The International Cat Day, which was celebrated on Tuesday this week, received a wide resonance on social networks, leaving far behind useful days like “Cuteness Day”, those with commercial potential like “Peach Day” or even really serious and important days, like “Rare Disease Awareness Day”.
What is it in him, in the cat, that cuts the nets every time anew? The phenomenon of cats on the Internet or rather people watching cats on the Internet has become such a big cultural interest that it has spawned its own research. For example, the study by Prof. Jessica Gal Meyrick from Indiana University, which examined who watches cat videos, and for what purpose. “There are those who will say that this is not an interesting enough topic for research,” Meyrick said at the time, “but watching cats is one of the most common uses of the Internet today. If we want to understand how the Internet affects our society, we cannot ignore the cats on the Internet.” These things were true for 2015. Cat videos had the highest number of views per video of any other category, meaning they had the highest virality potential, and many likely watched these videos more than once.
Meyrick surveyed more than 7,000 people. 36% said they were cat people. 60% said they like cats and dogs. Those surveyed said they felt more vital and more positive about life after watching the cat video, and also reported decreased levels of negative emotions such as anxiety, irritability and sadness. Watching the cat videos usually happened while working or studying, as a kind of light break or procrastination, charging batteries.
When asked if they felt guilty about procrastinating, most said the emotional benefits of watching cats outweighed the harm of procrastinating. The viewers of the videos were not necessarily cat owners, but the group of cat owners was naturally overrepresented among the viewers of the videos. Other traits that were shown more were agreeableness and shyness.
The secret of attraction: evoke empathy, maintain mystery
Other researchers claim that the cat is very easy to humanize. Indeed, many of the viral videos are based on cats doing “human” things. For example, one of the genres of cat videos is called “flawed masculinity”, in which a cat tries to perform a heroic act, and fails colossally.
The face of the cat, especially kittens, and especially cats that have become network stars, resembles the face of a human baby – the large eyes relative to the button nose and the small mouth. This is how they evoke the feeling of cuteness and also identification. But on the other hand cats are mysterious. Unlike dogs, who externalize their feelings and can be tamed relatively easily, cats are seen as animals that hide something, and we may unconsciously assume that they have deep thoughts, which are not visible to us.
While humans domesticated the dogs, the cats “domesticated themselves”. They began to hang around humans when the residential complexes began to swarm with mice and rats. The humans saw that it was good, and began to cultivate the cats so that they would control the rodent population, but the cats did not change genetically or behaviorally in a significant way following this domestication, as the dogs did. This distance is part of the “kept secret” of cats. They are still quite independent, deciding for themselves when to respond to human courtship (which only heightens our interest in how their brains work), and in laboratory studies they are uncooperative. Therefore, their behavior is studied less and they know less how to explain it.
To all these explanations you can add another one that has not really been researched, but it sounds good. Cats are the animal of choice for introverts, and these are the people who used the Internet more in the beginning, and set the trends of what wins online.
And really, in recent years, there is a decline in the control of cats on the Internet. According to an article on The Outline website, in 2018 Instagram reported that among the 50 most popular animal accounts, 22 were of dogs, 18 of cats. In the “cute things” Reddit thread, cats ruled until 2010, when dogs overtook them and are on the rise, and cats are on the decline. Even on YouTube, dog video searches overtook cat searches in 2014, and since then dogs have held the lead, although cat videos are still far more viewed than video. In gifs, on the other hand, cats still keep the lead. Since gifs are often used to express an emotion or reaction, their success in this area supports the hypothesis that it is easier for us to attribute human qualities to them.
Communication: A long blink is like a smile to a cat
It may be easy to attribute human qualities to a cat in part because the human smile bears some resemblance to a feline facial expression, which new research is beginning to refer to as the “cat smile.” For cat owners, this expression is familiar. Look for Slow Blink gifs, a kind of slow blink of a cat, where the eyes don’t close all the way, but shrink to slits, then open again. Warning: watching these videos may lead to the appearance of the “feeling of cuteness” and an increased release of oxytocin. That is, if you’ve watched videos of cats doing it. There are also videos of humans doing this, and there it looks mostly weird.
But British researchers claim that cats and humans can indeed communicate with each other, using the long blink. The research they conducted was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The team of researchers, led by Prof. Karen McComb and Dr. Tasmin Humphrey from the University of Sussex, showed in a first experiment that the probability that a cat will blink long at a human increases if the human did so at the cat first. Also, cats are more likely to approach a hand that offers petting, if the human Blink at them first. “Many cat owners already intuitively suspected the positive meaning of the long blink,” McComb said, “so we were very happy to find evidence of this in the study.” The research may improve communication between cats and their owners, and also improve the feeling of a cat in veterinary care, Maybe like the difference a doctor’s smile makes to a human patient.
