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guest_
· 49 weeks ago
· FIRST
Funny enough (or sad enough?) there is a theory right now amongst animal cognitive psychologists that the majority of house cars are depressed. You may have seen one of many studies where dogs are given word buttons to comunícate by pressing the buttons? It may seem odd but it was only recently that any real documented experiment was done with cats- it was just generally assumed cats wouldn’t take to the process by their nature as being somewhat difficult to train. It turns out at least some cats can be trained to comunícate this way, and that early findings show that cats might have deeper social needs than once thought. This is bolstered by other studies on house cats behavior, brain activity, and hormone levels. A general assumption is that cats are much simpler and require less attention or care than dogs by their nature.
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guest_
· 49 weeks ago
Findings are indicating that cats may simply require different stimulus and environments than dogs. Some things aren’t particularly new discoveries, it is generally held that cats are happier when they get adequate attention of the desired type and have stimulation for their natural instincts and some degree of novelty- toys that allow them to chase and explore and such, but it isn’t enough to have a ball in a track or a remote control mouse or a feather on a string. In fact many such toys and cats reactions to them might be akin to if aliens were studying a human locked in a room and gave them a pillow so they began to twirl it on their finger and the aliens jotted down: “humans love playing with pillows” and called that case closed without need to explore other options.
guest_
· 49 weeks ago
Of course we tend to observe cats in nature to get an idea of what sorts of things they enjoy that we might emulate- but that isn’t really the best way to do these things because humans enjoy many things that don’t directly correlate to the things a feral human might have available to them. They may in some way tie to some instinct but things like enjoying stories and by extension television and such- those aren’t exactly direct analogs to natural behavior. We can connect the dots to work back to the realms we might enjoy those things, but it wouldn’t be intuitive per se to observe a wild human or a primate analog and deduce they’d enjoy watching Seinfeld or a cartoon man turn into a pickle.
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guest_
· 49 weeks ago
So cats haven’t really gotten as much attention in those ways as dogs. In part because humans rarely work with cats. We live with cats, but the work of cats- primarily pest control, is usually a solitary job. Dogs traditionally have worked closely with humans in collaborative tasks. That not only has caused us to adapt closer to each other over time but builds more of a partnership and connection as we can observe more closely and part of that process requires understanding how to influence the behavior of dogs and work with vs. Cats whom we can generally leave to their nature and they will just do what they normally do which benefits us.
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