Cat Psychology

PHOTO: ANNIEPADDINGTON / GETTY

While there are many books on cat psychology or cat cognition, I have found two to be very helpful and have used them extensively in this chapter:  Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture by Elisabeth Marshall Thomas, and Being Your Cat: what's really going on in your feline's mind by Celia Haddon.    

In addition there are two excellent documentaries that I would encourage you to watch if you have time:
Inside the Mind of a Cat on Netflix, and

The Lion in Your Living Room, on Amazon Prime or available on Youtube

The Importance of Hunting

In order to understand the minds of cats, it may be helpful to go back 65 million years to the end time of the dinosaurs.  As Elisabeth Marshall Thomas explains in her book, Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture, once the dinosaurs died out, the only carnivores left were small insect eating mammals.  As  mammals grew up to fill the ecological niches left by the dinosaurs, vast herds of herbivores emerged, and eventually mammalian carnivores evolved to feed on them.  Two strains of mammalian carnivores emerged: the Fox tribe, which eventually turned into the dogs, bears, racoons and weasels, and the Mongoose tribe which evolved into mongooses, hyenas, and cats.  The Fox tribe became opportunistic eaters, eating animals but also carrion, insects, vegetables, fruits and almost anything if they were hungry enough.  The cats took a riskier path.  They evolved to eat only freshly killed meat: no carrion, vegetables or fruit.  Cats are obligate carnivores: they are so specialized in their diet that they can only survive on animal protein; given an alternate diet they will starve to death.  Unlike us, they have no taste receptors for sweet things because they never eat them.  It’s a high wire survival act: they must kill in order to eat and their prey makes each meal a challenge.  As Thomas says, “the food of cats is frightened of the cat and is dedicated to its own survival.  It is intelligent, brave, fast moving, often well armed, and sometimes much larger than the cat who wants it.  So to live at the edge, the cats were challenged to become highly skilled as hunters.  And this they did.  Hunting preoccupies a cat almost from birth. The behavior of kittens at play is hunting behavior and nothing else. Because a cat can hunt without eating but cannot eat without hunting, hunting means life to cats, so much so that the process of hunting matters more than the resulting food.”

The necessity of hunting for survival has over the eons shaped cats into the most efficient, superb killing machines.  Forty-one species of cats spread out and successfully colonized almost every land based ecosystem on earth.  The largest cats: lions, tigers, jaguars and leopards can roar, while the smaller cats, including lynxes, pumas, cheetahs and many species of wildcat cannot, but all are superb hunters and can kill prey many times their size.  All house cats around the world are descended from the African wildcat, Felis sylvestris lybica, which is a little larger and longer legged than the house cat, but otherwise very similar.

African Wildcat Ecology

Like many species of wildcats, the African wildcat is extremely territorial.  A breeding female will live in a well guarded territory on the order of four square miles, together with several litters of offspring.  A single male will range over three or more female ranges, reproducing with the females and ferociously guarding against any male intruders.  Territories are extremely important to wildcats; think of them as a farm or game preserve.  In order to survive, the wildcat must get to know the locations and behaviors of all potential prey species in its territory, along with the terrain and best methods of hunting.  Smaller cats tend to be ambush predators, finding hiding places near where their prey may pass and leaping out and killing them.  A cat in a new and unknown territory is in danger; it must quickly learn to find and kill prey or it will itself perish.  Wildcats mark their territory with scent marks using urine as a warning to other cats to keep away.  Male cats can even twist their penis to pee on the underside of leaves so the scent lasts longer.  Cats don't use scat (poop) as much as dogs as a territory marking because cat poop has high residual nutritional value and will be eaten by other animals.  If an intruder invades a cat's territory, the defending cat will act in a threatening manner, arching its back, standing its fur on end (piloerection) to make itself appear bigger, and hissing aggressively.  Cats use these threat displays to avoid physical fights; if it comes to a physical fight, the chances are high that one or both cats could be fatally injured because their teeth and claws are so lethal.  

Wildcats as well as house cats have an unusual reproductive strategy.  Rather than come into heat twice a year like dogs, they are always fertile if they have an ample food supply and nesting places, and the act of copulation itself can induce ovulation.  As Celia Haddon says, in Being Your Cat, "Your feline reproduction strategy in the wild is to mature young, breed fast and die young. This  strategic trade - off of quantity over quality works well for you,  just as it works well for another successful species, one of your prey animals – the rabbit. You could say that cats breed like rabbits!  As a female cat, you can have up to five litters a year – in theory, at least.  Hypothetically, if a single female cat bred freely for five years, and if all the kittens survived and also bred in their turn, she would have 20,000 descendants."

