A 22-month-old female scaredy cat tiger appeared to get the shock of her young life when she encountered a dead leaf floating on a pool of water in the Bandhavgarh National Park, India. Clearly unusure about just what was approaching her, the partially submerged youngster’s tail shot up in the air and with teeth bared she let out her most fearsome growl – all in an effort to scare the humble leaf away.
Picture: HERMANN BREHM / NPL / Rex Features
I CAN’T BREATHE
OMFG I AM DYING!
this is like the happiest thing I have encountered in a while
they should form a support group.
I lost it when I saw the tail, before I even read the comment oh my god
My name is cat And wen I see An unnown thing Approaching me Prepared to fite I show my teef I growl real loud I scare the leef
Obviously I want you to take care of your pets and make sure they get food and fresh water on a regular basis, but cats being huge drama queens and screaming hysterically at you and acting like they’re tragic famine victims who haven’t eaten in weeks and are about to drop dead from starvation right mcfuckin now, because you’re 10 minutes late feeding them is always going to be one of the funniest things to me
the cat who lives at the vet clinic i volunteer at was mad yesterday because his dinner was half an hour late due to a busy day. he proceeded to go to all the (empty dw) garbage cans and tried to knock them over and started desperately scavenging for scraps of food because obviously no one loves him or cares about him and if he must eat garbage to survive then so be it
not food related, but one time my cat cried at me for 20 minutes before i worked out that the reason why she was upset was because there was a coat hanger on her favourite cushion
This is absolutely beautiful and changed my life, thank you so much. Please protect her from hangers at all costs
wow. am STORVING and humaines here making joke laugh at cate honger ?!
My cat is a social eater who is not food motivated at all, so I was baffled when I first got him because he didn’t seem to care about food but he would SCREAM at me for hours when I knew his bowl was full. Any time I went to double check that he did indeed have food, he’d book it to the bowl and snarf like his life depended on it, but as soon as I walked away he’d follow me screaming again.
Eventually I figured out that he just wanted a dining companion and was screaming about how we’re a family and families eat together, god damnit! I moved his food bowl under my computer desk and it fixed the problem. But if I’m ever out for more than 12 hours I’ll come home to find him in a passive-aggressive kitty huff because dinner has been ready for hours but he’s been trying to be considerate (unlike some humans) and waiting for me to eat it.
My cats are indoor cats. Being indoor cats, they can’t go outside to hunt for food (mice, rats, birds, etc) to gift to my sister and I.
But they know that the kitchen has food. They know where the easily accessible cat food is. And obviously my sister and I are just Really Big Stupid Hairless cats.
So if my sister and I go without leaving our rooms for too long? My cats will sit outside our doors and scream for our attention, lead us to their food bowls, and then only stop the screaming and leading once they see us sit down at the table and eat something. Because they think we’re hungry.
That thing about how cats think humans are big kittens is a myth, y’know.
It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.
The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats – but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.
It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true – but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.
They like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates – it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.
They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need – it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.
They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.
It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.
Basically, you’re going to have a much easier time getting a handle on why your cat does why your cat does if you remember that the natural mode of social organisation for cats is not as isolated solitary hunters, but as a big communal catpile – and for that purpose, you count as a cat.
Procrastination Station 