Friday, August 22, 2025

Relaxed sleep or terrified pretend sleep - educating humans.

 




Humans cannot read our body language, so they often fail to recognise when we are fully relaxed. True relaxation shows in the way our bodies look when we are truly sleeping (without even one eye open). 

If we are warm, we sleep stretched out - limb relaxed (not ready for action), belly visible, head on the carpet. The body is lying to one side. 

Or, if it is cold, we are likely to find a place where we can sleep curled up.

This looks different but is much the same. The legs are still relaxed (not ready for action) only this time they are closer together and the tail is wrapped round them to keep body warmth in.

The head is still limp - in the second video it is resting on the paw and the side of the cat tree.

The video below shows a stressed out cat pretending to sleep. Her legs are tucked under the body ready for her to spring into action and run away. Her eyes occasionally squint open a little bit. Her back is arched and her head is not limp. 

This is a very frightened cat. Would your human recognise this pretend sleep?



 

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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