Comments on Existence is Wonderful: Cat Cognition Capers: Knocking Stuff Over Edition

I just signed up to your blogs rss feed. Will you ...

2010-10-22T22:20:16.611-07:00

I just signed up to your blogs rss feed. Will you post more on this subject?

fledchen: My friend has a Quaker parrot (
2010-10-08T20:56:24.101-07:00
fledchen: My friend has a Quaker parrot (here is the photo of the parrot) who also has this fascination with dropping objects. She has a huge collection of balls that she will fling around and then drop them off the top of her cage. I wonder if it's a general parrot thing, or whether it's because she's lived with budgies for a long time (she speaks budgie-speak more than she speaks Quaker-speak a lot of the time, so we assume she's had at least one good budgie friend in the past, unfortunately we don't know her past because she was abused and neglected and then confiscated from someone's house and then smuggled out of the state by a rescue group so they wouldn't kill her, and so on, so there's a lot of missing links).

oops, that was for the 2nd one

2010-09-17T14:19:22.294-07:00

oops, that was for the 2nd one

Looks to me like their curiosity was initially spa...

2010-09-17T10:01:21.800-07:00

Looks to me like their curiosity was initially sparked by the novel sound of rattling in the bottle, and you also. But then it was firmly reinforced with the smell of the food that was present in the room (and on the bottle) at the same time everything else was happening. A neat observation was made by 'justsomeguy' in a previous entry regarding the effect of the sense of smell on a mind (being that it is most memorable of all senses, or something like that, but anyway let's say it's so for the sake of discussion). And in being more memorable, it stands to reason that their attention was effectively captured by the smell, regardless of how their curiousity was aroused. At this point, all sorts of neat stuff was happening in their minds on all levels of consciousness. For instance, as they were processing what was with the bottle, they were also looking at you, yawning (as if they weren't), and communicating subtly amongst themselves. Here's a cool site with relevant trivia: http://largestfastestsmartest.com/animalswithbestsmell.html

A couple of years ago I watched a crow with a disc...

2010-09-11T01:01:05.569-07:00

A couple of years ago I watched a crow with a discarded crisp (chip) packet. First he tried to stick his head in it but it wouldn't open; then he picked it up in his beak at the sealed end and shook it. He at once ate all the crumbs that fell out, then walked back and forth across its surface as it lay flat on the ground and picked it up (without hesitation by the sealed end) and shook it again, apparently to good effect as he pecked around on the ground some more before flying off.

Oh, yes, I did mean Brodie. Sorry! I think you...

2010-09-10T18:50:28.883-07:00

Oh, yes, I did mean Brodie. Sorry!

I think you're probably right about Brodie experimenting, trying out different things. Our cat Dakota figured out how to open her cage at the shelter and how to open the attic door in our house. She seems quite attuned to the details of how things work, and clearly (to me, anyway) understands cause and effect.

She's also extremely attuned to human expression and emotion, far more than any other cat I've ever met. She walks quite comfortably into any room except my loft, which she seems to understand is my "private space," and she'll stand at the doorway meowing until I invite her in. I've never shooed her out, so how she knows that my loft is different from other space in the house is intriguing to me. I'm not sure there's an experiment that would answer that. :-)

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg: I presume you mean...

2010-09-10T18:31:06.790-07:00

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg: I presume you meant Brodie when you wrote Budgie? (I don't have any cats named Budgie, but I can see how you might have been thrown off by the comments Fledchen and I made prior to yours, in which we referred to budgies in the avian sense).

That aside, you've made some intriguing observations. Generally speaking, Brodie is a lot more cautious and detail-oriented than Shadow is. Shadow prefers to wield his will like a blunt instrument. :P You seem to have picked up on that just from these videos, which is very cool.

I doubt Brodie was worried about getting in trouble, though, as I don't yell at the cats or scold them when they knock things down (my home is pretty well cat-proofed, so there's not much for them to knock over that would actually lead to problems if they did). More likely he was just "experimenting", in the sense of testing out how close he could push the bottle to the edge of the desk without it falling. Or something along those lines.

As for the third video...I suppose it's possible that the cats were wondering what I wanted them to do, but I would guess it more probable that they were wondering if I was going to do something interesting or entertaining on their behalf. (I often do things like set up boxes or arrangements of toys for them to figure out and play with, and they usually stare at me when I'm doing that!)

