Live data from Hacker News

Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

nature.com

191–200 of 229 posts

Re: Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

#191
post #138
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 7 cats now and have had had 15 cats in my life. My whole extended family has always had lots of cats. Two things stick out at me: 1) Cats really do respond to being talked to and interacted with. Cats that are talked to often get more responsive and communicative. 2) There is huge genetic IQ gaps, lol. Some cats are so smart they blow your mind, others are mouth breathers. The normal distribution is real.

"There is huge genetic IQ gaps, lol. Some cats are so smart they blow your mind, others are mouth breathers. The normal distribution is real." I'm very curious about how well someone with a "lot of experience in digital advertising" is positioned to define "genetic IQ gaps", "smart", etc. as it applies to cats & others. Perhaps instead of throwing these terms around like they're candy, you should submit your findings…

No need for the condescending disrespect.

Re: Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, that article is not about house cats vs big cats. The still-extant ancestral species of the domestic cat, F. lybica , is a small wildcat, as were its ancestors, and as such a predator but not an apex predator. Big cats, which typically are apex predators in their respective ecosystems, are a wholly separate branch of the felid family.

Recent research showed that house cats share nearly 95 or was it 96% of their DNA with big cats

The same is true of humans and orangutans, that comparatively small percentage can clearly account for massive differences in behavior and intelligence.

Re: Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, that article is not about house cats vs big cats. The still-extant ancestral species of the domestic cat, F. lybica , is a small wildcat, as were its ancestors, and as such a predator but not an apex predator. Big cats, which typically are apex predators in their respective ecosystems, are a wholly separate branch of the felid family.

Recent research showed that house cats share nearly 95 or was it 96% of their DNA with big cats

Sounds like a lot, until you realize they share 90% with humans.

Re: Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My cat and I have one firm English phrase: "3...2...1". I say that whenever I want him to make up his mind, and at the end I always close the door, pull the sweater from under him, or whatever. He definitely knows what it means, and knows I mean it. > between "No, I don't understand you." and "I understand you perfectly well, but [nothing in my nature compels me to care]". This is where he and I are for lots of other…

As a parent, this works well with toddlers too. When you start counting they know a storm is coming and they can avoid it if they choose their next answer/action carefully...

"I want that done by the time I count to one" terrifies 5-7 year olds.

Re: Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

#195
post #149

I have tried to train my two cats with just these words: 1. "Let's go" - morning meal 2. "Upstairs" - I am going to bed 3. "Dinner" (plus clink bowls together) - evening meal 4. "Lie Down" and their names. Emerald, who prefers being upstairs, definitely responds to "Upstairs": she charges upstairs when I say it. Jade remains enigmatic and skeptical: that seems to be her nature. But if she is in the mood for a tummy r…

>the great charm of cats is that it is impossible to tell the difference between "No, I don't understand you." and "I understand you perfectly well, but I plan to ignore you completely until I feel like responding" It’s totally the same thing with retired racer greyhounds. Gentle, stoic, sleep 20 hours a day, and literally zero eagerness to please. They’re the most catlike of dog breeds.

It depends a lot on the greyhound, I think.

We had a rescue when I was little, a beautiful dog named Anubis. She wasn't too bright, but that was okay; she had a pal, an Eskimo dog called Raven, who was smart enough for the both of them and had a sense of humor to match - not but a foot high but she could jump up from a standing start and lick my face, and often did. Even on the worst day of my life, Raven could still get me to smile.

Anubis hadn't been a winner on the track but she loved nothing more than to run, and Raven knew it. Every so often, not more than once a month or so, Raven would pick a spot at the edge of the backyard fence. There she'd dig a hole bigger than she needed, because the hole wasn't for her; it was for Anubis, who'd wriggle through and promptly light out for the horizon. Meanwhile Raven amused herself and kept us busy with fruitless attempts to catch her. She'd run straight at me till I crouched down and committed to the lunge, and then she'd dodge on a dime and turn laughing to watch me faceplant in the dirt - cats might not laugh but dogs sure do, and Raven was the laughingest dog I ever did know.

This'd keep up till Anubis had done stretching her legs, and trotted back to press her muzzle into Mom's hand by way of genuine contrition. You could see she felt bad about it, but only to the extent she knew Mom didn't like it, if only because we were concerned with the day's occasions and she worried Anubis would get hit by a truck, which was a real concern on the gravel roads around where we lived then. Hell, Mom and I spent enough time ourselves tooling around those back roads with a six-pack in a foam cooler on the bench seat between us, her getting through a couple-three cans of Bud Light while she taught me how to drive and how to know every bird we saw without most times needing to pick up the Audubon next to the cooler. But just a few beers, barely enough to get buzzed, and most of the folks around there were a fair bit less restrained than Mom - less likely to worry about whether or not they might hit a deer on the road, more so to put a .308 through it, this being close enough to roadkill to keep the fish & game wardens sweet. So I can't blame Mom worrying, but Anubis must've either kept mostly to the woods or else just led a charmed life; occasional fleas notwithstanding, she never came to the least bit of harm.

