While allogrooming — animals socially grooming each other — is a sign of community, alliance and social bonds in other species, apparently cats have found a way to weaponize it.
By analyzing footage of cats grooming each other, the Belgian team confirmed cats groom the way other animals do, signaling closeness, trust and all that good stuff…most of the time.
But they also use it to seriously piss each other off, usually to take possession of territory they covet.
“I saw these weird grooming patterns in my own cats where I thought, ‘This is not super friendly at all,’” Morgane Van Belle, a cat behaviorist and co-author of the new study, told the New York Times. “Sometimes one cat would lay on the blanket near the window and the other cat would come up and start licking it — but in an annoying way.”
Credit: Francesco Ungaro/Pexels
The aggressor cat is hoping the other feline will get so annoyed with the invasive grooming that they’ll abandon their prize spot, whether it’s a sun puddle or a particularly comfortable spot on the couch.
The study’s authors believe there’s more to learn about this behavior, and understanding it can help people mitigate conflict among their feline overlords.
For readers who have multiple cats, have you witnessed this behavior?
For what it’s worth, allogrooming between cats and humans is a thing too. For example, I brush the Budster, and he grooms my hair when I’m in bed.
Some people find that gross, but I try to take it was the compliment it is. Thankfully I have not been subject to weaponized hair grooming, but I’ve seen examples of the behavior the Belgian researchers have identified, and once you realize what you’re looking at, it makes perfect sense. Taking a normal behavior and turning it into an instrument of annoyance is also a very feline thing to do.
Cats show great ingenuity, so we’re fortunate they’re extremely lazy. If sufficiently motivated, they could undoubtedly rule the world.
Kittens remind us what it feels like to experience pure joy in discovering the world.
July 10 is National Kitten Day, and what better way to inspire people to adopt and help relieve pressure on shelters than by showing photos of kitten Bud to prove how cute these little guys can be?
Even as a kitten, Buddy was dashingly handsome and had huge muscles! Top image: My mom holds Bud and my niece, who were both babies at the time.
Hiding in my sneakers. Jumping on my head and biting my feet while I’m trying to sleep. Zooms at every ungodly hour imaginable. Boxing his own reflection in the mirror. Inexplicably destroying large objects around the house despite his tiny size and weight. “Fighting” enemies on the screen while I’m trying to play video games. Being obsessed with nursing from my right earlobe.
Those are just some of Bud’s charming behaviors from kittenhood. I miss those days of curiosity, extreme playfulness and adventure.
While I would like to adopt an overlooked adult cat in the future because it’s much more difficult for them to find homes, I would not trade my experience with Kitten Bud for anything.
Perhaps best of all is seeing the pure joy and wonder expressed by a kitten who plays in snow for the first time, discovers the fun of playing with guitar strings or figures out how much fun it is to startle his human by sneaking up ninja-like and giving him a horror movie jump scare.
Everything is new and exciting to a kitten, and it’s an amazing thing to see and participate in. Kitten energy is happy energy.
My first real camping trip ended in disaster, though thankfully without any injury besides wounded pride, after an encounter with a ravenous bear.
The bear was outside my tent.
Its moans cut through the night above the cricket song and I could see its distorted shadow cast against the fabric by the dying fire as it circled our camp.
Something ripped — the canvas of one of our packs, I later learned when daylight revealed the carnage outside — and there was a loud crunch of ursine teeth against plastic packaging and the styrofoam of an egg container.
Then my friend Larry did what he’d been doing all night: he raised a ruckus by banging pots and pans, scaring the 500-pound animal away. Temporarily.
The bear’s breathy vocalizations faded into the distance. After a few minutes I breathed a sigh of relief. I had to pee so badly, worse than I’d ever had to go in my life, but there was no way in hell I was stepping out of my tent. Then I heard the air horn from the campsite a mile or two away.
The bear was making its circuit again. I was still too scared to leave my tent.
An adult male American black bear, the species I encountered in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
How we blundered into a bear
Larry was a family friend and outdoorsman. Since my brother and I were kids of a single mom it had become something of a tradition for Larry to take us and others on annual camping trips every summer. Without Larry, who was the closest thing to a father I’ve had, we would have never known what it was like to tell scary stories by a fire, hook a fish from a river or navigate rapids while whitewater rafting.
