A Michael Broad Blog
The truly unique “two talking cats” video on YouTube has been seen 103 million times which is unsurprising. Or perhaps it might be fair to say that it’s unique to capture on video cats talking to themselves like this. It possibly happens from time to time but it must be extremely rare. But what …
Do cats need to socialise with other cats in order to be happy and healthy? What the question is asking is whether a domestic cat needs to successfully live with another domestic cat in a good relationship in order to be happy and healthy. And the answer is no because there are many millions …
For me the answer to the question, “why does my cat lick me?” mainly comes from personal observation. Mother-kitten relationship My cat looks upon me as a mother cat. All domestic cats do the same. Our cats are kept in a state of perpetual kittenhood with us as we provide for them and unwittingly …
My conclusion from my discussion below is that domestic cats can get confused when they are licking their owner’s passive hand at a time when there is no petting and relate to the hand as food, perhaps a prey animal and bite it. It is an instinctive mental aberration brought about because of conflict …
I have used the word “allogrooming” a lot. I discovered the word many years ago in writing articles for this website. You would not normally use it because it’s rather an unusual word. As you probably know it describes the grooming of one cat by another. And sometimes domestic cat groom each other simultaneously …
You will see quite a lot of this: domestic cats grooming their human caregiver not only on their hand or their arm but also on their head. It is clearly impractical because the hair on a human’s head is far too long for a domestic cat to groom. The hair gets stuck in their …
When your cat licks your hair, she is allogrooming you. From her perspective your hair is unnaturally long. It makes the allogrooming process almost impossible which is why she struggles. However, she is licking you as another cat with normal-length hair. It’s just unfortunate that the hair on your head is much longer than …
We don’t know everything that there is to know about domestic cat behaviour. That is the first point to make. Please don’t expect clean, definitive answers to every question about cat behaviour. This is one of those instances in my opinion. But the question is relevant to a study that I’ve just bumped into …