As for the running itself, Mom understood that was just what Anubis had to do every now and again, but when she came back you could see she'd rather have found a way that wouldn't put Mom out. In any case, only once she saw Anubis was satisfied would Raven let me "catch" her, mainly so she could lick my face and I'd scratch behind her ears - it wasn't that I couldn't stay mad; it was that she was the kind of dog that you couldn't get mad in the first place. Both of them were.

Mom kept Rottweilers later - as pets, not for any other reason - and those were good dogs too, smart and kind and loving, but Anubis and Raven were special. God, I loved those dogs. Every kid should be so lucky.

Re: Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

#196
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's on the poster?

A waterfall. I think he's basically just saying "Nice poster you've got there, be a shame if something happened to it"

Could be the paper makes a distinctive rattle, and he's learned it will elicit a distinctive response. Cats' theory of mind for humans isn't all that thorough, I think, but they have a very solid grasp of cause and effect. Honestly, I think they mostly think we're simple.

They definitely aren't, though, at least not all of them. My guy used to fight like hell any time I tried to trim his claws, so eventually I gave it up and let him look after himself, thinking, well, he's a cat and he's got plenty of carpet to scratch, he'll do fine. That lasted till he got an ingrown claw, so I had to trim that back, debride and disinfect the wound it'd made in his pad, then trim enough fur on his foreleg short enough to get a bandage to stick where he couldn't shake it off.

He really hated that, for all that it only took a couple of days to heal - they're better at that than even we are, and in a week you couldn't tell except by the missing fur that anything had ever happened. Well, by that and one other thing: for the balance of his life, when I went to trim his claws, he never put up much more than a token struggle. Where before he'd fight his way to the top of my head and leap clear, this was just enough of a fuss to make sure nobody thought him a coward, and no more - he'd learned it was worth letting me look after him a little, so he didn't need me to look after him a lot.

Re: Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

#197
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real. Off the top of my head there's, MeerrrOOOOOwww MerrrOOOOwww, the loudest one, huge inflection in the middle. Generally while strolling through the house, back and forth. I think that's the "I'm bored" one. But he'll also do it if I stay up. If someone is out of bed past curfew he'll do it. I have to close the bedroom door or he'll wake the wife. If you say summon him he'll probably ignore you but if he's in…

> But he'll also do it if I stay up. If someone is out of bed past curfew he'll do it. One of my cats also does this. It's a very distinct vocalization that I only ever hear when I've stayed up too late and seems to mean "Why aren't you in bed already?" If I hear that, I know I've stayed up too long. (And usually, she seems to mainly want me to get into bed so that she can curl up and go to sleep by my feet or on my…

That checks out, yeah. If I stayed up late, mine would sometimes fuss at me till I went to bed, where he could stretch out with his back against my front and watch Youtube with me while I scratched his chin and brisket.

He'd tuck the top of his head under my own chin, and the tip of his tail would just reach my knees. I'm five foot ten - mongrel tabby or no, he was a big cat.

Re: Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

#198
post #2

"Analysis: One cat completed only the first trial before escaping from the room and climbing out of reach." I quite enjoyed this bit.

That and the fact that the statistics don't seem very crisp says everything you need to know about cats. Anecdotally I can confirm that my cats know each others names, not sure if they would recognize on a monitor though.

Oh, I don't know. If wasps can recognize one another's faces - and they can! - I don't see any reason in principle why cats, who have orders of magnitude more neurons to work with, shouldn't be able to recognize images of one another.

Re: Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

#200
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Not limited to cats either. I've noticed the same in dogs and even some cows. Same rules apply to humans as well. Interaction early on develops personality and intelligence varies genetically by a wide margin.

Intelligence is not well-defined even for humans, and we have little understanding of what goes on in an animal's "mind", yet people like you use terms like IQ for cats like they're established facts. For all we know, it could be that some animals/cats just don't "care" as much about interacting with humans. Just like some humans do.

> we have little understanding of what goes on in an animal's "mind"

Maybe you do. Behaviorism went out with disco and bell bottoms, and good riddance; more recent researchers often take an ethological approach - Goodall, not that pervo freak Skinner - and what we've learned from corvids only scratches the surface of the extent to which we're lately discovering that animals other than humans are a lot smarter than we tend to give them credit for.

The human animal, on the other hand - well, that you put quotes around "mind" in your comment earlier suffices alone to demonstrate that your confident assumption of knowing what you're talking about here lacks quite a bit for congruence with reality. Hell, I've met crows who proved to have a very accurate theory of mind for me - much more so than you here give the impression of having for them.

Post reply on HN