different events to learning that certain sounds seem to do trick.
My cat just has an annoying meow sound she makes when she wants attention. It's not cute or nice, it just grates on the nerves. She was very late in learning to meow when she wants things, so I think that has a lot to do with it. (I had another cat that took care of her and did all the asking, so she never had to. After he died, she had to learn to take care of herself and she was already like 5 years old.)
There's no doubt she learns, though... But sometimes she 'learns' things that are wrong. For instance, for some reason she thinks that I'll fill up the water bowl more often if she drops food in it. She's wrong, but she's done it for years now. There's always exactly 1 piece, no matter how far from the food bowl it is.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
> Don't forget that cats self-domesticated
Thing is, cats *aren't* domesticated. They only pretend to be when it suits their purposes.
If you want to see what domesticated looks like, look at dogs, or horses. Domesticated dogs and horses take their instructions from human masters. Cats, as a rule, don't.
Cats live *among* humans and coexist more or less peacefully with them, but so do squirrels and houseflies. Cats accept food from humans and even depend on it as their main food source, but so do wild birds that eat at feeders. Cats will even occasionally approach a human and allow themselves to be petted, but only when it's their idea.
There's a continual argument between people who prefer dogs and people who prefer cats, over which kind of animal is smarter. Of course, there's a great deal of variation in intelligence from one dog to another, and one supposes there may also be from one cat to another, but fundamentally the main reason this argument has never been resolved is because nobody can really demonstrate exactly how smart cats are, because the cats don't cooperate with the study. If you've got a dog, you can find out exactly how smart he is, based on what you can teach him. A monumentally stupid dog can learn about one trick, and then when you try to teach him another, he either can't figure it out or forgets the first one. On the other end of the scale, the most intelligent dog I've ever known recognized an English vocabulary of several hundred words and understood SVO sentence order. With a dog, you can find out exactly how smart he is, because he'll cooperate with the whole exercise. A dog is a social animal. His whole life is focused around *you*. A cat is altogether a different beast. A cat does what it wants, when it wants. You can try to teach it stuff, but as a rule the cat doesn't cooperate, so you can never really be sure what it's learned and what it hasn't.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Some of it's learned while the rest is inherited. My maine coon running to the VCR and hitting the stop button to get my attention would definitely qualify as learned behavior though.
My mothers cat was a companion to her beyond something on 4 legs that just wanted food.
Highlighted by the animal's actions previous to my mother suddenly passing away. For several weeks the cat would never leave her side, as she became ill. Then mom passed away suddenly in her sleep. The autopsy revealed a ruptured cyst around a cancerous growth on the large intestine. For a couple weeks previous to her death, she had complained the cat was licking the area just under her ribcage. The doctors were confused as to the raw area of skin on her belly area. The cat knew, and I believe was an effort to heal my mother the only way a cat knows how.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
How much of this perception is expectation? I've had cats and dogs, and while I agree that dogs are easier to train, it is still possible to completely train your cats to respond to verbal and gestural commands. I think a lot of people don't even try to train their cats, or treat them like untrainable companions because that is what they expect. When the cat does something bad, instead of looking how to modify the behavior, people say "oh, that's cats for you!" and then give the cat attention (either negative or positive). I think one of the big differences between cats and dogs that set up this mentality is cats respond a lot better to negative attention than do dogs. When a dog is punished, he feels cut off from the pack, and while negative attention is slightly better than nothing for a dog, it has a more significant impact in reducing unwanted behavior when paired with intermittent positive reinforcement. Cats on the other hand, just like attention. When training them, you just can NOT punish bad behavior unless it is a serious transgression (knocking over the tv, smothering the baby, etc). Instead you have to focus on rewarding positive behavior. So, if your cat meows a lot, don't yell at him or squirt him because he then will continue to meow--he thinks you are talking or playing with him. Instead, wait until he stops and reward the silence. Cats are a little more like toddlers. In general, the most negative action I take is to ignore them, but then give them lots of praise and reward for acting in ways I approve. So don't say cats don't take instruction from humans. I think it would be more accurate to say dog and horse owners take more care to understand the psychology of their pets and put more effort in training them, and as a rule, give up on cats before they even try training because they have already jumped to the conclusion it's impossible.
Self domesticated? are you nuts?
Cats were domesticated normally originally in Mesopotamia, you really need to learn about cats. The wierd part is the bizzare letting the animal do what it wants holdover from a few millennium ago is all out bizzare.
My cats act like my dog. They come when called, they fetch (one LOVES fetch big time) they actually do tricks very well. And people are incredibly astonished at this. My youngest cat is not de-clawed as it is a experiment. It will NOT claw anyone it plays with, but will claw when hurt. It will NOT bite hard when playing even with the other cat that DOES bite hard. but then I conditioned it to think that grabbing it's head is being nice to it so it will walk up to people and shove it's head into their hands. It freaks people out.
it's simple training, anyone can do it (they use the toilet as well, cant get them to flush though) it's simply that most people choose to not do it so they can let kitty be a giant pain in the arse and serve it.
