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, I think it is important to try and understand as much as we can about ‘cat intelligence’. There is little information on it as there are far more studies in that field of science on dogs as they are easier to work with.
The point is that despite about 10,000 years of domestication the cat is still programmed to interpret human activity through the eyes of the domestic cat’s ancestor, the wildcat, despite being very familiar with human surroundings e.g., houses, cars and other human objects.
Dr Bradshaw lived or still lives with at least one pet cat, Splodge, who ‘always inspected the bumpers of cars parked outside my house. Sometimes after sniffing he looked around nervously…’
Dr Bradshaw could see that Splodge had picked up scent from another cat that had perhaps been sprayed on the bumper when the car was many miles away. Splodge would regularly smell the car’s bumper checking on the scent as cats do when patrolling their home range.
Scent markers within home ranges tell the resident cat who has been there and approximately when as the strength of the scent fades over a set time.
But Splodge ‘never seemed to understand the possibility that the scent marks might have arrived already on the car: he always seemed to presume that they belonged to an unfamiliar cat that must have just invaded our neighbourhood’.
The reason being that in ‘in nature scent marks stay where they’ve been left, so there would be no need to evolve an understanding that scent marks might move with objects on which they’ve been deposited’.
It is a nice way of explaining that domestic cats know their human surroundings very well as static objects and markers but they don’t understand ‘humankind’s manipulations’ of these objects i.e. how they are used by humans.
In an earlier article I wrote about cats opening doors. To many observers it might look as if they understand how the door handle works and what doors do and the reason for their existence. In short cat door opening seems to imply that cats understand the workings of human surroundings.
But when cats learn to open doors, it is a form of trial and error under the umbrella of ‘operant conditioning’.
When cats were offered two strings to pull, one of which was attached to food, their actions in getting the food were governed by operant conditioning – trial and error with the reward of food when they pulled the correct string. Getting the food was not a result of working out which string was the one that produced food.
Years ago, I wrote in response to the news media criticising domestic cats for sometimes disdainfully rejecting their owner’s call to come. They were reinforcing the belief that cats are aloof and too independent. My assessment was that the cats were slow in responding due to their poor ability to apply rational thought. It can take time for a cat to respond when rational thought is required.