This study joins previous studies that have found signs of a psychological bond between cats and their owners – contrary to the conventional wisdom that cats enjoy the company of humans for food and shelter, but emotionally they keep to themselves. Previous studies have shown that cats purr to get their owners’ attention, even when the result is attention alone, with no additional reward. Further studies have shown that a cat can distinguish the name given to it by humans, and distinguish it from other words, even when strangers call its name.
Ecology: Fewer dead birds in the trash, please
Our cats are the cats of the era, and the era is political. Thus, the “cat yes or no” question is also an opening for endless and venomous discussions on social networks. What is there to discuss? It turns out that cats are quite an ecological hazard.
Stray cats, or cats that move between the house and the outdoors, are very dangerous to other species of animals and even endanger global biodiversity. According to the US Bird Conservation Authority, cats have contributed to the extinction of 63 species of animals – birds, rodents and reptiles, and today threaten hundreds more species. The problem is so great that the house cat has been declared one of the worst invasive species in the world. In the US, house cats live About 2.4 billion birds are killed outside the home every year. This is the effect of tens of millions of cats. If each cat only catches a bird or two a day, this is the result.
So let’s feed the cats so they don’t eat birds in the wild? This is one of the research directions being tested, but for now it seems that it is not the complete solution. Satiety cats also carnivore, if they have the opportunity. Another study did reveal that cats, unlike other animals, prefer free meals rather than working for their food, but they will still be happy to practice hunting from time to time.
Researchers from the University of Exeter found that if you feed a cat meaty food and at the same time play games with them that keep their interest level and simulate ambushes and ambushes, their tendency to hunt decreases.
Domestic cats that were fed and trained with this method reduced their number of predations by 36%. Playing for 5-10 minutes a day led to a 25% reduction. The drop pleased not only the researchers and the cats’ prey, but also the cat owners who were happy not to find dead birds secretly around the house and mice on the pillow.
Cats have become an ecological hazard / Photo: Shutterstock
The recommended type of play is tying a feather to a stick and shaking it in the air, so that the cat can chase it and jump on it. When the cat grabs the feather, you can throw it a toy mouse as a reward.
“Previous studies have tried to reduce the extent of hunting by leaving them at home or with colored collars that warn birds of the approaching cat,” said Prof Robbie MacDonald from the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Exeter when the study was published. “The collars do reduce the cat’s ability to hunt birds, but they don’t help against rodents. Bells probably don’t help at all.”
Now researchers are trying to understand if certain components in the meat food, which can also come from other sources, are the ones that satisfy the cat’s hunting instinct.
This research is less relevant to stray cats, although some cat feeders may be happy to play with them as well. And yet, even a non-predatory cat will cause stress to the birds and prevent them from nesting when he walks around their territory, so not everything is solved, but it’s a start.
Genetics: The Key to Cracking the Human Genetic Puzzle
Genetically, cats are more similar to us than dogs, at least in the way the genome is arranged – so claims Prof. Leslie Lyons from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Missouri in the USA, in an article published in the journal Trends in Genetics.
“A dog or a mouse genome has a different order of chromosomes than a human genome. A cat has a genome about the size of ours, and it is conserved quite similarly to ours,” she wrote. It turns out that cats also have “dark DNA” (formerly called “junk DNA”) like humans, and they may hold the key to deciphering its role.
Dark DNA is genetic material that does not code for proteins, and one of the questions that bothers genetics researchers is what it actually does. Cats are known to have diseases associated with dark DNA mutations, so researchers think they may hold the key to solving the puzzle.
Cat lovers and animal rights in general will not so much like the direction in which this thought leads the researchers: cloning cats in order to test the effect of the dark DNA.
The first cat to be cloned this way, in 2001, contained genetic material from a black, white and red calico cat, but the cloned result had no red fur at all. Something happened during the cloning, and the researchers want to understand it.
Lyons says this research may also help cats. “If there is a development in the genetic research of cats, even if the goal is to help humans, perhaps veterinarians will be able to identify and treat genetic diseases of pet cats, and perhaps they will also develop personalized medicine, which will treat not only the symptoms.”
How to keep a cat healthy
Vomiting hair, refusing food and defecating outside the box are behaviors that veterinarians call “sick behaviors” of cats, but it turns out that they may also appear in healthy cats when there is a surprising replacement of the caretaker figure, a significant change in schedules or a surprising dramatic event, according to a study done at the hospital Ohio State University Vet. So what can be done to make the cat as healthy and happy as possible, according to the research?
■ Feed him at a fixed time every morning
■ Leave the food and the boxes of necessities in one place
■ Clean the crate and wash the bed regularly
■ Play music for an hour or two a day at a fixed time
■ Hide a large number of cat toys in the house
■ In pens – release the cats to interact with each other in a large and enriching space for an hour to an hour and a half a day