Anatomy and Senses of the House Cat

The anatomy of a cat is superbly tuned for hunting and killing.  Their dagger-like canine teeth are designed to puncture skin and grab their prey, ideally around the spine at the back of the neck where their strong triangular molars and premolars can sever the victim's spine and slice its meat into bite sized chunks for passage down its throat.  The cat's obligate meat diet gives her a short intestine since meat is easy to digest, and doesn't require a heavy gut that would weigh her down.  The cat's powerful back legs allow her to jump at least six times her height (some house cats can jump eight feet in the air) clearing tall grass and landing on top of her prey.  Cats walk low to the ground, silently on soft toe cushions, allowing them to creep up on prey.  While this stance is ideal for stalking, it is inefficient, and cats cannot trot steadily for long distances like dogs or humans.  Above their toes are retractable claws, which stay sharp until they're extended to grab their prey or scratch a tree to mark their territory.  Like sharks' teeth,  behind each claw is a new claw so that as claws get dull they'll be replaced with a freshly sharpened one.  

Scent

Despite their smaller size, the nose membrane of cats is up to ten times larger than that of humans, which suggests that they have a much better sense of smell than we do.  However, since cats are harder to train and experiment on than dogs, we don't fully understand their scent capabilities.  Undoubtedly their noses are useful in hunting to detect the scents of their prey.  However, in addition, cats have an auxiliary nasal organ: the vomeronasal organ, which detects sex pheromones and other chemicals and sends nerve signals directly to the emotional centers of the brain.  Cats expose the vomeronasal organ by opening slits in the top of their mouth with the Flehmen response, when they sniff something then open their mouth and stare.  Scent is an important means of long distance communication between cats; cats leave scents as messages to other cats without having to confront them directly.  Cats have glands all over their bodies which make oils that they rub on things to indicate possession, sexual availability, and other things we don't understand.  Cats have glands on their cheeks, chin, top of head and base of tail which they will rub onto their owners, thought to indicate possession, membership in a group, or marking the smell of home.  Familial cats will often greet each other with a head bump or rub.  Cats also have glands between their toes, called interdigital glands which give off a pheromone when they scratch; thus they can mark their territory with both visible scratches as well as scent cues.  Finally, cats have anal glands which can scent their scat; male cats especially may mark their territory (called middening) with scented scat.  Insecure house cats may unfortunately reassure themselves by scent marking with urine or feces throughout the house.

Taste

In contrast with their sensitive noses, cats don't have much of a sense of taste.  They have on average 475 taste buds, compared to 1,700 for dogs and 9,000 for humans.  They're adapted to being a strict carnivore and don't need a sense of taste to tell them what to eat.

Touch

Smell and touch are the primary senses of newborn kittens, born blind and deaf.  Like humans, the emotional reassurance of touch from their mother is necessary for cats' emotional development, and in the same way, adult house cats often seek petting from their owners.  In addition to normal touch response, cats have prominent whiskers on either side of their noses, above the eye, below their chin and behind their lower front legs.  These whiskers are extremely sensitive and allow cats to sense minute air currents, to the extent that they can detect the location, size and texture of nearby objects through their whiskers alone.  This allows them to hunt in the dark, sensing objects and prey like a bat.

Hearing

Cats have perhaps the broadest range of hearing of any mammal, spanning 10.5 octaves, from 48Hz to 85kHz.  In contrast, young humans can hear about 10 octaves, from 20Hz to 20kHz.  The exceptional high frequency hearing of cats allows them to localize the high frequency of mouse squeaks and chirps.  The low frequency hearing of cats reflects their role as a prey animal: they need to be able to hear growls, footsteps or rumbling of large animals that might want to eat them.   Cats can also swivel their ears independently 180 degrees to pinpoint and amplify sounds.

Vision

Surprisingly, cats' vision is not as good as humans.  Cats tend to be nearsighted, and can see at 20 feet what people can see at 150 feet.  Furthermore, cats can't focus nearer than 12 inches away; at that distance they rely on their sense of touch.  Where cats excel in vision is in low light and sensing movements.  Cats' eyes have a large number of rods that are sensitive to low light, and they have a reflective layer behind the retina, called the tapetum lucidum that reflects light back to the retina.  The tapetum lucidum makes cats eyes seem to glow in low light.   While cats can hunt in the dark, they're crepuscular, not nocturnal: they hunt best around sundown and sunrise, when their prey tends to be most active.  Cats tend to sleep the rest of the time; they can sleep two thirds of the day.  When they're awake and well fed, they'll groom themselves between 30 and 50% of the time they're awake, partly to keep their coat clean and scent free,  partly to cool themselves under the hot African sun.  Turning back to cat vision, their eyes are exquisitely sensitive to movement.  If cats detect movement in their peripheral vision, they will reflexively turn to attack, without even thinking.

