We are told that Asher, a 16-year-old female cat, was raised with two dogs and has adopted some canine characteristics such as barking like a small dog.
Note: this page is made with text and three embeds – two videos and the image below. These embeds may one day fail and if that has happened I apologise.
The tricky introduction when Asher barked by Michael BroadAsher’s caregiver has a TikTok account which allows us to see the story in videos. Asher is a bicolour gray-and-white moggie. The Daily Mail reports that Asher grew up with two dogs; one a Chihuahua and the other a husky. She lives in Alabama, USA. And in a nice sympathetic touch of caregiving, Asher’s caregiver, Katie, said that she adopted a gray-and-white kitten, Waffles, to allow Asher, to have a feline friend. That’s my interpretation.
And because Asher was raised with dogs, when she first sees Waffles, she barks like a Chihuahua. Very cute. Katie was cracked up by that. She must have learned that from living with dogs for so long. But after the initial slight difficulties, it seems that Asher understood that she would enjoy having a feline friend and as you can see in the subsequent video, they are best buddies.
The Daily Mail says that in the first video Asher is on the toilet but I don’t think that’s true. She is resting in a litter tray because it is comforting to her (being surrounded by her smells).
I suspect that she might have been a bit stressed and perhaps that stress might have been exacerbated slightly by the fact that she lived with two dogs. And it seems that Katie picked up on this and decided to improve her life by adopting a young kitten as a companion.
There are stories about the opposite side of the coin in which a dog raised with cats behaves like a cat and jumps around onto kitchen counter tops and so on just like a cat might. It’s just learning through observation and they pick up on the behavioural characteristics of their parent who happens to be another species of animal. But this fact seems to be unrecognised.
RELATED: Dog never barks and likes to be on elevated surfaces (he thinks he is a cat) – this opposite to what is happening in this story. Normal too.
It reminds us, too, that cats pick up on our behaviour and learn from it as well. That’s why we see them opening doors and so on sometimes. They tend to copy us particularly if we have raised them as kittens.
RELATED: Cat raised with dogs learned to bark – this is another example of the same development in a cat raised by dogs. It is normal.
