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.
Their greatest strength was also their greatest weakness, which is why modern big cats have smaller, sturdier teeth.
Saber-toothed cats — an umbrella term for a wide variety of felid species with massive, scimitar-like teeth — are some of the most terrifying prehistoric predators, carnivorousness incarnate.
But it turns out the teeth that give them their name and their fearsome reputation were also their greatest weakness.
The problem? While the oversized upper canines were optimal for delivering kill bites and tearing into flesh, they could break if the teeth met bone with force.
“Slicing and crushing are basically the two main things a carnivorous mammal’s teeth can do,” said Narimane Chatar, a postdoc at UC Berkeley studying carnivores. “But for saber-toothed animals, there’s a clear trade off. Those upper canines were extremely efficient but also break very easily.”
As experts on extant big cats are well aware, a hypercarnivore with broken or damaged fangs can struggle to take down their typical prey. That’s what often turns tigers, leopards and lions into man-eaters. (Interestingly, there are no documented accounts of man-hunting jaguars. Jaguar attacks on humans are exceedingly rare, and while they have killed humans, there’s no jaguar equivalent of the Chamapawat Tiger or the Leopard of Rudraprayag.)
A reconstruction of Smilodon, commonly known as the saber-toothed tiger, although it’s not closely related to modern tigers.A reconstruction of Megantereon, a saber-toothed cat that went extinct as late as 350,000 years ago.
During her research, Chatar found the skull and teeth of a saber-toothed cat in Berkeley’s archives and realized it was not the same species associated with saber-toothed cats in the Americas.
Although Smilodon and Homotherium are the most well-known species, “there was a crazy variety of saber-toothed cats,” Chatar said.
Her research has confirmed the prehistoric cat’s sword-like fangs were double-edged, literally and figuratively. Per UC Berkeley:
“In simulations, 3D-printed saber teeth from various species proved ideal at penetrating a gel with the consistency of flesh but fractured easily against simulated bone. In the former tests, Smilodon came out on top. In the latter, Smilodon fared the worst.“
Smilodon lived in the Americas and went extinct about 8,200 years ago. Los Angeles’ La Brea Tar Pits have yielded a number of preserved skeletal remains, making Smilodon and its three sub-species among the best-known prehistoric felids.
Smilodon and Megantereon images via Wikimedia Commons.
The footballer stars in a TV series that calls cats “unwanted ecological trash” that can be repurposed as “culinary gold.” One cast member claims eating felines is a heroic endeavor: “In some cases you should and could eat it into eradication.”
Earlier this week we noted an Australian celebrity chef’s enthusiasm for eating a “pussycat sandwich,” but Maggie Beer isn’t the only famous Aussie who has raved about eating cats.
An Australian football (soccer) player, Tony Armstrong, spoke in glowing terms about eating cat meat in an interview with The Guardian a year ago, enthusing that it was “the yummiest.”
“We had it in the Western Desert and cooked it in a fire, wrapped in foil,” Armstrong told the newspaper. “It was like the most delicious rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had.”
Armstrong’s interviewer, Sian Cain, the Guardian’s deputy culture editor for Australia, didn’t bat an eye or consider the answer worthy of a follow-up question. She just moved on, asking him if rising early for “breakfast telly” was as difficult as keeping in shape for football.
Armstrong consumed the cat meat for his television show, Eat The Invaders, which casts it as an attempt to “turn our unwanted ecological trash into desirable culinary gold.”
That’s what the life of a cat is casually referred to in certain mainstream segments of Australian culture: “unwanted ecological trash.”
Armstrong and his castmates say they’re on a noble quest to eradicate invasive species by eating them.
As we noted in our post about Beer’s “pussycat sandwich,” the casual way this is talked about in Australia provides a window into the way some people there think about animal life in general and felines in particular.
Not all of them, of course. There are lots of people for whom the idea of eating intelligent companion animals is extremely disturbing. But the idea is widespread enough to make it onto mainstream Australian television without much of an uproar, undoubtedly because Australians are constantly told felines — not industrialization, pollution, pesticides, traffic collisions, man-made environmental hazards, and habitat loss — are almost solely responsible for declining populations of native fauna.
