Exploring our Cat’s Comprehension

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Ever wake up in the middle of the night to your cat performing a version of Cirque de Soleil, usually directly above your head? Or maybe the opposite, you awake to your cat sitting on your chest, staring intently into your snoozing face, deep in kitty thoughts (of revenge). What in the H E double hockey sticks are these cats thinking? Let’s delve into cat comprehension.

Did curiosity actually kill the cat?

According to Webster, intelligence is the ability to acquire information, retain it, and utilize it to solve problems. Like humans, cats research their surroundings. Put a cat in a new place and every nook, cranny, and water glass will be studied. Science has shown that not only does a cat investigate new territory, cats have the ability to retain this knowledge. They retain information and often life-saving environmental details so curiosity didn’t kill the cat, it gave them the notoriety of having nine lives.

The Midnight Marauder

Best day – you bring a cat home. Second-best day – you’ve gotten an uninterrupted night’s sleep with the cat in the house. Cats are nocturnal by nature and these lions of our living room still have those instincts deeply engrained in their primal brains. The spurt of wild energy that many cats get in the middle of the night, dubbed “midnight crazies,” or as we call it at my house “the kitty rave,” is their primal brains telling them that IT’S GO TIME. They often hunt their toys, or other objects, and rubber hair bands are often high on the list of household prey. Thankfully there are ways to curb this behavior. Tired dog = happy, well-rested, human, and the same concept can hold true getting your cat to chill out at night. Interactive toys, feather wands, hide and seek with treats are all great ways to get your cat’s brain and body tired. If you answer their meows and zooms by giving them food to get them to leave you alone, their hunting game is working, with rewards! To repeat this behavior night after night… who’s a smart kitty?

I snooze, the cat stares

Cats think three dimensionally, but they think in different dimensions than we do! When cats hear a noise, they can precisely locate it, while we can locate the direction the noise is coming from. Cat brains are wired to pick up on wavelengths and patterns that prey or humans generate. When you wake up with your cat sitting on your chest staring, the cat is “mapping” its territory. Its intent stare while listening to your sounds and breathing patterns, give the cat a heightened sense of other changes in its environment (your bedroom). They’re not actually plotting revenge against you for not allowing them to lick your ice cream bowl. They’re keeping watch over you and themselves in case of a drastic and scary change in your environment.

The Nip Head
We’ve all seen it… drooling, rolling around meowing to the beat of reggae music (wait what music?), widened pupils as if the colors your cat is seeing are just. so. colorful. That tell-all tail twitch and erratic zoomie behavior. Your cat SMELLED catnip! When catnip enters a cat’s body through its nostrils, cats exude behaviors common to females in heat. These effects last for about 10 minutes and the guilty Nip Head is temporarily immune to catnip’s effects for the next 30 minutes. Pulled from The Cat Guide’s 2017 online article, “Cats and Catnip,” by Sean Green, “When a cat smells catnip, Nepetalactone, one of catnip’s volatile oils, enters the cat’s nasal tissue, where it is believed to bind to protein receptors that stimulate sensory neurons. Then, these cells will provoke a reaction in neurons in the cat’s olfactory bulb, which project to the amygdala and other regions of the brain. These cells also stimulate response from the brain’s hypothalamus, which helps in regulating feelings such as emotions and hunger. The amygdala then combines the flow of information from the olfactory bulb cells and sends it to the brain regions governing the cat’s behavior responses. On the other hand, the hypothalamus regulates neuroendocrine responses of the cat’s brain and body via the pituitary gland – thus creating what it seems to be a “sexual response” in cats.” In laymen’s term’s or as your cat thinks the “lame human’s terms,” your cat is blissfully turned on! If your cat decides to nibble on the nip instead of smelling it, you’ll get more of a Bob Marley effect. Eating catnip puts your cat in a more mellow irie state (mon).

Thanks for traveling the cat’s brain with us. We’re all safe for now, knowing that they’re not plotting against us every night… Or are they?!

 

Inside the Canine Cranium

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Here at the PAWS office, we have dogs on the brain. In order for humans to excel at being dog parents we need to understand how our dog’s brains operate. Let’s explore the canine cranium!

First question, do dogs think? Dr. Jill Sackman, a clinician in behavioral medicine and senior medical director of BluePearl Veterinary Partners’ Michigan hospitals says, “Absolutely.” Dog cognition is similar to a three-year-old human, so there is some accuracy to the infamous bumper sticker, my dog is smarter than your honor student, as long as that honor student is in preschool.

Got a pup that likes to give you the cold shoulder? Do you ever wonder, does my dog even like me? Animal Cognition scientists at Emory University trained dogs to be still in an MRI machine and they measured a dog’s neural responses to different types of smells. Dogs navigate through their noses and the way they process smell offers insight into behavior. First of all, who’s a good boy!? Many of our dogs won’t stay still for more than a minute. Secondly, what did they find out? The scientists discovered that a dog owner’s scent actually sparked the most activation in the “reward center” of dog brains. Of all the smells to take in, dogs prioritized the smell of their humans over anything or anyone else. Fido prefers L’eau de YOU the most!

A Mutt’s Memory Lane
Fact, dogs do remember. Dogs who have gone through obedience training know and remember commands and hand signals. Dogs remember friend’s houses and routines. Do you always give your dog a treat after a walk? You’ll see that when you return home they’ll sit and wait for what comes next. But do dogs store memories in their brain like humans do? The short answer is no. Dogs have an associative memory which means dogs remember people, places, and experiences based on associations they have with them. They remember that you putting on shoes means WALK! But they won’t remember what the weather was like last time they walked. Have a pup that gets uneasy and scared in the waiting room at the vet? If they’ve had a negative experience, they won’t be able to remember what scared them, but they will associate the waiting room with fear.
Ever notice that your dog’s reaction to seeing you after being gone for an hour is similar to when you’ve been gone for a week? Dogs do remember people. But research shows that they don’t remember the last time they saw a particular person – they forget events within two minutes.

The Emotional Hound
Dogs are sensitive creatures, some more than others, just like people. A 2017 article in Psychology Today, says there is solid evidence from brain imaging studies that shows areas of dogs’ brains light up when they feel emotions that parallel those of humans. This means your pup feels similarly to how you feel when experiencing different emotions. While dogs have the same hormones and undergo the same chemical changes as humans when experiencing emotions, their range of emotions is different than ours. Because researchers have decided that a dog’s mind is roughly equivalent to that of a 3-year-old human, this decision holds true for mental abilities, including emotion. Like a toddler, dogs will have fewer kinds of emotions than an adult human. This chart shows a dog’s emotional range based on the human age emotions appear:

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/201303/which-emotions-do-dogs-actually-experience

You may think that your dog is exhibiting shame when you put him in a silly costume, but actually its disgust. Sorry Pooch!

 

We hope you learned a little something about our tail wagger’s inner workings! We’ll be back in touch with a breakdown of the feline intellect soon.