Monday, July 28, 2025

Licking, more like wiping my lips... what does it mean. Educating humans.

We wipe our lips carefully when we are eating or when we have finished eating. Our tongue comes out and travels round the edge of the mouth.

This is a functional movement of the tongue rather than an expressive signal. We do this so as not to waste food. The tongue curls so that any food fragments are carefully put back in the mouth to be eaten.

So what does this signal to our dumb friends, the humans? It means either that I like the food and want to make sure I get it all, down to the last crumb or smear. Or it means I was so hungry I didn't want to waste any, even of food that I was less keen on.

If humans look carefully at us, the fact that there is food being eating should make them able to distinguish between this kind of lip wiping and the swifter tongue flick, which expresses stress.


This video is also on Celia's Youtube channel in the playlist of cat signals - what is my cat saying?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxC12BbRB54&list=PLnwXtI1uuo884ABEOTorPYZNnIeTh04pV&index=26 

 

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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