I was very interested in the fact that in the seco...

2010-09-10T15:22:08.045-07:00

I was very interested in the fact that in the second video, Budgie moved the container from the edge of desk and back, but never actually pushed it over the edge. Then Shadow came over and made gravity work. As I was watching, I kept feeling that some kind of communication was going on between Budgie and Shadow, as though Budgie were kind of toying with the idea of pushing the container off the desk, and Shadow got impatient and finished the job. I wondered whether Budgie had somewhere gotten the message that humans don't like things getting knocked off desks, and decided not to push the limits, while Shadow either never got the message or just doesn't care, and decided to just go for the treats. Sometimes human siblings pick off this kind of social/psychic territory: I was the cooperative child, while my younger brother was the boundary pusher. I wonder whether the same kind of thing happens to domesticated animals.

In the third video, I also got the feeling that the cats were looking at you and wondering "What does she want from us now?" I don't know how you'd prove whether the cats knew they were subjects of an experiment, or how to account for the impact of that consciousness on their actions, but it's an interesting question to me.

Fledchen: Oh, interesting! I've never l...

2010-09-10T10:05:29.935-07:00

Fledchen: Oh, interesting! I've never lived with birds in the house but I've definitely seen some very intriguing avian antics going on in the yard, etc. I didn't know about budgerigars throwing things off shelves but that is kind of awesome. :D

You wrote: It saddens me that so many of the behavioral traits that I treasure in my avian companions get labeled "problem behaviors" simply because they are inconvenient for many modern humans.

Oh yeah, that is a big peeve of mine as well (whether we're talking about birds or cats or even atypical humans). Some people seem to be saying on the one hand that a given animal "doesn't really do anything interesting" but on the other hand, all kinds of things the animal IS doing are written off as merely "problems".

And while yeah, sometimes certain actions are problematic enough for the human to merit some kind of solution, I think that whenever any of us chooses to share a home with a member of another species, we need to make room for them to BE a member of that species. Which might mean (in the case of budgies) avoiding putting breakable throwable objects within reach of the birds, and in the case of cats, not storing fine china on shelves they can physically access. And so on.

I'm not a cat person, but I have had the pleas...

2010-09-09T15:12:28.144-07:00

I'm not a cat person, but I have had the pleasure of sharing my life with birds (6 budgerigars and 2 zebra finches) over the past 20 years. It saddens me that so many of the behavioral traits that I treasure in my avian companions get labeled "problem behaviors" simply because they are inconvenient for many modern humans. For example, budgies love flinging objects off of tables, shelves, etc. In some cases this seems to be for the pure joy of manipulating large objects with their beaks. Sometimes it appears to be curiosity/foraging behavior. Other times it's an invitation to play Parrot Fetch (bird flings object, human retrieves, repeat until one or both parties get bored).

Yeah, I like your theory that this is probably a m...

2010-09-06T14:03:43.839-07:00

Yeah, I like your theory that this is probably a more general predilection to fucke with shitte and see what happens. Here is the post:

http://physioprof.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/more-wackaloon-fucking-cat-foibles/

CPP: Hmm, I'd be curious to read the sp...

2010-09-06T13:39:17.454-07:00

CPP: Hmm, I'd be curious to read the speculations in response to your post, if it still exists. I'll see if I can find it. The "knocking eggs out of nests" thing makes sense, but personally my "theory" is that cats have evolved with a kind of generalized predilection for experimenting with physical objects.

One of my favorite examples of this sort of thing can be seen in this video of a cat repeatedly flushing a toilet. I'm interpreting again here but it looks to me like the cat has figured out a really interesting cause-and-effect relationship and is repeating the flushing because it's just so danged fascinating to see the water swirl around. And it's also important to remember that cats are opportunistic predators, meaning it makes heaps of sense for them to experiment with parts of their environment from multiple angles.

Very interesting. I once posted the question on my...

2010-09-06T12:03:44.252-07:00

Very interesting. I once posted the question on my blog, Why do cats love to knock little objects off of big objects? There were a lot of speculations, but the one that makes the most sense to me is that this represents knocking bird eggs out of nests to break on the ground so the inside can be eaten.