The meaning of rolling

Rolling is what we do when we are happy and relaxed. So humans think. And that's where they are wrong. Rolling has different meanings.

This kind of roll, done by my friend Boomer, is just a happy relaxed roll in front of his human. It means something like "Look at me! I'm your friend."  It does not mean "Tickle my tummy."

If an ignorant human thinks its safe to tickle Boomer's tummy, he will soon be put right. Because rolling then raking with his painful claws is also what Boomer does to toy mice - as a kind of play-with-prey game. Human beware!

Rolling, or rather lying on the side of the body, is also something cats do in a play fight - or in a real fight.  So itl's not straight-forward. 

A roll might also be a roll in the dust to thicken the coat or change our smell. It might be a sort of floppy roll to expose our tummy to the sun.

Humans need to attend very carefully to what we do, how we do it, whether we look relaxed, playful or even fearful. They need to consider the context not just one single action.

So a roll is either relaxation with attention-seeking, a play-with-prey (human fingers too) move, a move in a play fight, a defensive move in a real fight, or just a chance to roll in the dust or in the sunlight.

Humans, don't make assumptions.

 

Are humans learning to talk?

Humans depend upon us cats for affection and we depend upon them for food and warmth. How can we encourage and reward their efforts to win our love?

The photo shows one very easy reward for a human - the slow blink. 

First do a few little half blinks to catch your human's attention, then do a long slow blink. This will be recognised as a sign of affection by any savvy human. 

Indeed some humans are beginning to do a slow blink, themselves. A few of these noisy chattering human pets are learning to "talk cat." They call them selves "feline researchers."

They started to slow blink cats and see what happened. Naturally the cats concerned were thrilled by finding humans who were trying to talk our language. So they walked towards them to find out more.

The humans concluded that the slow blink might be a "positive emotional communication between cats and humans."

We concluded that these dumb (though noisy) humans were at last beginning the first slow steps towards learning to talk. When will they learn to purr?

* Google "The role of cat eye narrowing movements in cat–human communication"

We need choice

An essential for a happy feline life is choice... something which humans so often deny us.

Each morning I ask myself - shall I use the catflap or would I prefer my human to open the garden door for me?

Shall I use the human bed upstairs or shall I use the sofa? Or perhaps the cardboard box on the kitchen table? Or even the box that my human put for me on the top of the cupboard, after I used to spend time there without a bed?

Do I want a bed? Or shall I just lie flat out with my legs apart in a patch of sunlight in the living room? Or sit on my special cat lounge looking out into the garden.

Choice, you see. Make your human give you multiple beds and multiple resting places.

You know it makes feline sense.

Kittens with short lives

 

Feral cats and cats that have lost their home live miserably short lives. Kittens often die before the first winter, females are exhausted and half starved by constant kitten bearing, and males roam around looking for sex, risking their lives on the roads and picking up fatal infections. 

How different from our own lives as pampered pets. Regular meals, Warm beds. Central heating. And human servants. 

As cats we can't do anything much, as it is against our nature to share or give away our food (unless we have had our own kittens). Most of us do not want to share our homes with another cat. We prefer our humans to be totally devoted to us.

So it's up to humans to help. Out there are dedicated cat trappers who will help feral kittens find new homes, trap and rehome stray pets, and trap, neuter and return ferals.

My personal favourite is Sunshine Cat Rescue, a small devoted rescue in the UK. If your human knows a good one, purr in their ear till they send some money. 

Help kittens survive.

How I got my tabby markings

 

Striped tabbies have the ancestral tabby pattern

Spots, stripes or blotches, we tabbies have beautiful coat markings. I am a silver tabby but tabby markings can be found in beige or brown coated cats and a few gingers too. It's the background colour that varies.

Now some human geneticists have been studying just how it happens... in order to find out how the leopard got its spots. (Did you spot the Kipling reference there?)

First they found a gene they called Taqpep. Depending on how this gene worked, a tabby was striped or blotched and (guess what) cheetahs were just large tabbies when it came to coat colourings.

Then they investigated further and found that tabby markings happen very early before birth. The skin surrounding the feline fetus starts growing thicker or thinner. This is even before there are any melanocytes, the cells which are responsible for different colours.

Then slowly the hair folicules develop and with them the colouring, the melanin. Some folicules have dark melanin called pheomelanin and some have light melanin called eumelanin.

This coincides with the tabby patterning. The eumelanin defines the background colour to the stripes, blotches or spots.

They then looked back even further into the earliest days of the embryo and found  the patterning could be recognised at an even earlier stage. The Taqpep gene influenced the pattern of how a protein coding gene Dkk4 was expressed.

With me? Difficult if you are not a geneticist.

Their conclusion was that it was a reaction-diffusion model, a sort of genetic game whereby a colouring gene was inhibited or  expressed.

And all this led back to a very clever human Alan Turing who in the l950s suggested this particular kind of gene expression.

As for me, I don't understand all of this but what I do know is that tabbies are the most beautiful of all cats, whether they are pussycats like me or big fierce cats like tigers.

PS. Want to know more? Put Developmental genetics of color pattern establishment in cats into Google Scholar!