Kittenhood

While much of a cat's behavior is instinctual, kittenhood is a crucial time for a cat to develop social and more complex behaviors.  A cat's temperment is influenced by many things: the genetics of its parents, whether the cat's mother was stressed or underfed during pregnancy and nursing, and by the cat's early life experience in kittenhood.  For the first 4 weeks of life, a kitten nurses from its mother, and is oriented to the warmth of the nest and the smell of the mother's specific nipple that it "owns".   Kittens purr and knead with their paws, which stimulates the mother to let down her milk.   The mother licks the kitten's backside to stimulate it to urinate and defecate, and consumes the feces to keep the nest clean.  Starting around four to five weeks after birth, the mother will begin to wean the kittens and bring live prey back to the nest.  If the kittens don't know what to do with the prey, the mother will show them how to kill it.  From the ages of two weeks onwards, kittens will play with objects: batting them and pouncing on them.  They will also play with their littermates: pouncing, wrestling, and making threat displays.  This socialization period is crucial for them to learn how to behave with other cats.  Kittens learn to bite softly; they learn that if they bite too hard other kittens will refuse to play with them.  The period between 2 weeks and 9 weeks is a critical socialization period.  During this time the kitten is relatively fearless and explores its environment.  It learns to bond with its littermates and other adult cats it encounters, and if it is exposed to human handling, it will learn learn to trust people.  From 9 to 16 weeks, a cat becomes more fearful of foreign objects; if a cat has not encountered humans during the socialization period it will be feral and maintain a lifelong wariness toward people.  

Cat Body Language

Not very long ago, the consensus view among scientists was that cats didn't think or feel emotions, they just reacted reflexively.  However, with advances in understanding human neuroanatomy in the second half of the 20th century, scientists realized that cats, and all mammals, had the same emotional structures in their brains as humans.  The mammalian limbic system has structures, circuits and neurotransmitters for all the major emotions: fear, anger, excitement, tiredness, desire, pleasure,  motivation,  and confidence, among others.  Cats don't have the expanded cortex that humans do that allow for prodigious memory, abstract reasoning and language, nor do they have the human forebrain that gives us executive function and sophisticated planning, but other than that, their brains are very similar to ours.

Despite our brains' similarities, we probably cannot ever fully understand what a cat or animal is feeling.  But, by the same token, we can't every fully understand what another person is experiencing; we infer a person's feelings from their language and behavior.  And similarly, we can infer a cat's feelings by careful observation of their body language and behavior.

Studies have shown that cats know their names and may come when called or choose to ignore you.  While cats are often thought to be aloof and diffident, they do express themselves in body language, which we often don't know how to read.  

And here are a few diagrams of cat ear, eye and tail positions and what they might indicate, from this page on cat body language.  If you have a cat, how do you interpret some of its behaviors?

Cat Personalities and Human Relationships

So far in this chapter we've focused on traits and behaviors that are common to all house cats, however anyone who has been close to cats knows that they have distinct personalities, and the relationships between cats and people are unique.  A cat personality is shaped by its genetics, early kittenhood exposures, and learned social responses with other cats and its owner.  As Elisabeth Marshall Thomas says, "It is as if Gaia has said to the cats: Here, my beauties — the information you need in order to hunt, mate, fight, yowl, be cautious, raise children, is safely packed in the back of your brains . Save your forebrains for whatever creative inventions may strike you; use your wits to amuse yourselves and me."

Part of the relationship between a cat and its owner is based on the hardwired bond between a kitten and its mother.  Domesticated animals retain some juvenile behaviors into adulthood, and exposure to humans during the sensitive period of kittenhood allows an adult cat to project a sense of mother onto her owner.  This may explain the desire of adult cats to cuddle and purr with their owners, as young kittens did with their mother in the nest.

The cat may also view its owner as territory to be defended.  As Elisabeth Marshall Thomas says, "to keep the food source for himself or herself is the single most important reason for the cat to claim a property in the first place.  In this spirit, house cats display a proprietary interest in their owners , marking them with wipes of the lips, rearing up to incise their legs with claw scratches, occasionally spraying them and their belongings and defending them from the advances of other cats.   Why?  Because a supply of food issues from a housecat’s owner in much the same way that a supply of wildebeests issues from parts of the savannah or a supply of Arctic hares issues from a few square miles of taiga forest."   Thomas recounts an unusual story from an animal behavioral scientist named Lisa Rappaport: "One night in her apartment, her cat prevented her from entering a room in which an intruder was lurking . Lisa tried to go around the cat but the cat persistently blocked the way.  Lisa would have had to physically remove the cat to get by her, which she wisely decided not to do. That cat had clearly assumed the role of parent / protector, not the role of child."  See also Super Cat saves boy from dog attack in California for a similar example.

What stories about cat personalities and behaviors do you have?  Bring them to the class and we'll share some weird and wonderful experiences of life with these unique creatures.