They have very different understandings of "high-res image" and "full size image" than I do.
I'm wondering if this is related to a TV show I saw tracking household cats in the UK. I can't remember if it was Derby or not. They did a lot of GPS tracking and showed that cats often 'share' territory by time-sharing; one cat's schedule tends not to overlap another's.
There were also TONS of instances of cats going into multiple homes for meals. Sometimes sneaking in the cat door and snacking while the residents were unaware.
Our family cat, a rescue, would invite other cats in for lunch. Id come downstairs and see a strange cat eating out of the bowl. Our cat just stood a foot away like a waiter waiting on a table. I think he just wanted to share this magical food bowl that was always refilled.
We had 2-3 cats in a rural area, and several times, when their numbers fell low, they'd recruit an additional cat. So all we did was make sure the new recruit truly was a stray, and if so, go along with the adoption.
Haha it’s true. My mum gets hay fever from cat and horse hair. We used to have a stray in our yard sometimes and my mum hated it cos it would dig our vegetable garden and poo in it. She would throw stones and bricks at it, hose it, etc. (Never to hurt it, just to scare it away)
One day it came up on our back deck at 11pm at night with a flee collar around its waist really tight. So my dad and Uncle cut it off and have it some left over meat from dinner.
We had a ladder leading against the house near the bathroom (about 4 feet away from the window) which only opens about 2 inches cos of the security latches. This cat went up the ladder and somehow crossed 4 feet of nothing to the window. Climbed in and got caught upside down in the blinds.
Mum said any cat that willing to stay can stay, BUT ITS NOT ALLOWED IN THE ROOM!! It sat at the door and howled and howled so mum said “ok it can stay in the room BUT ITS NOT ALLOWED ON THE BED!!!!”. It jumped on the bed, mum kicked it off, it jumped on, mum kicked it off... after 2 nights of this mum gave up and let it sleep on the bed.
Tiger stayed with us for the next 8 years till he passed. Was my first pet. He was an outdoor cat. But they are smart. If mum came home from work. He wouldn’t be seen till dinner time. But sometimes mum would have a bad day at work. She would get home. And only on the days she had a bad day, he would be home within minutes of mum getting home and he would bump her legs until she picked him up. Always made mum feel better. He knew when something was wrong.
I believe the documentary you're referring to is "The Secret Life of the Cat" which fitted cats with tracking devices and cameras. It's available online [0].
We had a male cat. And I know that he was "ours" because I watched him being born. But some years later, he disappeared. So we put up posters. And discovered that several neighbors thought that he was their cat. He never did return, though. To us, anyway.
All felids sleep a lot. Lions are known to nap for 2/3 of the day. This becomes understandable when you realize they live or die based on the success of a few chases and pounces, for which they must conserve their energy.
But yeah, a cat sleeping near you or "ignoring" you means he likes you enough that he thinks he can afford to chill out in your presence. He really likes you if he takes over your bed to sleep in. The highest compliments a cat gives are often understated.
> But yeah, a cat sleeping near you or "ignoring" you means he likes you enough that he thinks he can afford to chill out in your presence. He really likes you if he takes over your bed to sleep in. The highest compliments a cat gives are often understated.
We're their magical feeding/guarding/providing shelter/petting machines. From their POV it's a good thing we humans are too big to eat, otherwise they wouldn't have all those benefits.
I like to think of less complex life forms like fish as being entirely interrupt-driven state machines. Cats are much more complex machines, capable of running long-term latent processes, and capable of abstract thinking. How else can I explain how my old cat found so much enjoyment in pushing things off tables? The only reasonable explanation is schadenfreude.
Can someone help me find a podcast with a story which I thought was called called "the cat came back". I've scoured through This American Life episodes and still can't find it. Maybe it was a different podcast?
Either way it's about a guy who adopts a cat and then finds out, by attaching a camera, that the cat has other lives.
A: Cats are seen as relatively lazy, especially compared to dogs. But we saw that when they were outside, they became superalert. They scanned their surroundings, sometimes for a half-hour or more on end. And even though cats are highly territorial, they didn’t always fight with other cats they encountered. Often, they just sat a couple of meters away from each other for up to a half an hour. They may have been sizing each other up. Sometimes they would engage in a greeting, briefly touching noses.
When they were in their homes, the cats spent a lot of time following their humans around. They liked to be in the same room. A lot of my students were surprised at how attached cats were to people.
Something similar to the displacement happened with birds during vacation recently. I was just relaxing on a porch, and one by one groups of birds would occupy the lawn for a while. It must've been four or five different species, in groups from one (only the kingfisher) to six or seven finches of some sort. It seemed strangely orderly, in that each group seemed to stay about the same amount of time, and none of the groups ever met - the new group would always swoop in shortly after the last one. There was no bird feed to be had there. I can't be sure, but it seemed the groups were actually rotating rather than new ones every time.
I'd like to see what and how the camera was attacked to the cat. My cat wouldn't tolerate anything on their person(?) for anything longer than a second.
It depends on the cat, they can be conditioned to accept things like collars and even leashes if you start early enough.
A friend once attached a servo to the collar of his appendage-friendly cat with a long carbon rod protruding in front of his cat's head carrying a small cat toy on the end.
The receiver and small battery pack hung from the collar bottom to keep things oriented. It only lasted for brief periods of amusement before the rig would get destroyed in the chaos, but in those short functional windows he could influence his cat's steering by radio control.
I don't think he ever figured out how to add a throttle control.
There's a photo of the third author (the cat that motivated the experiment) near the end of the paper[1]. They state that they tried it on a lot of cats, and many rejected the cameras.
Seems like more of a cat adoration project than a scientific study. Unlike other cat cam projects there is no mention of domestic cats predatory behaviour, and how this impacts the environment. Seems like mostly POV for cat lovers.
Remember kids, if it isn't the science you like, it isn't science at all.
For me, the best thing about this person's interview from TFA is their call for others to do the same. Just like me ubering to school or work is not science, the mass collection of data points yields opportunities for better studies down the road.
I'm wondering if this is related to a TV show I saw tracking household cats in the UK. I can't remember if it was Derby or not. They did a lot of GPS tracking and showed that cats often 'share' territory by time-sharing; one cat's schedule tends not to overlap another's.
There were also TONS of instances of cats going into multiple homes for meals. Sometimes sneaking in the cat door and snacking while the residents were unaware.