This is actually pretty normal and certainly not very unusual although the owner was nonplussed. My cat does something similar on my arm when I am wearing an old fleece dressing gown. I let him do it and this owner should let his cat do it. Why? Because it pleases him, and it does no harm and it's not really an inconvenience for the human caregiver in my view. Human caregivers should do all they can to please their cat. This often means allowing them to express natural behaviour.
Male cat has 'sex' with bed clothes. Screenshot.
It is entirely instinctive. You can see that he wants to hump his owner because he has grabbed the fictional female by the scruff of our neck in his jaws. He is clearly confused because he thinks that the bedsheet is a female cat.
It sort of proves that cats are very instinctive in their behaviour, and they don't rationalise what they're doing. If they did this cat would understand that he has a bedsheet in his mouth that he is trying to hump.
To me, it doesn't signify any mental health problem. It's just, as I said, instinctive and an outlet for his natural drives and motivators. Dogs like to hump their owner's leg sometimes for the same sort of reason. Our pets need an outlet for their sexual urges and there's not much of an outlet for them.
And notably, domestic cats can still have an urge to procreate even when they are neutered i.e., their balls have been removed. I think that it is a very cruel operation but a very necessary one at the same time. Losing the production of testosterone does not sometimes prevent their urge to procreate.
On that basis, it seems that the origin of the urge to procreate does not come from testosterone but survival of the species, I guess. Testosterone probably heightens the urge and drives male cats harder to pass on their genes.
Note: sometimes embedded videos stop working or malfunction, something I cannot, regrettably control.
This charming photograph is on the quora.com website on a page which discusses the photo-editing of pictures of cats. And the person who started off the discussion said that pictures of cats should never be photoshopped because cats are charming enough as it is, and they don't need to be photo edited.
And you should never add human teeth to cats which, incidentally, is something we see a lot of on the Internet.
Anyway, one person who joined the conversation added a screenshot of a photograph of a 14-year-old cat head-butting an 18-month-old child and that is the photograph that you see on this page.
It is charming and it is to be expected to be honest. The ginger tabby obviously has a nice connection with this child. And he is doing what he would do with an adult person which is to scent exchange. That means he deposits his scent from the glands around his head onto the child and in doing that he receives the child's scent onto his head.
There is a metaphorical merging of minds and beings which is reassuring for him. It's a bit like saying that the child is part of his family. And as the child now smells more like him, he is part of the family.
Based on what I have read and seen on the Internet, domestic cats are curious about babies, and they often form good relationships with babies. I don't see any real danger to babies from domestic cats. There is a fear probably by some mothers that a baby might be harmed but it doesn't happen.
And there's quite a lot of work on whether a baby benefits from being in a home with a cat and indeed being close to a cat such as when sleeping with a cat on their bed at night. This is still work in progress but my reading of the science on this is that it can strengthen a child's defences against allergens.
In effect, when a baby is in a relationship with a domestic cat it desensitises them to allergens in the air for the rest of their life. But, as mentioned, the science is not entirely conclusive on this.
The feline allergen, Fel D1, is carried around the entirety of the home on cat dander, which is a kind of dandruff, but it is in fact small skin particles and bits of hair on which is dried saliva and the dried oils of sebaceous glands in the skin both of which deposit the feline allergen onto these tiny particles which are 5 µm across.
They are so small that they can float in the air very easily and they land on bits of furniture and so on which is why a person who is allergic to cats can feel the effects of the allergy even when they are a good distance from the cat in a home where a cat resides.
Accused cat killer in court. Screenshot from video below.
The video explains the story. It is pretty horrible, but the guy is innocent until proven guilty as we all know. The protesting ladies are sure that he is the cat killer because he was captured by a security camera abducting one of the cats and the footage is sufficiently clear to identify the individual.
The guy is 18-years-of-age. He looks much older.
Please remember I can't guarantee that the video above will remain functional as it is embedded here and served up by a computer beyond my control.
The video caption is "Orangevale alleged cat killer appears in court. Madisen Keavy was outside the Sacramento County Main Jail where she questioned the accused cat killer and spoke with neighbors in Orangevale".
