Catwatching (4 page)

A second important function of the stropping with the front feet is the exercising and strengthening of the retraction and protrusion apparatus of the claws, so vital in catching prey, fighting rivals and climbing.

A third function, not suspected by most people, is that of scentmarking. There are scent glands on the underside of the cat's front paws and these are rubbed vigorously against the fabric of the furniture being clawed. The rhythmic stropping, left paw, right paw, squeezes scent on to the surface of the cloth and rubs it in, depositing the cat's personal signature on the furniture. This is why it is always your favourite chair which seems to suffer most attention, because the cat is responding to your own personal fragrance and adding to it. Some people buy an expensive scratching-post from a pet shop, carefully impregnated with catnip to make it appealing, and are bitterly disappointed when the cat quickly ignores it and returns to stropping the furniture. Hanging an old sweat-shirt over the scratching-post might help to solve the problem, but if a cat has already established a particular chair or a special part of the house as its 'stropping spot', it is extremely hard to alter the habit.

In desperation, some cat-owners resort to the cruel practice of having their pets de-clawed. Apart from the physical pain this inflicts, it is also psychologically damaging to the cat and puts it at a serious disadvantage in all climbing pursuits, hunting activities and feline social relationships. A cat without its claws is not a true cat.

When you enter a room where a cat is lying asleep on the floor and you greet it with a few friendly words, it may respond by rolling over on its back, stretching out its legs as far as they will go, yawning, exercising its claws and gently twitching the tip of its tail. As it performs these actions, it stares at you, checking your mood. This is a cat's way of offering you a passively friendly reaction and it is something which is only done to close family intimates. Few cats would risk such a greeting if the person entering the room were a stranger, because the belly-up posture makes the animal highly vulnerable.

Indeed, this is the essence of its friendliness. The cat is saying, in effect, 'I roll over to show you my belly to demonstrate that I trust you enough to adopt this highly vulnerable posture in your presence."

A more active cat would rush over to you and start rubbing against you as a form of friendly greeting, but a cat in a lazy, sleepy mood prefers the belly-roll display. The yawning and stretching that accompany it reflect the sleepiness of the animal – a sleepiness which it is prepared to interrupt just so much and no more. The slight twitching of the tail indicates that there is a tiny element of conflict developing – a conflict between remaining stretched out and jumping up to approach the new arrival.

It is not always safe to assume that a cat making this belly-up display is prepared to allow you to stroke its soft underside. It may appear to be offering this option, but frequently an attempt to respond with a friendly hand is met with a swipe from an irritated paw. The belly region is so well protected by the cat that it finds contact there unpleasant, except in relationships where the cat and its human owner have developed a very high degree of social intimacy. Such a cat may trust its human family to do almost anything to it. But the more typical, wary cat draws the line at approaches to its softer parts.

Partly to make friendly physical contact with you, but there is more to it than that. The cat usually starts by pressing against you with the top of its head or the side of its face, then rubs all along its flank and finally may slightly twine its tail around you. After this it looks up and then repeats the process, sometimes several times. If you reach down and stroke the animal, it increases its rubbing, often pushing the side of its mouth against your hand, or nudging upwards with the top of its head. Then eventually it wanders off, its greeting ritual complete, sits down and washes its flank fur.

All these elements have special meanings. Essentially what the cat is doing is implementing a scent-exchange between you and it. There are special scent glands on the temples and at the gape of the mouth.

Another is situated at the root of the tail. Without your realizing it, your cat has marked you with its scent from these glands. The feline fragrances are too delicate for our crude noses, but it is important that friendly members of the cat's family should be scent-sharing in this way. This makes the cat feel more at home with its human companions. And it is important, too, for the cat to read our scent signals. This is achieved by the flank-rubbing element of the greeting, followed by the cat sitting down and 'tasting' us with its tongue through the simple process of licking the fur it has just rubbed so carefully against us.

One of the problems cats have when adjusting to human companions is that we are much too tall for them. They hear our voices coming from what is, to them, a great height and they find it hard to greet such a giant in the usual way. How can they perform the typical cat-to-cat greeting of rubbing faces with one another? The answer is that they cannot. They have to make do with rubbing our legs or a downstretched hand. But it is in their nature to aim their greetings more towards the head region, and so they make a little intention movement of doing this – the stifflegged hop in which the front feet are lifted up off the ground together, raising the body for a brief moment before letting it fall back again to its usual four-footed posture. This greeting hop is therefore a token survival of a head-to-head contact.

A clue to this interpretation comes from the way small kittens sometimes greet their mother when she returns to the nest. If they have developed to the point where their legs are strong enough for the 'hop', the kittens will perform a modest version of the same movement, as they push their heads up towards that of the mother cat. In their case there is not far to go, and she helps by lowering her own head towards theirs, but the incipient hop is clear enough.

As with all rubbing-greetings, the head-to-head contact is a feline method of mingling personal scents and turning them into shared family scents. Some cats use their initiative to re-create a better head contact when greeting their human friends. Instead of the rather sad little symbolic hop, they leap up on to a piece of furniture near the human and employ this elevated position to get themselves closer for a more effective face-to-face rub.

All cat-owners have experienced the moment when their cat jumps up and with cautious movements settles itself down on their lap. After a short pause it starts to press down, first with one front paw and then with the other, alternating them in a rhythmic kneading or trampling action.

The rhythm is slow and deliberate as if the animal is marking time in slow motion. As the action becomes more intense the prick of claws can be felt, and at this point the owner usually becomes irritated and shoos the cat away, or gently picks it up and places it on the floor.