When the choice is between modifying our own behavior or blaming animals who cannot speak for themselves, it’s always easier to shift the blame than to, say, derail development projects or outlaw the use of harmful chemicals.
Just look at the decades-long controversy involving the weedkiller Roundup despite the damage it does to other plants, animals and the people working directly with the substance. Despite successful lawsuits on behalf of cancer patients and evidence that chemicals in the herbicide cause cancer, the EPA says it’s safe. Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides are widely used in Australia as well, but that fact is rarely raised in discussions about protecting native fauna and flora.
In a promo for Eating the Invaders, after blaming “colonial ancestors” for introducing non-native species and repeating the claim that cats kill 3 billion animals per year in Australia (an assertion for which there is no evidence), Armstrong casts himself as a crusader righting ecological wrongs.
“But what if we could help,” he asks in a voiceover, “by reimagining this problem as a tasty solution?”
In the series, Armstrong works with chef Vince Trim and “artist and curator” Kirsha Kaechele, who credits herself with staging “immersive feasts [that] transform invasive species into art.”
Armstrong, Kaechele and Trim. Credit: Eat The Invaders
Kaechele says she has no qualms about eating intelligent domesticated animals.
“In some cases you should and could eat it into eradication,” Kaechele says.
Just as there is no hard evidence that cats are the primary force behind species extinction, there is no data to support the idea that randomly killing and eating cats has any positive impact on species survival.
But eating cats isn’t just about saving the world, Kaechele explains. It’s about aesthetics as well.
“In these feasts,” she says, “every element has to be art.”
By that she means she fashions cutlery, centerpieces and containers from the deceased animals.
Kaechele is no stranger to controversy. As an amateur troll, she’s known for attention-grabbing stunts. She’s faced legal complaints for opening an Australian lounge/art gallery that admitted women only, “so men feel as excluded as possible,” and attended one of her subsequent hearings with 20 female supporters who dressed like her and moved in sync with her.
The appearance was “performance art,” she claimed. The judge disagreed, calling it a disrespectful display. Kaechele was also blamed for gentrifying a New Orleans neighborhood after Hurricane Katrina, snapping up and later allegedly abandoning five properties and allowing them to decay. They were subsequently taken over by squatters while Kaechele was MIA, presumably globetrotting and enlivening people’s drab existences by “transforming them into art.”
“Women are better than men in every respect,” Kaechele says in one video, echoing the provocateur Dick Masterson’s assertion that “men are better than women.”
The difference is that Masterson is a character created by a comedian. Whether individual people find his act amusing or not, Masterson performs for an audience of men and women who are well aware his schtick is tongue in cheek. Kaechele may or may not believe what she’s saying, but one thing she’s not doing is comedy. No one’s laughing.
She’s a deeply unserious person who shouldn’t be anywhere near any conversations about conservation.
As for Trim, he can’t bring himself to admit he’s cooking cats. To him, they’re no different than anything else in his fridge or pantry.
“It’s really exciting to be using a lot of these invasive ingredients that we have,” he said.
It’s one thing to consider the possibility that species like cats are signficant drivers of native species extinction, and another to prove they are measurable contributors compared to the hundreds of ways human behavior impacts animal life.
But you have to be really far up your own ass to keep a straight face while claiming you’re saving the world by eating cats, and even more divorced from reality to characterize it as a form of artistic expression.
Perhaps most concerning, telling people that cats are “yummy” could inspire others to try it for themselves, and turning it into a trend would be an entirely new level of barbarism.
Say what you will about people who participate in China’s infamous Yulin dog meat festival. At least they plainly admit they eat dogs and cats because they like the taste without clinging to any pretense that they’re creating high art or saving the planet.
Convinced that culling cats will prevent local wildlife from going extinct, despite no evidence supporting that idea, New Zealand’s authorities have pledged to wipe out ferals and strays.
A recent RNZ story about efforts to exterminate cats in New Zealand starts with an anecdote about a man named Victor Tinndale, describing the way he bludgeons a cat to death as casually as if he’s sipping a cup of coffee.
Tinndale has taken it upon himself to kill cats even though the country’s wildlife management authorities told him not to. Why? Because he thinks cats are responsible for driving native species toward extinction.
