Klohe Cat

Klohecat

11 hours ago

www.facebook.com/share/1JDEocrUbm/?mibextid=wwXIfrYour cat is not being mischievous — it is running a survival assessment on your coffee mug.
What feline behavioral neuroscientists documented — that the single paw-swat your cat delivers to objects on the edge of your counter is a hardwired neurological reflex with a precise survival function in the wild — never gets explained to the millions of people filming their cats and laughing at the chaos.
Meet the Feline Predatory Assessment Reflex.
Cats are neurologically wired with a documented behavioral sequence called object play, driven entirely by the predatory sequence — and the specific stage activating when your cat swats your mug is called the catch and assess stage, where a wild cat bats at captured prey to confirm it is fully neutralized before committing to a final bite.
Studies in feline behavioral neuroscience reveal the paw-swat is not random mischief and not attention-seeking — cats preferentially target objects positioned at edges specifically because the movement and fall of an object from a height precisely mimics the behavioral signature of wounded prey dropping from an elevated surface, triggering the reflex automatically.
Your grandmother's cat knocked things off her kitchen shelf every single morning of its life and she called it ornery — never once imagining she was watching a hundred-million-year-old neurological survival program running perfectly on her countertop before breakfast.
Domestic cats, raised without live prey to practice this sequence on, redirect this ancient reflex entirely onto the nearest available object — meaning every glass, pen, and phone your cat has ever swept to the floor was not an accident but a precisely executed biological assessment with a function that kept wild ancestors alive in complete darkness.
Real cat people have always defended their cats against the mischief label — and feline behavioral science has now handed them the evidence to prove they were right every single time.
Save this before it disappears — and tag someone who has lost a coffee mug to their cat and deserves to finally know exactly why.
Understand this reflex once and you will never reach out to stop your cat mid-swat again without recognizing the ancient survival intelligence firing behind those eyes.
What is the most memorable thing your cat has ever knocked off a surface? ... See MoreSee Less

Klohecat

12 hours ago

If you place a mirror in front of a cat, you are generally not watching an animal have an existential realization; you are watching an animal deal with a confusing, scentless intruder. While cats can change their behavior toward mirrors over time, scientific consensus suggests they never actually learn that the reflection is them.

The gold standard for this type of research is the Mirror Self-Recognition (MSR) test, often called the "rouge test," developed by psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. in 1970. In these experiments, researchers place an odorless dye or sticker on an animal's face—specifically on a spot they can only see if they look in a mirror. If the animal looks in the mirror and then reaches up to touch the mark on their own body, they possess self-awareness.

Great apes, dolphins, Asian elephants, and Eurasian magpies have all passed this test. Cats, consistently, have failed it.

When a cat first encounters a mirror, the reaction is usually social. They see another cat. Depending on the individual’s temperament, they might puff up their tail in aggression, flatten their ears in fear, or tentatively sniff the glass. When they look behind the mirror and find no body attached to the image, they often become confused.

The "learning" that owners observe over time is not a shift toward self-recognition, but rather a process called habituation.

Because the "mirror cat" has no smell (the primary way cats identify each other), makes no sound, and never initiates physical contact, the real cat eventually categorizes the reflection as irrelevant. They learn that the image is a non-threatening, boring phenomenon, similar to a moving picture on a television screen. They stop reacting to it not because they know "that's me," but because they have decided "that thing doesn't matter."

However, failing the mirror test does not necessarily mean cats lack a sense of self; it may just mean the test is biased toward visual species. Humans and apes are primarily visual creatures. Cats live in a world of scent and sound. A reflection is a visual ghost—it mimics the look of a cat but lacks the pheromones and biological signals that actually define "catness" to a feline. To a cat, a reflection isn't a self-portrait; it is a sensory glitch.

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Klohecat

2 weeks ago

The first veterinarian in the US to dedicate their entire practice to the care of cats was Louis Camuti (1893-1981). Before his work in promoting cats as pets they were seen as nuisance or working animals only. He said his love of cats came from a childhood incident in which a cat warned him of leaking gas in his home. His autobiography was whimsically called “All My Patients Are Under The Bed”. ... See MoreSee Less

Klohecat

2 weeks ago

Wanda Gág's Millions of Cats (1928) is a new entrant to the US public domain this year and the oldest American children's book still in print. Though this heartwarming tale of love for pets may not be all that it seems. In light of Gág's left-wing politics some see in the story an anti-capitalist allegory... publicdomainreview.org/collection/millions-of-cats ... See MoreSee Less