Saturday, September 05, 2020

Stand up for rescue cats - feigned sleep stress

This cat is not asleep. Rescue cats that pretend to sleep like this one are highly stressed. But humans often do not recognise this. They describe the cat as "quiet" or "shy."

If you look carefully at this video you will see that the cat has its ears lowered, a sign of fear. Its back is humped not relaxed. And it turns its head away from the human videoing it - another sign of fear. It also blinks rapidly.

Feigned sleep is found in rescue catteries and among wild animals in zoos. Humans do not recognise it. It is a sign of chronic stress and unhappiness.

This cat needs help. It needs a box to hide in and if it has one it will be more likely to come out and look around, knowing that it can retreat if need be. No rescue cat should be without a privacy area.

If a privacy area doesn't help enough, then it needs fostering in a home.

Stand up for rescue cats. Pass this information on.

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Help for cats whose humans show behaviour problems.

This blog is devoted to the study of human behaviour. We cats, who live with this sometimes unpredictable and always feeble minded species, can benefit from seeing their behaviour in its proper scientific context. The study of feline dilemmas, training problems, and difficulties with humans, can only benefit all of us. All of us train our humans - to buy the right food, for instance, but many of us do not have knowledge of how to improve our training methods. The human species is obviously not as intelligent as the cat, but nevertheless can learn quite a lot - if properly managed. Topics of interest include the use of claw and order, purring as a human reward, rubbing your human up the right way, when to bite, spraying as a method of making our wishes known, ignoring the human, human harassment, human inattention and sheer human stupidity. I welcome your questions. Photos can be sent via my secretary's website, www.celiahaddon.com This blog has been chosen as one of the top 50 feline blogs by Online VetTechprogramms.org