Yesterday I posted a video which has gone viral of an ordinary family domestic cat charging at a dog that was mauling a boy. Having thought about the video I felt it necessary to write a bit more about it but not just about what we can see in the video (which is impressive) but what must have been in the mind of the domestic cat at the time. I believe that this video sheds some light on the emotional connection between domestic cat and human caretaker. It may go further than that because this was a boy being attacked by a dog and you wonder whether the cat would have done the same thing for the boy’s father if he was being attacked by a dog.
http://youtu.be/C-Opm9b2WDk
This happened in Bakersfield, CA. The father of the boy says this:
“My cat defends my son during a vicious dog attack and runs the dog off before he can do additional damage. Thankfully, my son is fine.”
It is almost as if the cat and boy had a particularly strong friendship and the cat perceived the boy as being vulnerable, requiring protection as if the boy was her sibling (or son, dare I say it). There is such a huge amount of commitment in the cat’s determination to stop the dog. You can sense the emotional motivation behind the cat’s actions.
The cat behaves exactly as a person would have behaved. In fact, as mentioned previously, the cat behaves like the boy’s father or mother. He is taking on a protective, fatherly or motherly role — I have a feeling the cat is female and taking on a mother in defence of offspring role. I’m not sure that, if the boy had a brother of a similar age, that he would have done what this cat did.
Update: Please see an extended version of the mother/kitten theory – the boy’s father has said there is a close bond between cat and son which developed from the beginning of the son’s life. The cat is tabby and white female. Here name is Tara.
I would like to know a bit more about the relationship between the boy and the cat. Judging by what the father has said it appears that there was no special relationship between cat and boy or it was not apparent to anybody that there was a special relationship.
It is hard not to come to the conclusion that this brave, courageous and committed cat perceived the boy as her child, her offspring! That might sound ridiculous to some people but perhaps the cat was part of the family when the boy was born. We have seen quite a few videos of cats becoming very connected to babies. This is something that might have happened in this instance.
I’m just speculating. I feel that the content of the video needs to be discussed in the light of cat behaviour and cat mentality rather than simply about the raw actions of the cat. It is not often that we are able to shed clear light upon the mentality of a cat in respect of his or her relationship with human family members.
I read that the cat is indeed a female whose name is Tara. I think since male as well as female dogs protect their people, that a male cat that was bonded with the boy would have done the same thing. Who knows how many times a cat has protected his or her human, but there were no cameras rolling. This time it happened to be a female, that’s how I see it.
The video is survellaince video from home security cameras. It has to be real considering the dog is being euthanized.
Sad for the dog but it could just be a one in a million dogs that has a bad character. My cousins when I was growing up had several German Shepherd dogs and all of them were raised the same way; one of them was just a mean dog that would bite anybody except the people that lived in the house. She bit neighbors and relatives. Her son on the other hand was the most loving dog ever. We all thought there was something wrong in the mother dog’s head. Eventually she died by hanging herself jumping over the fence when her collar got caught on the fence. She was obviously trying to chase after someone or some other animal that had walked by. It happens rarely only, thankfully.
I agree. I think this is genuine. It has to be because of the injury. The video was on BBC News this evening, which is very rare indeed.
Neat comment. Clever. I didn’t notice that. Cat mom’s are better than human mom’s — present company excepted 😉
Did anyone else notice that the cat had more “motherly” instinct than the kids’s mom? The cat, without regard for it’s own safety, ran at the dog to protect the child. Then, after she helped the kid up, the mom LEAVES THE KID AND TAKES OFF RUNNING!! WHAT THE?!? I’m a mom and, trust me, if I’m running from danger, I’m taking my child WITH me!
Jmo…
I’m always suspicious of these videos too.
Some that I’ve seen seem “staged”.
Yes, DW, I thought about that too. My answer (perhaps a generous one) was that the house had more than one security camera (at various positions) so they copied the relevant raw video material from each camera and spliced it together which is pretty easy to do. It is definitely “real” however it was done and the father confirmed on British TV (BBC) that the cat bonded with son after his birth.