Can you detect a faint smile on this rehabilitated feral cat?

This is Sad Boy. As you can see, he had a hard life as an unneutered feral cat. In the photograph on the left his face is tense, his eyes are closed slightly, his nose is badly scarred through fighting, and his mouth points slightly downwards. All in all, his face as a feral cat indicates the difficulty in surviving.

Can you detect a faint smile on this rehabilitated feral cat? Photo: Reddit user: u/PoetsSquareCats.

Move forward a couple or three months and thanks to the care of an individual (we don't know her or his name), he is rehabilitated. Sad Boy appears to have been a semi-domesticated feral cat because he looks domesticated in the second photograph implying that it didn't take that long to integrate him into the human lifestyle.

What is noticeable is the lightness in his face. I even detect, I believe, a faint smile. His eyes are slightly more open and the tenseness in his face has disappeared.

Also, his jowly cheeks have disappeared. This is because, I presume, he has been castrated (neutered) and when you do that the production of testosterone is more or less completely stopped (but not entirely as it happens as the adrenal glands produce this hormone). This shrinks the cheeks and you end up with this slightly less masculine appearance.

The two photographs help us to focus on a domestic cat's facial expressions. I suspect that a lot of people think that domestic cats have no facial expressions. They are used to seeing the same impassive face every day. This leads people into believing that domestic cats are aloof. It is not actually true. They do have facial expressions and they are not aloof. Pain is certainly reflected in a cat's face. That is been established scientifically and a cell phone app has been created to read a cat's face so that the owner can better understand their mood.

Perhaps, the subtle changes in the expression of a cat when their mood lightens as reflected in this pair of photographs, is due to the fact that they suffer pain with greater stoicism than humans. Humans express their emotions almost wildly sometimes through facial expressions. There is a stark difference between felines and humans in this regard.

Your phone will tell you when your cat is content or in pain

It's in development but a cell phone app which has been created using artificial intelligence can read your domestic cat companion's facial expression to tell you whether she is happy or sad, content or in distress and in pain. The technology is based on studies, recently conducted, which concluded that the various elements of a cat's face change position relative to each other when they are in pain just like the human's; although for domestic cats the changes are quite subtle as we well know. Cats tend to hide their pain and they tend to hide themselves when in pain.

 Your phone will tell you whether your cat is happy or sad. Image: The Times. Sorry for stealing it.

But the beauty of this application for cell phones is that cat guardians who are uncertain about how their cat is feeling can photograph their cat full-face (a bit like a passport photo) and then ask the software to analyse the image.

The software has been programmed with thousands of images of cats and AI used those images to work out their feelings. Software can then produce a readout for the owner.

The image on this page shows you some of the facial expression differences between a happy and a sad domestic cat. I think perhaps the better description of the difference is between a contented cat and a cat in distress or in pain. 

You'll find that a cat's face tightens up when they are in pain and their eyes become more squinty. In short, their face becomes more tense which actually is what happens to people as well. Although the domestic cat's ears become flattened and rotated outwards compared to in the alert position facing forwards and direct.

You can download a beta version of it using a desktop computer as I understand it by going to the website: Sylvester.AI 

You might like to click on that link to see where it takes you. It is said that the accuracy is as high as 97% provided you give the software a decent quality front-on image of the cat's full face. I think there will be some failures because some cats are camera shy and, in any case, it can be difficult to provide a high-quality image of a cat.

I think what I might do is write another post about how to achieve that. It does take some skill. The app has been developed by an animal health company in Canada. It is a collaboration between an AI company and a cluster of other companies involved in sectors ranging from animal health to sleep gadgets.

Fedya, the cat with a permanently startled face and chunky cheeks

Fedya lives in Rostov, Russia with his human caretaker Natalia Zhdanova, 40. She found him as a poorly stray kitten in her garden, took him in and nursed him to good health with the help of her neighbour's cat, Handsome, who looked after Fedya, nursed him and licked him and now they are the best of friends.

Startled Fedya. It's permanent and he isn't startled! Photo: his Instagram page.

The point of this short post is that Fedya has a permanently startled expression which is a nice change from a permanently grumpy expression. Grumpy Cat started off the grumpy cat look and there were one or two after her who did very well on social media.

What I noticed about Fedya is that he looks like a male cat who has not been neutered with his chubby cheeks. This is a typical non-sterilized male cat look. I don't know whether he has been sterilised but except for his started appearance he looks like a fully intact male, blue British Shorthair, which he isn't because he was a stray cat in Russia. His coat is definitely a classic blue (grey in non-cat fancy parlance).

When she found him, she said that he was "very weak and was dying". He turned into a very playful, intelligent, sweet and gentle individual who purrs very loudly and who is inseparable from Handsome. As expected, he has an Instagram page which I can't find but he's gathered together about 4,000 followers at the moment which no doubt will grow rapidly as his fame spreads far and wide!

Natalia and Fedya. Photo: Instagram/Natalia.

The best guess is that the startled look is simply the way his face is built. You get this sometimes. It's about facial anatomy and is just in the lap of the gods as to whether cats end up with these fixed expressions which are quite rare. All the former cat celebrities have some sort of facial deformity. It is a inherited skeletal condition. It does not affect his health as far as I know.

Neighbour's cat called Handsome helped nurse Fedya back to health when he was a rescued stray kitten. Photo: Instagram/Natalia.

Apparently, when he was found he also had "wonky legs". And his eyes were misaligned. That is why they say that he looks permanently startled but that isn't the reason in my opinion because his does not look cross-eyed like a Siamese cat. His eyes look quite well aligned to me. They just look wide open, very round and stuck in the middle of his very large round, chubby-cheeked head!