Do Cats Hear with Their Feet? by Jake Page

Author:Jake Page [Page, Jake]
Language: fra
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-09-21T15:41:53+00:00

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DO CATS HEAR WITH THEIR FEET?

trouble once the cat is in the world of humans. No one knows how many cats sitting on the stove have caught on fire.

Some cats will ask for a bit of gentle stroking by rubbing themselves against the human’s ankles, arching the back and raising the tail to the vertical. In a sense, petting a cat reminds it of the pleasurable sensation of being groomed by its mother when it was very young. But too much stroking is taken as threatening. Cats are not like dogs who will sit all day in one place as long as someone will scratch them. Not being especially social animals, cats typically will soon tire of being stroked and will leave, or flatten their ears menacingly, or even bite the hand that strokes them.

For furry animals in general, being stroked is almost surely a more intense feeling than it is for us furless humans—intensely positive or intensely negative. On a cat or a dog, for example, each hair grows out of a small cluster of cells that are fairly strongly tweaked when a hair has been moved. Each hair is like a lever, the shifting of which in one direction or another has a magnified effect on the sensory neurons at its base. The Whisker

most sensitive levers on a cat’s body are, of course, its whis-positions: At

kers, which scientists call vibrissae to differentiate them from rest (left);

walking

a human’s whiskers, which are just hairs growing out of the (center);

chin and face. These are especially thick and stiff hairs, and the greeting,

little bundle of cells are three times farther below the skin than defensive

regular hairs. These deep cells send vibrissae-sensed messages (right)

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