There are many cat killers in many countries. In fact, all countries have cat killers because the domestic, stray and feral cat polarises opinion and there are many disturbed people, almost always men or boys, who need to express their anger by killing innocent and available animals.
The outside domestic cat is a very convenient target sadly.
EV stands for electric vehicle as you probably know. Charging points are springing up around various countries where the sales of EVs are sometimes outstripping diesel-engine cars. And so, we have charging points in public places. And in this instance, we have a car charging point sign which looks like a cat charging point sign because the sign is tipped up vertically. If you flip the sign through 90 degrees to the right (turn the picture on its side), you will recognise the outline of a vehicle.
Image: Nigel Stewart
The person who spotted it said:
"Woah, didn't know you could get electric cats. Can finally get rid of my petrol one."
Here it is flipped through 90 degrees to the right.
Image as above.
The sign is outside a supermarket chain in the UK called Morrisons. Nigel Stewart had nipped down to his local Morrisons in Kirkham, Lancashire to get some bits and bobs for his dog, a nine-year-old Cavachon Fozzie when he spotted the interesting sign.
I wonder if the draughtsman who drew the image thought the same thing. I don't think he or she did because if they did realise, they probably would have altered the orientation of the image and kept it horizontal.
Take a look at this. I know that it is not directly about cats, but it is indirectly because it is about being risk averse. Risk aversion goes to the heart of everything we do and achieve. Modest risk aversion is good but being overly risk averse is bad as it stunts development and experiences. It leads to less of a life. This philosophy affects how we care for our cats.
Risk aversion is part of decision making in cat caretaking - Michael
In fact, it goes to the heart of the debate on full-time indoor cats and indoor/outdoor cats. I am not saying that the full-time indoor cat life is bad. Far from it. Often it is very sensible. I am saying though that a lot of the time the reason why cat owners confine their cats to the home is for peace of mind. It is primarily for the benefit of the human and not the cat.
This guy (not living in the West) is not risk averse. No sir. Image: Screenshot from video. Sorry the quality is so poor.
And there has to be an 'and', when domestic cats are confined to the home for their life, they become zoo animals in effect. The owners do not compensate by entertaining their cat sufficiently. The environment is insufficiently enriched.
I can think of only one example where the cat owner truly committed to designing the interior of their home half for the benefit of their cat companions and half for themselves. And I have seen tens of thousands of pictures and examples.
I have just written about a philosophy or religion or even a concept called "animism". It's hard to know what it actually is. I think it is a type of religion, but it is very far from the conventional religions of the West such as Christianity in which people worship a man. Christianity seems to be sexist to me. And I think that Christianity has left a terrible legacy to the world.
Shamans from the organization Tengeri conduct an offering ritual in 2013. Image: see bottom left.
Through the bible, Christianity preached and continues to preach that humankind has dominion over the rest of the world including all animals. That's at least partly why, I argue, there is mass and endemic animal abuse across the planet and has been for centuries. An also who sport hunters have no empathy with animals. It is completely missing.
And that is why humans think they can control and abuse nature to their own commercial ends.
But nature is striking back with global warming. And if everybody on the planet believed in animism, we wouldn't have global warming. Animism is respectful of nature, the landscape, the mountains and all these inanimate objects which are given souls by animism. They almost become sentient. They are part of our lives. They support us.
Animism believes that nature is more powerful than people. The landscape has dominion over people. People have a place within the landscape, within nature and the world. This forces people to be more respectful of inanimate objects and animate objects other than themselves.
It is hard to know whether it is a religion or not. It is certainly a belief system as I would call it. It appears that ancient tribal people tucked away in some far-flung lands are far more predisposed to believing in animism than the technocrats and capitalists of the West.
Technology seems to me to present a barrier between people and nature. Technology too dry. It lacks spirit. But if a person opens their mind and walks into a forest and tries to commune with nature i.e., talk to the trees, they will talk back. It's a question of being open-minded and 'feeling' nature.
Sadly, most people are so distanced from nature that they have lost contact with it completely. They won't understand animism at all. There are far more likely to understand football and the latest smart phone.