That year we headed upstate to the Adirondacks with the aim of climbing Mount Marcy, the highest peak in New York.
Most people think of New York City when they think of our state, and the city and its environs were what I was familiar with. But New York is a big state and once you get north of the suburbs it’s almost entirely rural. If randomly blindfolded and dropped in the middle of the Adirondack mountains, few people would guess they were in New York.
We arrived at the ranger station, registered our destination and set off. Why we didn’t know about the bear I cannot say, but we found out later he was notorious. The rangers were well aware of him, and he was the reason why, after hiking for some 15 miles to Marcy Dam, we saw dozens of packs hanging from the dam itself, fastened to the metal safety railings.
That was our second opportunity to learn about the bear, but when we saw the packs we just shrugged and made our way further in to find a good spot for camp.
After the day-long hike we hurried to set up our tents and got a fire going before sundown, then made dinner. When you’re camping — real camping, not the drive-up KOA camping that’s really an excuse to get drunk with your buddies — you do two things to keep critters out of your camp: you hang your packs from a tree with a sturdy branch, and you dump any leftovers several hundred feet away.
So when my brother and my friend Richie went to go dump the leftover mac and cheese, they came back white-faced.
“Larry! Larry!” they shouted. “There’s a bear!”
Larry shook his head.
“You didn’t see a bear,” he said, laughing.
“But we did!”
Larry didn’t believe them, and I didn’t either. Until I was ripped out of sleep by the sound of a prime specimen of ursus americanus tearing through our camp, helping himself to our food.
Black bears aren’t aggressive in the same way their ursine brethren can be, but they can still be exceptionally dangerous. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
I cannot tell you how many times the bear came back that night, or how many return trips it took him to consume every last morsel of food we brought with us.
What I can say for certain is that he spent the majority of the night making a loop between our camp and two others, including the camp with the air horn.
I was already a bit freaked out even before the bear invited himself into our camp. I had never been in true wilderness before. I never knew night could be so dark, nor had I ever been to a place where there wasn’t even a hint of the ambient glow of a city on the horizon.
I tried to convince myself that the thin fabric of my tent somehow afforded protection the same way a child terrified of ghosts or monsters convinces himself his blanket can shield him from the supernatural. Every kid knows the monsters can’t get you if you’re under your blanket.
By the time the bear came around for the second time that night, I had to piss like a racehorse. I toyed with the idea of slipping out ninja-like for a stealth draining, but who was I kidding? I was too terrified to move.
I thought of urinating every few seconds. I dreamed about it. In the video game The Legend of Zelda, which I played a lot as a kid, there are hidden lakes on the map where fairies restore your health. Your character, Link, says “Ah! Refreshing!” as you’re healed.
I dreamed I was Link stepping to the edge of a lake, where a fairy kindly invited me to urinate.
“Ah!” I said as I emptied my bladder. “Refreshing!”
For a few glorious moments, it was real. It was so good.
Then I woke up and I was back in the tent with a full bladder and the bear outside, tearing his way through our gear in search of every last bag of peanuts and stick of beef jerky.
“Ah! Refreshing!”
I know what you’re thinking because I thought it too. I reached a hand down just to be sure. I was dry. In a way I wished I had peed myself. At least it would be over.
Larry was banging the pots and pans again, and a few minutes later the familiar air horn cut through the night, giving us a temporary reprieve. The bear was someone else’s problem for the next 20 or 30 minutes as he made his rounds to raid the other campsites.
The post apocalypse
The long night finally relented. Birds began tweeting, the sun came over the horizon, and our ordeal was over.
I poked my head out of the tent, then ran to the nearest tree and recreated Niagara Falls in miniature for what felt like an eternity. Sweet relief!
Then I noticed the carnage.
It was actually even more of a mess than this!
Every pack we’d left hanging from a nearby tree had been shredded. The torn fabric and zipper remnants swayed in the breeze, still attached to the ropes around the tree branch. Potato chip bags had been popped with bear teeth and crunched along with their contents, then spat back out. The ground was strewn with egg shells, and all that was left of the bacon was half a plastic wrapper.