The cat is clearly upset by this rebuff and the owners are similarly put out when, brushing away a few cat hairs, they discover that the animal has been dribbling while trampling. What does all this mean?

To find the answer it is necessary to watch kittens feeding at the nipple. There the same actions can be observed, with the kittens' tiny paws kneading away at their mother's belly. These are the movements which stimulate the flow of milk to the nipples and the dribbling is part of the mouthwatering anticipation of delicious nourishment to come.

This 'milk-treading', as it is called, is done at a very slow pace of approximately one stroke every two seconds, and it is always accompanied by loud purring. What happens when the adult pet tramples on the lap of its human owner must therefore be interpreted as a piece of infantile behaviour. It would seem that when the owner sits down in a relaxed manner, signals are given off saying to the cat, 'I am your mother lying down ready to feed you at the breast." The adult cat then proceeds to revert to kittenhood and squats there, purring contentedly and going through the motions of stimulating a milk supply.

From the cat's point of view this is a warm, loving moment and its bodily removal by a claw-pricked owner must be quite inexplicable. No good cat mother would behave in such a negative way. People react rather differently. To the cat they are clearly maternal figures, because they do supply milk (in a saucer) and other nourishment, and they do sit down showing their undersides in an inviting manner, but once the juvenile reaction of milk-treading is given, they suddenly and mystifyingly become upset and thrust the pseudo-infant from them.

This is a classic example of the way in which interactions between humans and cats can lead to misunderstandings. Many can be avoided by recognizing the fact that an adult domestic cat remains a kitten in its behaviour towards its pseudo-parental owner.

This action is always referred to as an indication of the fastidious tidiness of the cat. Owners of messy dogs are often regaled with this fact by cat-owners insisting on the superiority of felines over canines. This favoured interpretation of faeces burying as a sign of cat hygiene does not, however, stand up to close investigation.

The truth is that cats bury their faeces as a way of damping down their odour display. Faeces-burying is the act of a subordinate cat, fearful of its social standing. Proof of this was found when the social lives of feral cats were examined closely. It was discovered that dominant tomcats, far from burying their faeces, actually placed them on little 'advertising' hill-ocks, or any other raised points in the environment where the odour could be wafted abroad to maximum effect. It was only the weaker, more subdued cats which hid their faeces. The fact that our pet cats always seem to carry out such a careful burying routine is a measure of the extent to which they see themselves dominated by us (and also perhaps by the other cats in the neighbourhood). This is not really so surprising. We are physically stronger than they are and we completely dominate that all-important element in feline life – the food supply. Our dominance is in existence from the time of kittenhood onwards, and never in serious doubt. Even big cats, such as lions, can be kept in this subordinate role for a lifetime, by their friendly owners, so it is hardly surprising that the small domestic cat is permanently in awe of us and therefore always makes sure to bury its faeces.

Burying the faeces does not, of course, completely switch off the odour signal, but it does reduce it drastically. In this way the cat can continue to announce its presence through its scents, but not to the extent that it transmits a serious threat.

The obvious answer is to keep itself clean, but there is much more to grooming than this. In addition to cleaning away dust and dirt or the remains of the last meal, the repeated licking of the fur helps to smooth it so that it acts as a more efficient insulating layer. A ruffled coat is a poor insulator, which can be a serious hazard for a cat in freezing weather. Cold is not the only problem. Cats easily overheat in summer-time and fur-grooming increases then for a special reason. Cats do not have sweat glands all over their bodies as we do, so they cannot use sweating as a rapid method of cooling. Panting helps, but it is not enough. The solution is to lick repeatedly at the fur and deposit on it as much saliva as possible. The evaporation of this saliva then acts in the same way as the evaporation of sweat on our skin.

If cats have been in sunlight they increase their grooming even more.

This is not, as might be imagined, simply because they are even hotter, but because the action of sunlight on their fur produces essential vitamin D. They acquire this crucial additive to their diet by the licking movements of their tongues over the sun-warmed fur.

Grooming also increases when cats become agitated. This is called displacement grooming and it is believed to act as an aid to relieving the strain of tense social encounters. When we are in a state of conflict we often 'scratch our heads'. A cat under similar conditions licks its fur.

Any cat-owner who has just been holding or cuddling their cat will be familiar with the animal's actions as soon as it has been released from human contact. It wanders off, sits down and then, nearly always, starts to groom itself. This is partly because it needs to smooth its ruffled fur, but there is also another reason. You have, by handling the cat, given it your scent and to some extent masked the cat's scent.

The licking of the fur redresses the balance, weakening your scent and reinforcing the cat's own odour on its body surface. Our lives are dominated by visual signals, but in the cat's world odours and fragrances are much more important, and an overdose of human scent on its fur is disturbing and has to be rapidly corrected. In addition, the licking of the fur you have been handling means that the cat can actually enjoy 'tasting' you and reading the signals it gets from the scent of your sweat glands. We may not be able to smell the odour of our hands, but a cat can.

Finally, the vigorous tugging at the fur which is so typical of a cat's self-grooming actions plays a special role in stimulating the skin glands at the base of the individual hairs. The secretions of these glands are vital to keep the fur waterproofed, and the tugging of the cat's busy tongue steps up the waterproofing as a protection against the rain.

So grooming is much more than mere cleaning. When it licks its fur a cat is protecting itself, not only from dirt and disease, but also from exposure to cold, from overheating, from vitamin deficiency, from social tension, from foreign odours and from getting drenched to the skin. No wonder it devotes so much of its waking day to this piece of behaviour.