Posted on 02/23/2019 11:53:59 AM PST by ETL
Evans, a psychology graduate student at the University of Liverpool, recently devised a survey for owners who think that their cats are psychopaths.
The survey asks owners to describe the allegedly psychopathic behaviors, and so far they have included bullying other pets, taking over the dog’s bed, and waiting on the kitchen counter to pounce on unsuspecting family members. In short, pretty typical cat behavior.
These answers get at the tricky semantics of calling a cat a “psychopath” when it is just … a cat.
There’s always an implicit comparison when we talk about cats as aloof little jerks, says Mikel Maria Delgado, a postdoctoral researcher on cat behavior at the University of California at Davis.
And that comparison is with dogs, which humans have spent thousands more years domesticating and molding in our image.
Cats, she pointed out, simply don’t have the facial muscles to make the variety of expressions a dog (or human) can.
So when we look at a cat staring at us impassively, it looks like a psychopath who cannot feel or show emotion.
But that’s just its face. Cats communicate not with facial expressions but through the positions of their ears and tails.
Their emotional lives can seem inscrutable—and even nonexistent—until you spend a lot of time getting to know one.
Dogs, on the other hand, have learned to mimic humans.
They do that thing where they pull their mouths back into something resembling a smile.
They hang their heads in a way that looks super guilty.
Just as humans have shaped the physical appearance of dogs, we’ve bred them to be extremely attuned to human social cues.
Dogs that repeatedly raise their brows to make cute puppy faces are more likely to be adopted out of shelters.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
“Their emotional lives can seem inscrutable—and even nonexistent—until you spend a lot of time getting to know one.”
And when you’ve spent a lot of time getting to know a cat, you realize that yes, yes, they are psychopaths.
I don’t think they eat their own. The male lions will kill the cubs fathered by the previous pride leader. I couldn’t find anything about male lions eating cubs though.
Yes, we had a cat that was a total psychopath. The best was the day he beat up a German shepherd he saw being walked down our street. He charged it, the German shepherd totally freaked out when he attacked, and he broke lose and our cat ended up chasing the dog down the street. (Of course, we pretended we had no idea whose cat that was.)
And here’s a famous video of a cat protecting a small child from an attacking dog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRhV8YoEUqA
...and raccoons, dogs, foxes, bobcats. Anyone with chickens can tell you all about it.
Those exposures to *big* cats have shown me that "conscience" is a word that lions,leopards and cheatahs couldn't even spell...even if they could spell at all.
I wonder how much DNA the typical house cat has in common with its cousins on the African plains?
Lack of interspecies communication. Poor kitty :(
I'm not sure that *that's* true but when a male lion takes over a pride he'll typically kill any cubs in that pride that are under a certain age.
Big cats Like the mountain lions out here of the ones I worry about
I mean not really they’re never going to attack yours truly
(Of course, we pretended we had no idea whose cat that was.)
Cats aren’t psychopaths...they’re high-functioning autistics.
Did you rinse it off and give it back to them? :)
Cats have a FAR greater range of verbal expression than dogs.
Yeah, I saw that one. Clearly something seriously wrong there. I gave it a pass.
Our current cat makes more different sounds than all of the previous cats we have had combined. I kinda/sorta think I have deciphered a couple of those sounds, but I may be giving myself too much credit. He sometimes appears to converse with himself as well.
Our best cat, Jean-Marie tried every sound he had to get my wife to give in to what he wanted (often food).
He had the most success with a soft, high pitched meow with a crack in the middle. He sounded like he was dying of thirst.
This same cat also jumped into my arms and licked my face when I came back from my honeymoon. He acted like he didn’t think he was going to see me again.
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