There is a distinct place in the modern world for animism. It is a growing philosophy or religion, and this is timely because the destruction of the planet by humankind would not have happened if there was a greater belief in it.
When people visit fantastic landscapes and sit within that landscape and contemplate or meditate, I believe that they can feel nature and in feeling nature they are practising the religion of animism even if they are unaware of it. That is my interpretation.
A person with a far more knowledgeable approach to animism is Justine Buck Quijada. She is an associate Prof, Department of Religion, Wesleyan University.
I think she sums up animism quite nicely in the following words written by her on The Conversation website:
"Instead of human dominion over the landscape, in animist cosmologies, humans live under the dominion of the landscape around them."
Her article from which I formed my thoughts is available for republishing under a Creative Commons licence and therefore I've taken the liberty, something I would never do normally, to republish it below. It should be interesting to many people who are concerned about the planet, nature and animal welfare.
‘Animism’ recognizes how animals, places and plants have power over humans – and it’s finding renewed interest around the world
Shamans from the organization Tengeri conduct an offering ritual in 2013 to Bukhe Bator, the spirit master of the Selenga River, Republic of Buryatia, Russian Federation.
Roberto Quijada, CC BY-NCJustine Buck Quijada, Wesleyan University
Most of these people are using animism in a very general, and inaccurate, way, to mean the belief that everything in nature has a soul. The renewed interest in animism stems from the hope that people will behave in more ecologically sustainable ways if they believe that the natural world around them is alive.
However, as an anthropologist of religion who works with people whose religious practices were traditionally described as animist, I believe the reality is both more interesting and more complicated. Animism is not a religion or even a set of beliefs about nature having a soul. It’s a term used by scholars to classify religious practices through which human beings cultivate relationships with more powerful beings that reside in the world around us.
A history of the term
The term animism was coined by an early anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylor, in 1870. Tylor argued that Darwin’s ideas of evolution could be applied to human societies; he classified religions according to their level of development.
He defined animism as a belief in souls: the existence of human souls after death, but also the belief that entities Western perspectives deemed inanimate, like mountains, rivers and trees, had souls.
Animism was, in Tylor’s view, the first stage in the evolution of religion, which developed from animism to polytheism and then to monotheism, which was the most “civilized” form of religion. From this perspective, animism was the most primitive kind of religion, while European, Protestant Christianity was seen as the most evolved of all religions.
Tylor was not the first to make this argument. Scottish philosopher David Hume, for example, made a very similar argument in the “Natural History of Religion,” in 1757. Tylor was, however, the first to use the term animism and the classification scheme as part of what was then the nascent field of anthropology, the scientific study of human society.
Animism is therefore not a religion but a term for classifying a type of religion, one which was, in the 1870s at least, deemed by European and American scholars to be less civilized. The racist conception that some groups of people were less civilized than others was integral to the initial definition.
Around the turn of the 19th century, scholars used Tylor’s term to classify a wide array of rituals. James Frazer and Geza Roheim, for example, used animism to argue for similarities among the practices of Indigenous populations, ancient Greeks and European peasants. Animism was used to describe the psychology of Native Americans and Siberian shamans asking spirit masters to offer up game to hunters. By the 1940s, however, the term, and the practice of classifying cultures by their level of development, had fallen out of favor.
Why, then, are environmental activists embracing a term with this complicated history?
An alternative to ‘dominion’
In 1967, historian Lynn White Jr., himself a devout Christian, argued that the world’s environmental problems came from Christian dominion theology. In this reading of the biblical account of Genesis, humans are the only part of creation that is made in the image of God, which is usually interpreted to mean that humans, unlike all else in creation, have souls.
This theology gives humans – through Adam and Eve – dominion over the Earth. White argued that through its creation story, Christianity set up a dichotomy between inanimate matter and animate spirit that lifts humans above creation and turns the rest of the world – from animals and plants to rocks, soil and water – into “resources” to be used.
