In Finland, an elderly man told me he couldn't move because his cat had imprinted the neighborhood on its brain, and if he moved, the cat couldn't learn the new neighborhood landmarks, as he'd always believe he was in the old neighborhood. I thought it was dogs you couldn't teach new tricks.
If you took a cat and moved it, it would apparently become schizo, with two maps on top of one another, causing unutterable confusion.
Is this true?
If it is true (and can be proven) then cats should never suffer a move from one residence to another as it is inhumanly cruel.
15 comments:
This does not sound true to me.
When our cats were brought home to the apartment from the shelter they were immediately exploring the apartment with intense curiosity and don't seem to be confused about where they are. When let outside they also enjoy exploring and do not seem to get lost.
Furthermore it doesn't seem like a very adaptive behavior anyways for an animal, not to be able to move to new territory.
Kirby:
Are you considering moving? Do you own a cat?
We've been regular cat owners for decades.
A stray we adopted/who adopted us we named Schnooks. Schnooks routinely would raid other cats dishes in the neighborhood, and made enemies of other owners this way. Once a man who lived up the street, named Conrad, told us the following: A couple of years earlier, he had become frustrated with Schoonks. Thinking to rid himself of a bad stray, he boxed Schnooks up and drove him about 15 miles away (near Montclair--near Oakland) and set him loose there. During this period, Schnooks was missing, for over a month. Then, he had shown up.
This may be one of those "Lassie come home" anecdotes. How the cat could find his way home over 15 miles of dense urban and suburban territory, where he had never been, is completely mysterious and miraculous. Schnooks later had to be put down, because he became ill with feline leukemia. He also withstood attacks from raccoons, and other hardships. A real hero to us.
We now have Siamese cats. Siamese seem completely dependent (are indoor cats), and I think they wouldn't last five minutes in the real world. They'd get run over or fall off a roof, whatever. They're like children who never grow up.
But Schnooks was a survivor. In a state of nature, only the feral cats survive, the rest either are taken in (as domestic) or die off quickly.
As for the templating, there must be some truth to that, but becoming "confused" by new surroundings? Naw.
there's a law in Massachusetts that says that you can't move wildlife (yu can't cage a woodchuck and dump it somewhere else). I wondered if the idea of a template was behind this, but then, you are right there are many stories of various furry creatures, and even pigeons, who can make it back to a place. Some say they do it by the sun, or from magnetic sense of where the poles are.
No one knows, apparently.
I had never heard of the thing that a cat can't retemplate its surroundings, and wondered even if I had heard that right (the man was speaking in Finnish, which I don't know terribly well).
I wonder if there are any studies of this and what name they would go under if they do exist. In English we use the term psychogeography for how people understand the mental map of their surroundings (perhaps typified in the famous New Yorker cartoon where everything past New Jersey is just a blur).
I'm very interested in psychogeographical readings and especially in how people use landmarks to identify where they are in a landscape.
I read a book on Image of the City years ago, and the book said that Jersey City had the least clear landmarks. Citizens who lived there always felt lost because there were no clear markers.
I went there once to drive through just to see what the problem was at first-hand. When the lights turned on the main boulevard you could see perhaps a hundred green lights turn instantaneously. I loved it.
Not sure what cats are up to, or how there are cat groups like your Siamese that can't go outside at all.
to my amazement I picked up a brochure at the UN last week that listed endangered species. There is a variety of wild cat that lives in Scotland called I think the Scottish wild cat. It has only about 500 copies left.
They look just like other cats but are completely wild.
You'd think as William Barghest has said that it wouldn't be evolutionarily very brilliant for a cat to not be able to go to a new environment and remaster its surroundings.
But I thought too that perhaps that is something only for migratory animals, or animals like ourselves that have had a period in their evolutionary history where they had to migrate, or were nomadic.
If cats never had that, perhaps they never needed to develop that ability.
Is that really possible?
It does seem like a very severe limitation, but perhaps it's one that they never had to deal with in their evolutionary history. I assume that if you don't need a skill, then there is no adaptation over generations.
Why would cats require new settings?
I don't know much about cats. I think it's cute when they purr even if its sounds like bronchitis.
once when i was a kid
our cat hat furballs and my father
thought the charitable thing to do
was to take it out in t he country and let it
become food for a fox or a coyote or something
i remember the cat being sort of disoriented when it got out of the car
when it went to look around
my dad drove off
hmnh i thought
was my dad teaching me something
well about 10 days later who shows up at the house
all purring and meowing and everything it was Max our cat wanting some milk
i was ecstatic
and the thing didn't seem to have furballs in his stomach anymore
and we had that cat for a few more years
before one day
he just disappeared
cats need to be a little more respectful of human space
i've grown allergic to them
i treat them like wild animals
even when i'm visiting someone with cats my regard for them is they are completely undomesticated creatures
and i treat dogs like that too
they're all wild beast
and we happen to have them as neighbors
i walk at night and i hear the ubiquitous wooof woof wooof of the local dogs
i know one dog who shows no hatred of cats
it seems artificial
like someone took the dog out of the dog
cats are lazy suspicious and basically completely indifferent to human concerns
they do however
land on their feet
jh
Siamese cats exist because of domestication, not vice versa - All sorts of crazy things can happen relatively quickly through breeding.
