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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   5334 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 8, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Yes, basically cats lack a robust theory of mind, whereas dogs have a theory of mind that allows them to infer intentions. This makes "no" and other punishment-type responses especially ineffective for cats because it requires an inferential leap: I knocked over the lamp, the human made a loud scary noise. To connect those things causally you need to form a hypothesis about the human's mental state (they are upset I knocked over the lamp) which cats struggle to do.

Cat Psychology & Domestication: Are We Good Owners? by Gwern.

Bradshaw reviews the history of domestic cats from their apparent Middle Eastern origins as a small solitary desert predator to their domestication in Ancient Egypt where breeding millions of cats for sacrifice may have played a critical role (as opposed to any unique role as a vermin exterminator) through to the modern day and psychological studies of the learning abilities and personalities of cats, with particular emphasis on cat social skills in “cat colonies” & plasticity in kittenhood.

As Bradshaw diagnoses it, these are responsible for what ability they have to modern pet life, even though they are not bred for this like dogs; every tame cat still has the feral cat in them, and are in many ways unsuited for contemporary living, with disturbing hints that human lack of selective breeding plus recent large-scale spay/neuter population control efforts may be producing a subtle dysgenic effect on domestication, and this double neglect & backfire may be responsible for disturbingly high rates of cat maladaptation & chronic stress diseases.

A side note: I sometimes worry that modern spay/neuter campaigns are, on net, reversing the domestication process for cats. Practically the only individuals that are allowed to reproduce these days are 1) expensive purebreds and 2) feral cats so averse to humans that they escape TNR programs. If you have a snuggly, trainable one, let her make more!

Same thing for dogs, only with added bonus that it's the aggressive breeds which get to breed as their owners don't care enough to spay/neuter.

As a cat person, I honestly think cats probably are stupider than dogs. It's difficult to quantify, since you can't give these animals IQ tests or even proxies of such, but IIRC some measure of brain complexity showed dogs' to be more complex, which is at least a crude and noisy proxy for intelligence. Which largely conforms with common sense formed from general everyday experiences people have with these creatures. I wish more cat people were just accepting of this instead of treating "stupid" like an insult or "smart" like a compliment about virtue. Cats are stupider than dogs, but that doesn't change the objective fact that they are better than dogs.

A side note: I sometimes worry that modern spay/neuter campaigns are, on net, reversing the domestication process for cats. Practically the only individuals that are allowed to reproduce these days are 1) expensive purebreds and 2) feral cats so averse to humans that they escape TNR programs. If you have a snuggly, trainable one, let her make more!

This sounds like fodder for a The Time Machine reimagining involving cats evolving into cat-Eloi and cat-Morlocks. Maybe mix in some genetic engineering with Elon making catgirls real, to justify the cats gaining enough intelligence to form actual societies.

That's correct. A cat adopted us at our dacha last fall. We named him Asshole, but he really was a sweet specimen, sleeping inside all day, stepping out only to do his dirty business, and hunting all night. He was too outdoors a cat for us to take home, so we converted out greenhouse into a cathouse, with a narrow opening to keep out the snow, an insulated enclosed sleeping box and got our neighbor who would spend the winter there to come and feed him, but Asshole preferred to disappear and probably die instead.

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