People are intentionally annoying/frustrating their cats and sharing the footage online.
It pays to make people angry.
Rage-baiting has existed as long as the internet has been a thing, but thanks to algorithmically-ruled social media, eliciting clicks through anger has become incentivized and normalized.
Monetized Facebook groups use rage-bait to drive engagement. Advertisers use it to break through the noise with carefully calibrated taunts: “Taylor Swift has an IQ of 165. Think you can beat her in this online test?” Unscrupulous online “news” platforms use it to keep readers in perpetual doomscrolling loops, which is easy to do in a politically charged environment.
But rage-baiting cats? Why would anyone do that?
Apparently some people think it’s funny, and the practice seems to have originated where all of our society’s most brilliant ideas are spawned: on TikTok, that virtual salon where towering intellects advance the causes of humanity.
Of course you can’t bait a cat with politics or culture wars, so the videos of feline rage-baiting compilations demonstrate trolling of a more physical nature: pulling tails, aggressively petting when it’s not wanted, poking cats in their tummies, picking them up and taking an agonizingly long time to place them back on the ground.
If it annoys a feline and provokes a reaction, it’s on the table.
We won’t link to cat rage-baiting videos, but suffice to say stuff like this does not benefit your relationship with your feline bud.
Rage-baiting is just another way to say they’re making their cats extremely frustrated to get a rise out of them.
When the cat reacts, that’s supposed to be the funny bit.
It’s not funny. Rage-baiting your cats, in honest terms, means doing things that make them deeply uncomfortable in their own homes where they’re supposed to feel safe. Arguably worse, the perpetrators are their humans, with whom they’re supposed to feel protected and loved.
As feline behavior consultant Julia Specht of Park Slope Paws told Upworthy, our furry friends are not in on the joke, they’re the butt of it.
“Cats can’t know what your intention is; they’re not capable of that tertiary-level thought,” Specht said. “All they know is that you’re doing something unpleasant that they don’t like.”
I’m not going for virtue signaling points when I say it’s a profound betrayal. I cannot fathom intentionally making my cat feel uncomfortable or frustrating him, let alone to do so motivated by potential attention from online strangers.
Your cat is supposed to be your pal. Your cat lives with you and loves you. Your cat is innocent. Why would anyone damage that relationship to bring a few seconds of misguided amusement to phone-addicted automatons who think messing with animals is funny?
Cats are highly attuned to our emotions, especially when we share a strong bond with our little buddies.
I realized I needed to calm down when Bud turned and gave me a wide-eyed, uncertain stare.
It was the fourth quarter of the NBA Finals’ second game, and the San Antonio Spurs were chipping away at the New York Knicks’ lead with ample help from the referees.
The Spurs collapsed in as the Knicks’ Karl Anthony Towns (KAT, or Big Kat as he’s fondly known) drove the lane, pummeling him and grabbing at his shooting hand while the refs just watched.
It had been happening all night. Spurs star Victor Wembanyama even grabbed a much smaller Knicks player by the neck and tossed him at one point without so much as a peep from the refs.
(Above: 7’4″ Spurs center Victor Wembanyama grabs 6-foot Knicks points guard Jose Alvarado by the neck and tosses him. The refs did nothing.)
I shouted something not nice as the refs ignored the bludgeoning and the Spurs barreled down the other end for another bucket.
Then I saw Bud’s alarmed face and his uncertain crouch.
“Aw, sh–,” I said, softening my tone and doing my best to sound reassuring. “Not you, Bud. I love you, little guy.”
I held out my fingers, Bud rubbed his cheek against them happily, and we returned to watching the game as I scratched his head.
Still, it was a much-needed reminder that our little pals look to us for emotional cues, and our bad moods have a profound impact on them.
Jalen Brunson is the Knicks’ captain and point guard. Josh Hart (header image) is the team’s “Hart and soul.” Credit: Wikimedia Commons
I will never forget what my brother observed one day when Buddy was still a kitten: “You’re his whole world.”
Bud likes to pretend otherwise, of course, but the point stands. He picks up on everything, and it is deeply unfair for me to allow any outside emotions to impact him. Making sure he’s happy means everything to me.