He doesn’t know that, of course. No one does. No one’s bothered to do the research, and the driving force behind the claim that cats are responsible is a series of meta-analyses by birders who literally invented numbers to align with their predetermined conclusions about predatory impact.
To date there is not a single study that accurately measures feline predatory impact, nor is there a shred of evidence that slaughtering cats — whether beating them to death, shooting them with shotguns or poisoning them — has any beneficial impact on endangered bird species.
Yet there are vigilantes aplenty slaughtering cats across New Zealand, youth hunting contests encouraging kids to shoot cats and kittens, and government-sponsored extermination programs, like a particularly ghastly effort on a small island off New Zealand’s coast, where members of a team tell themselves they’re doing good work by sniping animals who are doing what they were born to do.
Ferals and strays already have tough lives without being hunted for sport or at the behest of government officials who aren’t in full possession of the facts. Credit: Mohan Rai/Pexels
The RNZ story describes Tinndale merrily skipping through the Aotearoan wilderness, singing songs and cracking jokes like a perverse Tom Bombadil as he murders cats unfortunate enough to get caught in his traps.
RNZ cameras follow Tinndale as he finds a terrified feline in one of the his traps. Tinndale describes the cat’s impending death at his hands as some sort of inevitable cosmic justice. He didn’t sentence the cat to die, he argues. He’s just the man who carries out the sentence.
“This cat is just an utter killing machine,” Tinndale says, addressing a camera as he repeats rhetoric from birder Peter Marra — who has advocated for the destruction of the entire species — almost word for word. “I’d hate to think what this cat has slayed to survive. So this guy has got to go, you know?”
The next scene shows Tinndale walking along the shore, the cat now hanging dead in his hands. He is judge, jury and executioner.
Tinndale buries his victims in a “graveyard” he made near a hut, admitting the graveyard is a “little bit of a laugh.” Tinndale was shocked, the story says, when New Zealand’s Department of Conservation didn’t pat him on the head for his vigilante efforts.
“I thought they’d have a chuckle, you know, and be pleased, but it was nothing of the sort,” he told RNZ.
Thought they’d have a chuckle?
This man thinks bludgeoning animals to death is hilarious. He is a psychotic vigilante who has taken it upon himself to violently end life. Why is he allowed to own weapons? Why is he not in prison or on a court-mandated mental illness management program?
Brad Windust with a trophy hunter’s expression as he shows off a Maine Coon mix he killed with the help of his hunting dog. Credit: Supplied to NRZ
The story goes on to quote Jessi Morgan of the Predator Free New Zealand Trust, who flat-out admits she can’t say how many cats there are in the country, let alone measure their predatory impact.
“I’ve seen estimates from two-and-a-half million to 14 million, which basically tells us we’ve got no idea what those numbers are,” Morgan said before immediately relaying anecdotes from hunters and farmers who say they’re “seeing more.”
This is not how we make decisions between life and death! This is not science, not by any definition of the word. This is not public policy. This is vigilantism and a mob mentality, amplified by the fact that it’s easier to blame a defenseless species for our own conservation failures and humanity’s impact on wildlife.
It is gross, utter disrespect for life under the guise of conservation, by people who not only can’t articulate what sort of damage they think felines are doing to their country, but have not a scrap of evidence that vigilantes running around bludgeoning cats to death are doing anything other than causing needless suffering.
Worse, it’s clear at least some of these self-appointed nature guardians are enjoying the task of murdering cats. It’s evident in their smiles as they show off their prizes and in the way they talk about their “work” — not as a solemn duty after all other options have been exhausted, but as something to “have a chuckle” over.
Credit: Dianne Concha/Pexels
This is also a failure of journalism, a failure to follow the most basic best practices and rules, to ask for proof when people assert opinions and call them facts. Those who call themselves journalists, who credulously spread the bunk studies about feline impact on native species, should be ashamed of themselves for not even taking a few minutes to read the studies they cite. Anyone who reads the research would immediately understand that the “studies” — which are really meta-analyses of old data — don’t provide any proof that cats are responsible for pushing endangered species toward extinction. They do nothing of the sort.
