The Contextual Knowledge of Pussycats
Sep. 6th, 2024 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeIn a previous housing arrangement, we encountered a fascinatingly strange look into a cat's mind. The topic? Ice cream.
This is Puck. Puck LOVES ice cream. Whenever one of his humans would eat a bowl of it on the couch, he would be all over them, desperately trying to get at the delicious treat. (This would always turn into an entertaining dance of my roommate shifting bowl from hand to hand and place to place, forever keeping it out of his reach.)
One day, the ice cream promenade was going, and Roomy needed to go to the bathroom. They obviously couldn't leave the ice cream unattended, but they didn't want to bring it into the bathroom with them. So we said, "Give it to us."
Roomy passed the bowl of ice cream to us in full view of Puck. But once the bowl of ice cream left their hands and entered ours, it completely left Puck's universe.
We were just sitting in a chair (the one in that photo actually), in arm's reach of the couch Roomy had been on. There was nothing stopping Puck from going straight from badgering Roomy to badgering us. But instead, with a confused air, he began searching the room. Where had the ice cream gone??? It was here just a moment ago! He could presumably still smell it, and clearly it was hiding from him! He seemed utterly stymied. When Roomy came out of the bathroom, we were just sitting there, unmolested. The moment we gave the ice cream back, Puck started up on his shit again.
It was hilarious (and useful), but it was also fascinating. It was like he identified the ice cream with "bowl held by Roomy." We were not Roomy, ergo the bowl we held could not be ice cream. We thought, maybe it's because we never feed Puck, so he doesn't associate us with food?
Fast forward to today.
This is Pedro. Pedro could not give fewer shits about treats of any kind. What Pedro cares about is HUNTING. And today, Pedro discovered our socks.
Pedro overwhelmingly prefers our wool socks. I think the animal fibers make him feel like he's hunting very large, fat mice. He's also chosen a bamboo pair, but only once and only when the wool wasn't available. (He ignores the cotton.) What he does is, he goes up to our wire rack, digs out all the socks he can reach, and finds a wool pair. He then bites into it, gives it that neck-breaking headshake cats do to "kill" prey, and walks off with it in his mouth. He usually will then bring it all the way to his human's room, where he will deposit the "prey," sometimes on the floor but usually on her bed. (Sometimes he will lose steam and drop the socks en route, but this is less common.) He will also tussle with the socks enough to unfold them or cover them in cat drool.
We got sick enough of this to take our socks and (in full view of Pedro) put them somewhere else. They disappeared from his universe. He kept determinedly digging through our sock shelf, even when there were no longer socks. He would dig out everything else he could find--gloves, underwear, stuffed animals--and then walk off, clearly disappointed. He never once attempted to find the socks elsewhere. Even as we were folding laundry, right in front of him (including socks), he paid them no attention. When we took the socks from him and put them in the pile of their follows on the floor, they ceased to be of interest, even though they looked, smelled, and felt exactly the same.
This leads me to suspect that cats, at least some of them, identify things not just by sight and sound, but by context. An ice cream bowl alone means nothing; it only becomes "ICE CREAAAAAAAM 8D" when in a bowl held by Roomy (preferably on the couch). Similarly, socks only become "PREEEEEY 8D" when on the sock shelf (which, being a small, dark cranny, may more resemble a "lair" to a cat).
It's funny to humans, of course. To us, a bowl of ice cream is a bowl of ice cream, regardless of who's holding it. But I wonder what things we fail to identify that to cats remain extremely obvious.
This is Puck. Puck LOVES ice cream. Whenever one of his humans would eat a bowl of it on the couch, he would be all over them, desperately trying to get at the delicious treat. (This would always turn into an entertaining dance of my roommate shifting bowl from hand to hand and place to place, forever keeping it out of his reach.)
One day, the ice cream promenade was going, and Roomy needed to go to the bathroom. They obviously couldn't leave the ice cream unattended, but they didn't want to bring it into the bathroom with them. So we said, "Give it to us."
Roomy passed the bowl of ice cream to us in full view of Puck. But once the bowl of ice cream left their hands and entered ours, it completely left Puck's universe.
We were just sitting in a chair (the one in that photo actually), in arm's reach of the couch Roomy had been on. There was nothing stopping Puck from going straight from badgering Roomy to badgering us. But instead, with a confused air, he began searching the room. Where had the ice cream gone??? It was here just a moment ago! He could presumably still smell it, and clearly it was hiding from him! He seemed utterly stymied. When Roomy came out of the bathroom, we were just sitting there, unmolested. The moment we gave the ice cream back, Puck started up on his shit again.
It was hilarious (and useful), but it was also fascinating. It was like he identified the ice cream with "bowl held by Roomy." We were not Roomy, ergo the bowl we held could not be ice cream. We thought, maybe it's because we never feed Puck, so he doesn't associate us with food?
Fast forward to today.
This is Pedro. Pedro could not give fewer shits about treats of any kind. What Pedro cares about is HUNTING. And today, Pedro discovered our socks.
Pedro overwhelmingly prefers our wool socks. I think the animal fibers make him feel like he's hunting very large, fat mice. He's also chosen a bamboo pair, but only once and only when the wool wasn't available. (He ignores the cotton.) What he does is, he goes up to our wire rack, digs out all the socks he can reach, and finds a wool pair. He then bites into it, gives it that neck-breaking headshake cats do to "kill" prey, and walks off with it in his mouth. He usually will then bring it all the way to his human's room, where he will deposit the "prey," sometimes on the floor but usually on her bed. (Sometimes he will lose steam and drop the socks en route, but this is less common.) He will also tussle with the socks enough to unfold them or cover them in cat drool.
We got sick enough of this to take our socks and (in full view of Pedro) put them somewhere else. They disappeared from his universe. He kept determinedly digging through our sock shelf, even when there were no longer socks. He would dig out everything else he could find--gloves, underwear, stuffed animals--and then walk off, clearly disappointed. He never once attempted to find the socks elsewhere. Even as we were folding laundry, right in front of him (including socks), he paid them no attention. When we took the socks from him and put them in the pile of their follows on the floor, they ceased to be of interest, even though they looked, smelled, and felt exactly the same.
This leads me to suspect that cats, at least some of them, identify things not just by sight and sound, but by context. An ice cream bowl alone means nothing; it only becomes "ICE CREAAAAAAAM 8D" when in a bowl held by Roomy (preferably on the couch). Similarly, socks only become "PREEEEEY 8D" when on the sock shelf (which, being a small, dark cranny, may more resemble a "lair" to a cat).
It's funny to humans, of course. To us, a bowl of ice cream is a bowl of ice cream, regardless of who's holding it. But I wonder what things we fail to identify that to cats remain extremely obvious.