The comedian Bill Burr has a bit about this, putting it in more crude — but much more hilarious — terms:
Happily, despite the abominable officiating, the Knicks won the game. They have now won 13 games in a row in the playoffs (!), they haven’t lost a game in six weeks, and after defeating the Spurs twice on their home court, the Knicks return to New York two wins away from being NBA champions…for the first time in 53 years.
It’s not only a big deal to me and millions of New Yorkers, it’s something I’ve wanted so badly since I was a kid watching the Knicks reach the Finals in 1994 and 1999, falling agonizingly short both times.
The Knicks came within a game of winning it all in the 1994 NBA Finals when Patrick Ewing (pictured) was the team’s leader.
Wembanyama, San Antonio’s best player, is a towering 7’4″ and doesn’t even have to jump to dunk the basketball, while the Knicks’ best player is Jalen Brunson, who at six feet tall is diminutive by NBA standards.
Wembanyama was the number one pick in his draft, already hailed as the future of the sport before he set foot on the hardwood. Brunson was the 33rd pick in the second round in his draft class, an afterthought who wasn’t predicted to be anything more than a bench player at best.
OG Anunoby, who hails from the UK, is a lockdown defender and explosive scorer. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
When the Knicks signed Brunson four years ago, the entire sports world laughed. One ESPN “expert” insisted the idiot Knicks had pinned their hopes on a “role player,” while another compared Brunson to one of the team’s all time great busts. A third declared the Knicks would never win anything with Brunson leading the team.
And yet here we are on the cusp of history. The Knicks aren’t just two games from a championship, and they haven’t merely punched their ticket to the Finals. They have absolutely obliterated every team they’ve faced, sweeping the last two series and winning by a margin of almost 24 points per game.
But it ain’t over until they win it, so I’m heartened by what the Knicks’ KAT and Mikal Bridges both said after the last two games: they’re treating each game as if they have no lead, as if they must fight tooth and nail to save their season. They are not resting on their laurels, they’re not taking anything for granted, and they refuse to underestimate their opponents.
So let’s hope they win two more and finally bring a championship home, at which time Bud and I will partay!
Cats and dogs communicate primarily by scent, touch and body language, but human efforts to understand them have focused exclusively on meows and barks. If we want to truly understand our non-human friends, we need to take an approach that considers the other ways animals “talk” to each other.
A few years ago when MeowTalk made a minor splash in the startup world, I was pretty bullish on its potential to help us understand our cats better.
Sure, the app had an unhelpful habit of attributing improbably loving declarations to Buddy, but I thought it would follow the trajectory of other machine learning models and drastically improve as it accumulated more data.
More users meant the app would record and analyze more meows, chirps and trills, meaning it was just a matter of time before the AI would be able to distinguish between an “I want attention!” meow and a “My bowl is dangerously close to empty!” meow.
Obviously that didn’t happen, and what I personally didn’t take into account back then — and should have, given how obvious it is in retrospect — is that cats don’t just communicate via vocalizations.
In fact, cats don’t normally incorporate vocalizations into communication at all. Pet kitties do it entirely for our benefit because they know we’re generally awful at interpreting body language and we are completely useless when it comes to olfactory information.
It’s actually amazing when you really think about how much of the heavy lifting cats do in our efforts to communicate with each other. They recognize we can’t communicate the way they do naturally, so they try to relate to us on our terms. In return, we meet them less than halfway.
No wonder Buddy sometimes looks frustrated as he meows at me, as if I’m the biggest moron in the world for not understanding the very obvious thing he’s trying to tell me.
“Human, how can you not understand the simple feeling of innerer schweinehund I’m trying to convey here? The cringe is killing me!”
Now the Chinese tech giant Baidu is throwing its hat into the ring after filing a patent in China for an AI system that uses machine learning to decode animal communication and “translate” it to human language.
Machines are designed to process things from a human viewpoint according to human logic, so if Baidu wants to succeed where MeowTalk has not, its engineers will need to take a thoughtful approach with the help of animal behavior experts.
This is a hard problem that encompasses animal cognition, neuroscience, linguistics, biology, biochemistry and even philosophy. If they approach this strictly as a tech challenge, they’ll set themselves up for failure.
Without the information and context clues provided by tails, whiskers, facial expressions, posture, eye dilation, heart rate, pheromones and even fur, an AI system is only getting a fraction of the information cats are trying to convey.