The absolute worst kind of cat owner is the ones that let kitty roam the neighborhood free. That is wrong and incredibly rude. Kiltty can die or get hurt in tons of ways many a cat hater leaves out bowls of antifreeze to kill kitties that enter their yard, and letting them piss and crap all over the neighborhood is simply being a jerk.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think it's the opposite, that before, people (at least westerners) were too dumb to realize how intelligent they were. There's a line from the movie Little Big Man where Chief Dan George's character talks of the difference between the Natives and the transplanted Europeans (not an exact quote): "The Indian, we think everything is alive - the coyote, the bear, the trees, even the rocks. But the white man, he thinks everything is dead, and if he suspects something is alive he'll kill it."
Free Martian Whores!
To a dog, the human owner is the pack leader, who should always be followed and obeyed. To a cat, the human owner is just a convenient source of food.
I used to agree with that statement, but not anymore. We have two cats in our home. One of the two plays fetch AGGRESSIVELY. While I'm at my computer she brings me toys to throw all night. Its an interaction I didn't think possible in cats. But its not a creepy as the pack activity.
The cats follow me around from room to room while I'm home. On the few times I've argued with people in my home they either flank or circle behind the person I'm arguing with, growling and hissing the entire time. One one occasion they actually attacked someone they like because I was yelling at them.
They also seem to understand that my children are my children. They tolerate abuse from them that they wouldn't take from me or anyone else and NEVER give them any grief. They actually hang out with my 1 year old (if I'm in the room) and let her roll/drool all over them without complaint. They even go so far as to wake my wife and I up when the kids are restless at night. Its not behavior I would have ever expected from cats.
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
You're correct. Tenacity matters much more than intelligence in a doctoral program.
True. You simply have to prove to the cat that it's being given the advantage by 'learning' the appropriate response. For instance, my cat will sit with (I hesitate to say 'command') the right suggestion and hand gesture. But I have to back the suggestion up with food or he gets disappointed I broke the agreement and the next time he will approach the 'sit' suggestion with wariness.
But he also trains me in return. He likes to drink from the tap, therefore he whines a particular meow until I go over and turn it on for him. I have also heard this baby-noise purr from him. He didn't do it at all until I had another cat, then he seemed to change his purr so I would notice him more. The other cat didn't do this though. Maybe because he was a feral kitten when I got him.
Sometimes cats view people as other cats.
I saw a special once where a bunch of female cats on a farm developed a community. They would feed each others kittens and arrange patrols to keep aggressive males away from the young. It was communal. They were a band of mothers doing a community job.
And we have one cat here who decided same thing. We have three cats, two from a rescue shelter that were fixed as kittens, and one we found in our backyard pregnant. The cat that went through motherhood has mothering instincts, the other two do not.
Two years ago my wife got pregnant.
The mother cat knew exactly what was up, the other two did not. She would sit on her belly off to the side of the bulge and purr beside the child which would calm him down and make him sleep. She became very gingerly and delicate towards my wife. The other two didn't change their behavior - they'd step on my wife's belly and had no clue they were disturbing a baby.
On the day the kid was born I stopped back from the hospital to feed the cats. I'm sure to a cat's senses I reeked of blood and birth. Mother cat was staring at me wild eyed with suspicion, taut as a bow string. I had never seen her so tense. I spoke to her in reassuring tones and let her smell my hands where I was holding the baby. As soon as she smelled "the baby is ok and dad here didn't hurt him" she took off like a rocket and ran laps around our house. She's very fat and I had honestly never seen her run before. The cat was celebrating. I know that seems unlikely and the sort of anthropomorphizing that pet owners often times overdo - but I swear...she was celebrating! She ran a few laps around the house, jumped on one of the other cats and went for a tumble, then started loving all over me. She knew. She is lethargic otherwise. A burst of energy from this cat is completely out of character. She knew.
When the kid got home she "helped". You get a lot of visitors from people you don't see very often with a newborn in the house. Soon as one would show up, she would position herself near the baby, and *watch* the guest. Her intent was clear. "Harm that kid, do anything I don't like and I'll shred your face" It was the same pose and watchfulness she would do when her kittens were around (which we took to a no-kill shelter eventually - the same one we got our other two worthless cats from).
And the cat would praise me for being a good parent. Male cats are more of a danger to kittens than a benefit. It seemed at first she was worried it was the same with people. Any time she'd see me being good to the kid (feeding/playing/whatever) she would make it a point to come up to me and love on me. Purr louder than a lawnmower and rub on my legs. She is a very vocal proponent of good parenting. Soon as I set the kid down she'd stop. Pick him back up, she's on again.
But as for our other two cats - you're right. They definitely view us as parents, not equals. They will do that "kneading" thing with their front paws cats do when they sit on our laps. That's something kittens do to get more milk out of their mother. It's a baby reflex and they do it with us. But mom cat does not - she views us as fellow parents in the pack. So your observation is true if you have cats that have never been through parenthood, but occasionally that's not the case. YMMV though, of course. Cats are definitely unique individuals.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.