It is important to note that this is only one of many Christian interpretations of Genesis. On the other hand, White’s argument was that this idea of dominion is what makes environmental exploitation under capitalism possible, and that argument was compelling to many environmentalists, who began to develop an interest in Indigenous belief systems as a way to fix environmental problems.
Relationships of power and obligation
What is important to understand about animism is that it is not a religion per se, nor is it a matter of merely believing that a mountain or a glacier has a soul. Animism describes practices that establish a relationship between places and people, usually one that recognizes places, animals and plants have power over people.
The fabric offerings tied to this tree mark the location where people can make offerings to a being that resides in the landscape. Olkhon Island, Irkutsk Oblast, Russian Federation.Roberto Quijada, CC BY-NC
I study the way urban Buryats, members of an Indigenous population of Siberia, are reviving pre-Soviet forms of animism and shamanism. Many of their rituals involve asking for blessings and protection from beings such as rivers, lakes and mountains, and from ancestors who are located in the landscape – all practices that create relationships of obligation between people and place.
In all these instances, rituals establish relationships of obligation that tie humans to the land, and the land to the humans who live on it. Instead of human dominion over the landscape, in animist cosmologies, humans live under the dominion of the landscape around them.
No magic bullet
Animism is not a religion one can convert to but rather a label used for worldviews and practices that acknowledge relationships between nature and the animal world that have power over humans and must be respected.
New Zealand’s 2017 act recognizing the Whanganui River as a legal person, the culmination of decades of Maori activism, could be described as animism taking a legal form. Additionally, when Indigenous practices are labeled animist religion, it is easy to overlook the very real biological and ecological scientific knowledge of these communities.
Animist practices are as variable as the peoples and places engaging in such relationships. Indigenous and animist perspectives illustrate that there are many different relationships possible between humans and the world around them, and many environmentalists are finding these alternatives instructive, despite the troubled history of the term.
Caught on CCTV, we see a man in Wales, who seems to be fairly elderly, kicking an elderly cat against a wall. The man went out of his way to do it. The cat's owner is bemused at this alleged wanton act of cat cruelty.
She branded the man 'disgusting'. Her cat is 17 years of age. Fortunately, the video shows us that the kick was not particularly violent although the cat was projected against a garden wall.
Man in Wales goes out of his way to kick an old cat. Image: see photo.
The video footage was recorded in Newport, Wales. It shows two older men walking down the road before the skinnier one spots the cat sitting on the pavement (sidewalk) outside a house and not far from a brick wall.
After he spots the cat, he clearly decides to alter his route to kick her. The cat's owner, Valerie Young, of Albert Terrace in Newport spotted the alleged crime because she appears to have her security camera attached wirelessly to her tablet computer.
NOTE: THIS IS NOT DIFFICULT TO LOOK AT. IT IS CRUEL AND BAD HUMAN BEHAVIOR BUT RELATIVELY MILD COMPARED TO WHAT WE ARE USED TO SEEING AND READING ABOUT.
She said: "The cat is old now. She's 17 so she doesn't go far. She only goes in the dingle [a shady dell] next door, and she was laying in the sun. I saw the two men on the camera, but I didn't take much notice. Then I saw what he had done. He kicked the cat against the wall, literally kicked it against the wall."
Valerie says that she is now carrying her cat around because her left paw was hurt in the incident. She will be taking her to a veterinarian to assess the injury.
Apparently, she confronted the men and shouted that she knew what the perpetrator had done.
She said: "'It's just dreadful, I don't understand it. I've just been crying all day. I can't see how people could be so cruel to a little cat. I think it's absolutely disgusting. She was just lying in the sun, that's all she was doing."
It appears that she reported the incident to the police. It is not the first time that her cat has been deliberately injured. Years ago, somebody damaged her cat's eye (it was lost as a result) and cut all her whiskers and all her claws.
Gwent Police have passed on the information to the RSPCA to investigate what is an alleged act of animal cruelty.
The police confirmed that they had "received a report from the Newport area at around 4:30 PM, Wednesday 19 October, that a cat was kicked. Anyone with information, including CCTV or dash cam footage, can call us direct quoting log reference 2200354630."