The entire area was dusted with powdered milk. Remnants of graham crackers, chocolate and marshmallows were scattered in the dirt. In a horrifying display of casual strength, the bear had split a Coleman cooler in half to get at the raw hot dogs and hamburgers inside . There were the barely recognizable remnants of a box of Lucky Charms. And one pack was left intact except for the smallest zipper pouch, which had been clawed open for the handful of granola bars inside.
I stared at it, amazed that an animal could smell food in sealed plastic wrappers inside a canvas rucksack.
We broke camp quickly because we had to go back to civilization. There was no other option: we had no food left.
When we returned to the ranger station, Larry spoke to one of the rangers, who said the other campers were hanging their packs from the dam because the notorious bear had learned how to cut down packs hanging from trees. Just like it did to our gear. Then he reminded Larry why it’s a good idea to have those conversations before you venture into the woods.
It was the most terrifying night of my life, but as an adult I just shake my head and smile whenever I think about it. And all these years later, when I wake up in the middle of the night and stumble to the bathroom, Bud in tow, I still shake off the last drops, sigh, and whisper “Ah, refreshing!”
Note:Every damn word of this is true, or at least as accurate as it can be when experienced through the eyes of a 10-year-old and recalled all these years later. It eventually occurred to me that Larry must have been terrified, if not for himself, then for the fact that he had someone else’s kids with him. I know I’d be crapping bricks if I’d taken my brother’s kids camping and an unreasonably clever bear wouldn’t leave us alone. I told this story to my nieces one night, and instead of having a bit of sympathy, they think it’s absolutely hilarious that their dad and uncle were terrorized by a black bear during a camping trip. Their favorite part is my dream of being Link from The Legend of Zelda and joyfully peeing into a lake. Apparently my misfortunes are rich comedic material for them.
We’ve now officially joined our European friends in deep summer, with an oppressive heat dome settling over the central and eastern US ahead of the July 4 weekend:
My extended family’s July 4 cookout is starting to look more like it’ll be a cook-in, pool or no pool. I think I’ll sit inside and watch baseball, thank you very much!
On behalf of Bud and myself, I hope everyone is taking it easy and staying indoors as much as possible.
For our friends in the New York area, you already know what the deal is: sticky, soupy heat from the high humidity that is the trademark of our summers.
Of course our furry friends have it even worse in this weather. Imagine having a jacket you cannot remove in humid 100 degree heat! Even Bud, a domestic shorthair, has modified his sleeping habits, snoozing next to my head with a paw on my hand instead of draping himself over me like he usually does.
Here’s to hoping everyone stays safe, hydrated and lazy this holiday weekend!
Buddy the Brave covered himself in glory by not being afraid of the fireworks.
The park across from Casa de Buddy is the site of our town’s annual fireworks display and I was a bit apprehensive about the Budster’s reaction this year.
The fireworks are so close that you can both hear and feel their percussive booms inside, but Bud’s been hearing them every year since kittenhood. The first few years I stayed inside with him to make sure he was okay, and to let him see how relaxed I was.
It’s never been a problem.
However, we are talking about a cat who sometimes freaks out at the rustling of a paper bag, and over the past year or two he’s become a little more sensitive. I attribute that to old age.
The fireworks here are no joke:
I gave Bud some grinded-up catnip, knowing that it calms him because he eats the stuff instead of just sniffing and rolling in it like civilized cats do. Then I waited until the explosions began, saw no visible reaction from Bud, and went outside to join everyone else.
When I got back, Bud was splayed out on the floor without a care in the world. He poked his head up as if to say “Ah, there were fireworks today, human? I hadn’t noticed!”
The Budster’s still got it!
We had our town’s fireworks today, I presume, because there are a metric crapton of July 4 events this year, and a neighboring town is known for their world class fireworks display which is always the night of. I still appreciate our display: it’s paid for by a local mom-and-pop business that is extraordinarily generous with the community.
Anyway, what could be more ‘Merican than celebrating our nation’s birthday by blowing things up? ‘Merica!
Pain In The Bud 