Trying to glean meaning from that is like trying to read a book in which only every fourth or fifth letter is legible. There’s just too much missing information.
Even if we can train machines to analyze sound visual, tactile and olfactory information, it may not be possible to truly translate what our cats are saying to us. We may have to settle for approximations. We’ve only begun to guess at how the world is interpreted differently among human beings thanks to things like qualia and neurodivergence, and the way cats and dogs see the world is undoubtedly more strange to us than the way a neurodivergent person might make sense of reality.
“He grimaced. He had drawn a greedy old character, a tough old male whose mind was full of slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans full of half-spoiled fish. Father Moontree had once said that he burped cod liver oil for weeks after drawing that particular glutton, so strongly had the telepathic image of fish impressed itself upon his mind. Yet the glutton was a glutton for danger as well as for fish. He had killed sixty-three Dragons, more than any other Partner in the service, and was quite literally worth his weight in gold.” – Cordwainer Smith, The Game of Rat and Dragon
An animal’s interpretation of reality may be so psychologically alien that most of its communication may be apples to oranges at best. Which is why I always loved Cordwainer Smith’s description of the feline mind as experienced via a technology that allows humans with special talents to share thoughts with cats in his classic short story, The Game of Rat and Dragon.
In the story, humans are a starfaring civilization and encounter a threat in the void between stars that people don’t have the reaction speed to deal with. Cats, however, are fast and swift enough, and with a neural bridge device, teams of humans paired with cats are able to keep passengers safe on interstellar journeys.
The narrator, who is one of the few people with an affinity for teaming up with felines, hopes he’ll be paired with one of his two favorite cats for his latest mission, but instead he’s assigned to partner with an old glutton of a tomcat whose mind was dominated by “slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans of half-spoiled fish.”
The narrator wryly notes that the last time one of his colleagues was paired with that particular cat, his burps tasted of fish for weeks afterward. But the cat in question, despite being obsessed with fish, is a badass at killing “dragons,” the human nickname for the bizarre entities that attack human ships in space. (The software that allows felines and humans to link thoughts also portrays the “dragons” as rodents in the minds of the cats, stimulating their ancient predatory drive so they’ll attack instantly when they see the enemy.)
We can’t know for sure if Smith’s interpretation of the feline mind is accurate, but another part rang true when he wrote that cat thoughts were all about the moment, filled with sentiments of warmth and affection, while they rapidly lost interest in thoughts about human concerns, dismissing them “as so much rubbish.”
If the mind of a cat is that relatable, we’ll be incredibly lucky. But in reality we’re dealing with animals who evolved in drastically different ecological niches, with different priorities, motivations, and ways of looking at the world — literally and figuratively.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand our furry friends. Research has yielded interesting information about the way animals like whales and elephants communicate, and AI is at its best when it augments human creativity and curiosity instead of trying to replace it.
Even if we don’t end up with a way to glean 1:1 translations, the prospect of improving our understanding of animal minds is tantalizing enough. We just need to make sure we’re listening to everything they’re saying, not just the meows.
The video is thoroughly amusing, but it also illustrates profound truths about feline intelligence, showing cats understand a lot more than people often give them credit for.
I’m loving this video of a sneaky orange tabby pretending to snooze while helping himself to his human’s food.
Little dude lays down and closes his eyes, then slowly reaches a paw out to the cap of an ice cream container, which has a glob of the good stuff on it. He checks to make sure the coast is clear by opening his eyes just a tiny bit, then slowly moves the cap over incrementally, pausing at intervals to make sure he’s still unobserved. (It looks like his human set her phone to record, then left the room so her little buddy thought no eyes were on him).
Aside from being hilarious and cute, this short clip actually illustrates something profound: Cats are much more intelligent than people usually give them credit for.
Consider the fact that to pull this off, the cat needs to be self-aware, and he needs to possess theory of mind. In other words, this cat understands he and his human have different perspectives, know different things, and that if he can move stealthily and appear to innocently nap, he can get away with eating some ice cream.
That may not seem like a big deal at first, but it means the cat understands humans can be deceived, and he understands how to do it. He cannot possibly know we have technology that can record him while we’re not looking, so that’s not a strike against him. There are plenty of things we don’t understand about animals, and we’re supposed to be the more intelligent species.
