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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3181 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 8, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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We took our kid to the cat theatre today. A bit of fun to start the holiday season: it's basically a play for children with various circus-style tricks performed by cats. Its original founder, the father of the current manager, was never coy about his role: "I can't teach a cat to perform tricks, no one can, I can only take a hundred cats and find out which ones are naturally inclined to perform which tricks".

So that's how the performance goes: this cat is great at climbing poles, that cat is good at walking along them, the third one doesn't mind walking on top of a large ball, the fourth one loves to jump, et cetera. But the big problem for a viewer prone to overanalyzing everything lies not in the cats or the humans. The show uses a couple of white poodles for certain tasks that are too big for the cats and it's like watching ChatGPT being used to check someone's spelling.

The complexity of dog tricks is kept in line with the cat tricks to not detract from the latter and you can't help but feel untapped potential. No, you can't get a dog to perform every trick a cat can, but when you see a dog push a cart it does it with eagerness and purposefulness that suggest this is what you could've had instead, whereas you see the cat's final and only form on stage.

Is there a deeper meaning to this, a lesson for us all? No idea, but if you ever find yourself with children in Moscow, go see the cat theatre.

Cats are definitely trainable, but dogs are so optimized for trainability they make cats seem untrainable by comparison. I think the biggest difference is that dogs are good at processing human social cues - voice, facial expression, and gestures. But cats are looking for cat social cues. This is why the cat always climbs into the lap of the party guest who hates cats. For a cat, avoiding eye contact and turning your back to them is a sign of friendliness; you're saying "I'm not threatened by you and I'm not a threat to you." To relate to a cat you have to think and act like a cat, but to relate to a dog you can think and act like human.

This might be an old wives' tale, but I heard that if you point at something, a dog will look where you're pointing. A cat will look at your finger.

My cats are about 50/50 with looking at my finger or what I'm pointing at, which isn't that much worse than my dog, so I'm not sure that's completely true.

Which is why, as a cat owner, this moment in X-Men 2 is hilarious because it's true.

This absolutely matches my experience, having gotten a couple cats about a month ago. I've been training one to follow my finger, but it really is following my finger, not where my finger is pointing, and so I have to actually physically place my finger at the platform or whatever I want him to go to; if my finger is hovering a few feet away from the platform, then it's well less than 50/50 that he'll go to the platform. Whereas the dogs I've encountered in my life seemed to just intuitively understand to look at the direction I was pointing at.

Completely true. Most animals, even monkeys, have a hard time understanding pointing because it requires a pretty sophisticated theory of mind. Dogs are one of the few species that can consistently understand pointing.

This is true for a comparison between dogs and wolves. Much of the evolutionary and behavioral divergence has been them evolving to understand us, and others, such as developing more visible eyebrows and moving them, to help us understand them.

I theorize that the human neurology optimized for understanding canine faces is what causes humans to become furries. I know that, as a kid with Asperger's, my family's dogs were my best friends.

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