A Michael Broad Blog
This article is about the effectiveness with which cats and dogs visual recognise people they know (their ‘handler’ in the tests) and animals they know. It is based on a scientific study. Caveat: this is one study. I am discussing it as it has potential to interest some people but I am not convinced …
Can domestic cats be mentally challenged or in ruder language ‘retarded’? I believe that in order to answer the question it might be useful to divide the domestic cat into two groups: the random bred cats i.e. moggies and the purebred, pedigree cats that you normally buy from a breeder. Cognitive dysfunction syndrome There …
This is a commonly asked question and I’ve not yet seen a really good answer. When you ask how long a domestic cat can survive without food you are presuming that the cat has access to water and therefore you are asking for how long a cat can survive on water only. Technically, the …
Scientists have looked into whether wild cats are smarter than domestic cat. Their study is entitled: “Are domesticated animals dumber than their wild relatives? A comprehensive review on the domestication effects on animal cognitive performance.” I discuss the study below and start off with a general discussion on the difficulties in making a comparison. …
Cats have their own type of intelligence. Of course, is different to ours but in their own way they are intuitively and instinctively smart. And it must be said that they are good learners by observation. They learn by observing us and indeed copying us sometimes. Their lives are so integrated into ours that …
STUDY RESULT PLUS COMMENT: Dorottya Ujfalussy from the Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, has decided in her study that flat-faced dogs (and I’m going to include flat-faced cats) are more attractive to their owners because they are more helpless. And in being more helpless they are more like human toddlers who are themselves helpless …
This is an interesting illustration from Dr John Bradshaw’s book Cat Sense (which you can download to Kindle by the way which allows you to search for keywords) on the topic of how well or not so well domestic cats understand what is going on around them in the human world. As cat owners, …
The full question from Reddit.com is: “Can someone explain to me why my cat will just sit and stare at me for minutes at a time? What does this mean in a cat’s world?” It accompanied the photograph below that they took from their bed. This is an extended version of the response that …
