Saturday, January 13, 2024

Signs that I am stressed - the tongue flick


 When I am stressed, I lick my nose - a quick flick of the tongue upwards. This is another example of our body language that humans cannot seem notice. They are very unobservant.

It's not the licking of lips, when I am finishing up a meal. When I lick my lips after a meal, I do several licks in succession or my tongue goes right round my mouth into the sides of the mouth to pick up any food fragments that have been left behind.

This kind of mouth licking takes much longer and is more thorough. The stress tongue flick is a single flicking move and quick. So quick that humans usually miss it. So quick that it only takes about two seconds or even less.

If you have a really good human pet, they will learn about the quick tongue flick. They will begin to notice it. And they will be on the way to understanding  you.

3 comments:

  1. I guess I need to be more aware of my cats. I have not noticed the flick.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I doubt that anybody in my house knows this! Ugh! How do I make my humans aware?

    ReplyDelete
  3. OK, George! I'm not stress but can I …pretend? Only to get the extra attention and a few more treats? What you think?

    ReplyDelete

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