Showing posts with label facial expressions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facial expressions. Show all posts

Saturday, 30 October 2021

If you weren't sure that cats have facial expressions this will change your mind

This is a cross post because I think the subject matter is interesting on a number of levels (see the other post by clicking here). Perhaps the most outstanding aspect of the video is that it shows quite clearly that domestic cats can have strong and clear facial expressions. A lot of people don't see facial expressions in domestic cats. They consider them as aloof and inscrutable. Or they don't believe they have them. This video should correct this misapprehension.

If you weren't sure that cats have facial expressions this will change your mind
If you weren't sure that cats have facial expressions this will change your mind. Deeply annoyed and irritated cat probably a Burmese. Screenshot.

And also the sound of the cat makes is interesting. It's a bit like a dog's bark. Sometimes domestic cats do bark like dogs. It's wrong to pigeonhole their vocalisations into well-defined categories because it doesn't quite work like that. Each individual cat has their own range of sounds which can be categorised but which are far more fluid and variable than people sometimes think.

Cat annoyed by owner and asks to be put down
Cat annoyed by owner and asks to be put down. Screenshot.

When you take the facial expression of clear annoyance and irritation together with this strange non-feline sound it is quite clear what the cat wants to say to his/her owner. He wants to be put down because he's being held in the wrong way and in any case he doesn't want to be picked up and filmed like this. I think the woman is deliberately provoking this kind of reaction in her cat for the camera to make an interesting video.

Note: This is a video from another website. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.


ASSOCIATED: Cell phone app understands your cat’s facial expressions

Once again, this is a mild form of cat abuse in order to gather a large number of viewings to a video. We see a lot of this. It irritates me but I'm not making a strange sound and I don't have a strong expression of annoyance!

ASSOCIATED PAGE: Noticeable difference in facial expression when feral cat is rehabilitated

What I like about the video is what I've said namely that it kind of proves that domestic gas can have very strong facial expressions. I think the cat is a Burmese and Burmese cats are talkative and they express their views in the sounds that they make! They are also loyal and friendly but not immune to being annoyed if mildly abused!

Monday, 16 August 2021

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?
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.

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