A Michael Broad Blog
This is a picture of a young woman who appears to be suffering from an acute case of feline anthropomorphism. Did I spell that correctly?! I am kidding or I hope I am. Dressing cats as babies is treating cats as babies and that opens up a book on how humans relate to their …
There are two main reasons why people put clothes on cats. The first reason is functional. You can buy “clothes” which calm your cat, for example. This is the Thundershirt. You can buy a jacket for your cat which stops him biting himself if he has had surgery. It is an alternative to the …
If this cat was a human you would say that they had a “furrowed brow”. A face of worry and anxiety. Whereas a person would be genuinely worried and anxious, for this cat the appearance is due to his or her facial markings around the eyes. I have decided that she is female. I …
This is anthropomorphising the domestic cat. It’s cute but….
I’ll focus on cats. To quote P.L. Bernstein (The Welfare of Cats) some scientists (see below) have suggested that anthropomorphism “may have evolved to enable humans to recognise animals as ‘alternative sources of social support’”. The main reason for being a cat guardian is companionship. This may have had the consequence of acting as …
Here are three points about anthropomorphising cats. Anthropomorphism is the “attribution of human mental states (thoughts, feeling, motivations and beliefs) to nonhuman animals”. Let’s say, though, that cats have emotions and therefore I’d argue they have feelings too. So some anthropomorphising is just a true recognition of cat behaviour and senses. That’s my personal …
If you are so minded and if you really want the ultimate reassurances that your cat is being treated and cared for in a way that you can’t even manage yourself, you can forget about boarding catteries and instead select a five-star pet hotel which has four-poster beds, full body massages and a room …
Do we, inadvertently, nearly always anthropomorphise the domestic cat? I believe that we have difficulty with dissociating the cat as a family member from human family members. I believe that all too often without realising it people judge cat behaviour from the standpoint of human behaviour. They measure cat behaviour in reference to the …