To truly appreciate how profound this is, consider that human children do not fully possess theory of mind until they’re four or five years old! That’s when they begin to appreciate the fact that other people have internal thought processes and emotions — even if they can’t articulate that — and, crucially, that what a person thinks she knows may not align with reality.
Footage like this goes well beyond refuting the old, debunked claim that animals like cats are biological automatons without thoughts or feelings. It shows they are in full possession of the cognitive tools that form the basis for higher modes of thinking. Again, while some people might hear that and say “What’s the big deal?”, it destroys all arguments that animals don’t have emotions or don’t understand what’s happening to them when humans mistreat them.
It also shows that cats are at least as intelligent as young children in all the ways that matter. They cannot verbalize their thoughts and feelings, but that has no bearing on their existence. After all, no one would argue that a child doesn’t have feelings simply because he’s unable to speak.
Lastly, there’s one more important lesson here: hide your ice cream from your fluffy pals!
Are we doing right by our furry friends? The latest issue of New York magazine takes a deep dive into the concept of pet “ownership” and the ethics of keeping animals in our homes.
Almost the entirety of New York magazine is devoted this week to what its editors call “an exhaustive exploration of the ethics of pet ownership.”
There are also articles about what veterinarians really think of “pet owners,” whether runaway dogs deserve to be free, and even a story asking whether the word “owner” is appropriate to begin with. (You’ll notice PITB almost always avoids that word, unless we’re quoting others. I refer to myself as Buddy’s servant and his caretaker, words that feel more honest than owner.)
The stories are worth reading. Some are free for a limited time, others can be read as part of the weekly article limit. And if you can afford it, supporting a magazine or two during these brutal times for the publishing industry is a good way to help quality publications survive, so we’re not all drowning in a sea of clickbait garbage tuned for algorithms instead of human readers.
Regular readers of this blog are likely familiar with the story of Bud’s one and only “escape” as a kitten. When I found him, this cat who hates being picked up leapt into my arms, holding onto me like a terrified toddler, and his relief was palpable as I felt him purring into my neck. We were both relieved.
He’s had the opportunity to leave since, but he won’t. He’s got a good thing going here, living like a little king with his personal servant. He gets tons of attention, he’s allowed to do pretty much anything he wants as long as it isn’t dangerous for him, and he loves his Big Buddy.
I know he does from the way he approaches me, purring and meowing happily as he bunts his forehead against mine. I know it from the way he makes biscuits on me and falls asleep in my lap, feeling content and secure. And I know it from his refusal to leave my side the two times I was so sick I could barely move.
He’s got his own site, awesome retrowave logos and online admirers, but Buddy only cares about the snacks.
We shouldn’t feel guilty for giving cats a home.
I think we tend to forget that as domesticated animals, cats don’t have a natural habitat. The process of domestication made them friendlier, more trusting and more capable of reading human body language, facial expressions and tone of voice.
But those changes came at a cost, as they always do in domestication. Felis catus looks like its wild relatives and retains many of the amazing abilities of wild cats, but compared to them the species has lost a step. Domestic cats are not as quick or agile, they’re too trusting, and they’re not well suited to providing for themselves. The statistics on life expectancy reflect that, with ferals and strays living short, miserable lives.
Although it’s usually very difficult to tell a domestic cat from felis lybica, the wildcat species seen here, there are major differences in their respective survival abilities and instincts. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
So if felis catus has a habitat, it’s our living rooms. When our ancestors welcomed them into human settlements ten thousand years ago, they formed an indelible bond and made a pact, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.
Consider it a debt we owe for the survival of our species, when nascent civilization would have likely been snuffed out were it not for cats protecting the grain stores over long, cold winters.
Without cats, rodents would have eaten their way through the season’s rations, starving out the early settlers before the next harvest. The great agriculture experiment would have been over as quickly as it began with people returning to the nomadic life of hunter-gatherers, and it’s likely that everything after — from the first cities, to the birth of western civilization in Greece, to the remarkable achievement of putting a human being on another world — would have been jeopardized or taken radically different paths otherwise.
So you can thank your cat for your house, your car, the medicine that keeps you tip top, all the comforts of modern civilization, and all the stories and songs of humanity. Without cats and their heroic willingness to eat their way into our good graces, we wouldn’t have gotten here. Thank them often. You can’t go wrong with treats.
Pain In The Bud 