evolutionary biology – Pain In The Bud

Study: Cats Use Facial Expressions To Reassure Each Other Everything’s Cool During Play Time

Once again, we’ve underestimated cats. There’s so much more to the ways in which they communicate than we realize.

We know cats use non-verbal signals to communicate with each other, but recent research suggests we may just be scratching the surface, glimpsing only a portion of the information that passes between our furry friends.

Cats “talk” to each other by the way they position their tails, whiskers and ears, in addition to their overall body language.

It turns out there’s more. A group of interdisciplinary scientists from universities in Kansas, Arkansas and Haifa, Israel, found cats also employ specific facial expressions, and rapidly mirror each other’s expressions during play time to signal they’ve got good intentions and aren’t going to hurt each other.

The study, which was given the yawn-inducing title “Computational investigation of the social function of domestic cat signals” (in English: using AI to figure out how our house cats “talk” to each other), started with observations of felines playing with each other in cat cafes.

From there, the coders and mathematicians on the team created an algorithm to record and sort the facial expressions the cafe cats used, employing CatFACS (Cat Facial Action Coding System) to associate each expression with its meaning.

“I’m serious. Feed me, or feel my wrath.”

Cats make a surprising number of facial expressions, 276 in total, according to a 2023 study.

The problem is, we humans are terrible at reading them. Even veterinarians trained in CatFACS still struggle to get it right, but happily this is precisely the sort of task algorithmic AI excels at. Like facial recognition software, a well-trained machine learning algorithm can recognize faces and record them more accurately and much faster than any person could.

In a column praising the facial expressions study, evolutionary biologist and Jane Goodall Foundation ethics board member Mark Bekoff said it’s the kind of labor-intensive work that truly advances our understanding of the ways animals communicate.

For cats and their human caretakers, Bekoff notes, it could help us reduce inter-species misunderstandings and make it easier to read our cat’s emotions, so we know when they’re not feeling well or need something.

“There are no substitutes for doing what’s needed to learn about the nitty-gritty details of how animals communicate with one another in different contexts,” Bekoff wrote. “This study of play opens the door for more widespread comparative research focusing on how animals talk to one another.”

“Do I look happy, human?” Credit: Milan Nykodym/Wikimedia Commons

We also know adult cats very rarely meow to each other, and the meow is reserved for cat-to-human communication. Imagine the frustration our little friends must feel when they have so much to tell us, but the only thing we understand are vocalizations — meows, chirps and trills — that can convey only basic ideas at best.

Cat Domestication Was The Start Of A Beautiful Friendship

Domestication’s real goal: to make cats cuddly as well as great mousers.

Cats have been doing things their way since the very beginning.

Unlike literally every other domesticated animal, cats were not domesticated by humans. They did it to themselves.

As if that didn’t make them unique enough, they lay claim to another major distinction: they’re the only species of obligate carnivores to undergo domestication in the entire history of human existence.

That explains why cats, more than any other animal that depends on humans, so closely resemble the wild animals they were before signing up for the good life of naps, warmth, endless rodents to hunt and free food from their new human friends.

In a new essay for The Conversation, evolutionary biologist Jonathan Losos, author of The Age of Cats: From the Savanna to Your Sofa, notes new DNA analysis settles the question of where cats came from once and for all.

Domestic cats are descended from North African wildcats, specifically the species felis sylvestris lybica. Unlike dogs, who underwent telltale physical transformations when they evolved from wolves, house cats “appear basically indistinguishable from wildcats.”

“In fact,” Losos writes, “only 13 genes have been changed by natural selection during the domestication process. By contrast, almost three times as many genes changed during the descent of dogs from wolves.”

While the change in genetics that happen with domestication left cats pretty much as they were physically, the process made dramatic changes in the feline brain, reducing regions governing fear and expanding those related to social behavior. The result? The major difference between house cats and their wildcat ancestors is disposition.

In other words, domestication made cats cuddly.

