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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3220 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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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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