Look at the pug.
And it seems more likely that the Finnish man was projecting his own fear of new surroundings onto his cat.
The housecat and the Scottish wildcat are the same species (felis silvestris). The natural range covers most of Europe and Africa, and the parts of Asia along the silk road. Housecats are believed to have largely descended from a population of wildcats in the near-east that self domesticated 10,000 years ago.
I don't know of any studies but I would suspect male cats need to leave to establish their own territory. Finding ones way seems to basic to animals that I bet the basic mental software evolved long before felis silvestris in particular became a distinct species.
I looked up "can cats be relocated" and it showed about twenty things about how to move your cat from one town to another. They all seem to recommend a quarantine, as cats don't like change. MAny said their cats would disappear after moving. And never return. Maybe they tried to get back to where they were from.
I think it's possible the Finnish man was on to something, but perhaps no one outside of Finland has figured it out. Cats are very strange, and in some ways very primitive. We should care much more about them, and work to give them the very best possible lives.
I love cats!
For some reason, I don't think I will ever respect or like dogs, although I can be diplomatic to them when they are around, and hide my animosity from their owners.
The man in finland is in fact my father in law. I didn't know if I really understood what he was saying. I just asked my wife if he could have really said this. She said, you can't move a cat. Cats have been known to be moved from one side of Finland to the other and as soon as they get the chance they go right back. You cannot move a cat, she said definitively.
This seems to be common knowledge in Finland and has the status of settled fact, at least between my wife and her dad.
Honestly, I have never heard of this before. But these two are absolutely certain about it.
Finnish cat moving must be the same thing as Korean fan death.
People believe stupid things.
Like if we give stuff to people they will magically want to earn things for themselves!
I see Ed removed his post about dropping cats from great heights.
Was this due to pressure from Kirby, or did someone contact him offline, or did he just decide to do that spontaneously?
Speaking of "landmarks"--when I first visited my wife's family in Texas (Fort Worth), I was severely alienated by the landscape. Everything so flat, with the buildings rearing up like improbable ikons on a plain. I decided that I was one of those people who "need a mountain" to back up against, to feel right in the landscape. A completely flat landscape makes me feel exposed, it's so pointless! No variation, no vantage, nowhere for water to flow.
Domestication is an interesting subject. We notice in our cats how their "wild" nature often conflicts with their "domesticated" nature--you can see them fighting one side or the other. Their play is almost exclusively "hunt!" but they're quite affectionate and loyal and sweet, within the range of their limits. Domesticated ones like Siamese--if they lose their gestalt, may become suddenly feral or "lost." We've seen this several times. They may be about 10% of the way along to total domestication. Can you imagine cats sitting at the table and eating with humans in the future? Is this possible?
It must be something Ed did. I didn't do anything about it. It seemed a weird thing for Ed to have said.
I heard an NPR program about boys on the West side of Chicago who killed dogs, setting them on fire, and making them fight. It was terrifying. The boys are now trying to reform and be nicer to their dogs, or what's left of them now.
I think they said the west side, not the south side.
Kittehs like to have their own territory. For them to know it well is for them to exercise dominion over it (as anyone who is owned by a cat will tell you).
Sure, they'd LIKE to stay in one place if given the chance. Who wouldn't? I mean, you've spent years making a place your own, and now you've got to leave it?
Bertie Wooster (a black smoke Siberian) is not allowed outside, and I can't imagine ever letting him out. It's a tough world out there for a neutered male, bred to be gorgeous :P
If it were the case that cats could not adapt, I would think that the Humane Society would probably euthanize them because they wouldn't benefit from being re-homed.
In his eight weeks of life before coming to me, Bertie Wooster had three "homes." One was under a trailer, one was inside a trailer, one was at his foster mom's house, and then mine. At no point did any of these moves seem traumatic to him. He seemed quite grateful for moving up in the world, for warmth, skritches, regular food, and his very own place to go potty.
Now he's treated like a regular little prince, and he knows it.
When his foster mom brought him over to finalize his adoption, he strolled right out of his carrier and started to play. No fuss or language, as my dad always says.
Kirby, did you know that it only takes four generations to go from Ocelot to lap kitty through cross-breeding? Its true our feline buddies are closer to wild than our canine pals. We just haven't been breeding them purposefully for as long. "They live in our homes with their wildness still upon them," someone once said.
I think that's pretty much true.
Cats need about as much special care and attention as a toddler might during a move. The cat might need to be confined to a room away from all the hustle and bustle until the house is settled. That isn't unreasonable.
Brett's argument is clever. It would mean that the man had used the cat to cover the fact that HE didn't want to move.
It has taken me months to realize this.
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