Notably, felis sylvestris lybica had to be pretty friendly in the first place, as well as bold and driven by the now-legendary feline curiosity to risk padding into human settlements with their bright lights, strange smells, open flames and the two-legged giants striding around them.

They didn’t have a way of negotiating or signaling their intent. They couldn’t say: “Hey guys, we’re here to kill and eat the tasty rodents who have been giving you problems by chowing down on your yums, but we don’t want your yums for ourselves. Plants are disgusting!”

So they had to demonstrate their usefulness, prove their worth, and enjoy the fruits of it by curling up in front of warm fires or on human laps.

That explains why it was the African wildcat that became a human companion species and not European wildcats, whom Losos notes are often “hellaciously mean” in interactions with people, even if they’re raised around humans when they’re young. It was also a matter of being in the right place at the right time, as nascent human civilization took root in the Fertile Crescent.

But ultimately, just like cats decided to domesticate themselves and didn’t really bother to consult us about it, so too do they bend us to their will with an entire repertoire of manipulative behavior, from solicitation purrs to incessant meowing and having a talent for looking their cutest when they want something.

While we may think we set the rules and parameters of our relationship with the furry little ones, as Losos notes, “cats usually train us more than we train them.”

Read the whole thing here:

Feline evolution: How house cats and humans domesticated each other

Do You Consider Your Cat Your ‘Child’?

Why do people expend so much time, money and effort on raising the young of other species? An anthropologist weighs in.

The Washington Post has an interesting story from an anthropologist who’s taken an interest in studying the relationships between people and their pets.

Anyone familiar with evolutionary biology has heard the oft-repeated idea that we’re hardwired to propagate our DNA, and every decision we make — from who we date, when we get married, whether we put career goals on the line to take care of children — is ultimately dictated by that goal.

If that’s true, then “parenting” pets doesn’t make sense. They aren’t our biological children. They won’t carry on our family names and history after we’re gone, they won’t go to college and have careers and take care of us when we’re old. In stark terms, we’re “wasting” resources on raising — and often pampering — the offspring of other species.

Yet we do it, so the question is: Why?

Shelly Volsche, an anthropologist at Boise State University, thinks the explanation can be traced back to our roots in pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies, when alloparenting — cooperative parenting — was key to raising children.

“If people evolved to alloparent, and our environment is now making caring for children more difficult or less appealing to some, it makes sense for people to alloparent other species entering their homes,” Volsche wrote. “Alloparenting companion animals can offer a way to fulfill the evolved need to nurture while reducing the investment of time, money and emotional energy compared to raising children.”

As readers of this blog know, I don’t refer to my cat as my “child” and I don’t see him as some sort of child replacement. He’s Buddy, my buddy. We’re best buds. Other people choose to “parent” their children, and that’s cool. Whatever works for you.

A female macaque takes care of two babies. Alloparenting is common in macaque troops.

I think Volsche’s ideas are interesting, especially in the context of our primate cousins and the way they raise their young. Orangutans are quasi-solitary, and children stick with their moms for about eight years because it takes that long for them to mature and learn how to survive in the jungle on their own.

But more social primates, like chimpanzees, Capuchin monkeys, macaques and vervet monkeys, live in groups and cooperative parenting is a major part of how they handle raising “kids” when there’s no daycare or schools.

A mother who goes out to forage, for example, might leave her baby with an aunt or a trusted female of the troop, and it’s common to see female monkeys caring for babies that aren’t theirs.

Human and proto-human hunter-gatherer societies were essentially upjumped primate troops, so it’s that ingrained behavior we’re talking about here.

Ultimately, Volsche says we’re driven by a “need to nurture.”

“Although the details may look quite different — attending training classes instead of school functions, or providing smell walks for dogs instead of coloring books for children — both practices fulfill the same evolved function,” she wrote. “Whether child or pet, people are meeting the same evolved need to care for, teach and love a sentient other.”