What we do know, and have confirmed over more than half a century of rigorous science, is that we are responsible for wiping out wildlife — more than 73 percent of the world’s monitored wildlife populations in the past 50 years alone, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s annual report.
Aside from the fact that they don’t have homes, these cats are no different than pet felines. They are the same species. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Animal welfare groups have never disputed the idea that cats probably do have a part in endangering small mammals and bird species. They are predators. Hunting is their role.
But that is a far cry from proving they have a measurable impact, let alone are the primary drivers. In rare cases when research teams did the hard work of taking a feline census, as Washington, D.C.’s Cat Count did, the population numbers turn out to be considerably lower than expected.
Data from the Cat Count also confirmed what we know, that cats do not stray more than a few hundred feet from their territory, whether it’s a human home or a small shelter in a managed colony. In urban and suburban environments, the study found, cats have minimal impact through hunting unless they’re living directly adjacent to wooded areas.
Sending a bunch of lunatics out, dancing and skipping as they arbitrarily slaughter sentient creatures with real emotions, is the kind of monstrous behavior only humans are capable of.
Human-made devices and structures kill innumerable birds annually, a fact that isn’t accounted for in studies and news stories blaming cats for bird species extinctions. Credit: Amol Mande/Pexels
But it isn’t enough for New Zealand’s government to have vigilantes killing cats, or community-sponsored cat hunts. Now the government has pledged to eradicate feral cats by 2050. Because feral cats are the same species as stray and pet cats, and there is no way to determine by sight if a cat is feral or just frightened, that means any feline found outdoors will be killed.
“In order to boost biodiversity, to boost heritage landscape and to boost the type of place we want to see, we’ve got to get rid of some of these killers,” says Tama Potaka, the country’s conservation minister.
Note the language in the linked story, which describes domestic cats as if they’re a separate species. That’s the kind of ignorance that drives these cruel efforts.
New Zealand is heavily reliant on tourism, with visitors accounting for almost six percent of the country’s GDP before COVID-19, a number the country’s leaders expect to match in late 2025 as the tourism industry recovers. It’s part of New Zealand’s overall shift to services instead of products in an effort to diversify its economy.
Anyone who loves cats, who thinks men shouldn’t play God, who thinks we ought to demand at least something in the form of proof before allowing socially maladjusted vigilantes to brutally kill animals, should boycott New Zealand as a travel destination.
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Header image: Tinndale walking with a cat he killed via RNZ
The species has webbed feet and lives in some of the most remote regions in the world.
The flat-headed cat is one of the most elusive and rare felines in the world, and for three decades conservationists thought it had died out in Thailand, leaving only a handful of places where the species still eked out an existence.
Now there’s good news: the tiny feline, which weighs about half as much as a house cat, has been spotted in a remote region of the country.
Camera traps set up for an ecological survey starting last year detected flat-headed cats 29 times in Thailand’s Princess Sirindhorn Wildlife Sanctuary, according to the country’s Department of Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation. One of the sightings was a female and her cub, an encouraging sign that shows the local population is breeding.
Credit: Jim Sanderson/Wikimedia Commons
The sanctuary covers five square kilometers of rainforest and peat swamps. Along with the flat-headed cat and several unique species of birds, it’s also home to the endangered hairy-nosed otter.
Conservationists believe about 2,500 flat-headed cats remain in the wild. The species is mostly nocturnal and has webbed feet, helping the tiny wildcats navigate mangrove swamps and rivers in its rainforest habitat. Known as Prionailurus planiceps in scientific nomenclature, the flat-headed cat is most closely related to the fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus), which also has webbed feet, and the leopard cat.
Finding evidence of the endangered feline in Thailand is “exciting, yet concerning at the same time,” said Kaset Sutasha of Kasetsart University.
That’s because it means the surviving population is severely fragmented, which makes it more difficult for the cats to breed and could lead to genetic bottlenecks.
But Atthapol Charoenchansa, director general of Thailand’s parks department, also called it a “significant win” for conservation efforts. Knowledge of its presence in Thailand provides more opportunity to study the rare felines to better understand their behavior and protect them from extinction.
Pain In The Bud 