If a kitty pees on the bedspread, do they know they’re in trouble if the owner finds out, or wiil they have probably forgotten about it in a few minutes or hours, and then think they are being persecuted if their owner yells at them the next day after discovering it?
I was a hard core cat disliker, until we got our first cat minmei. I am also a psychologist. For your specific OP I would say no. To my wife who is glaring at my neck right now…I’d say she thinks YES, they are smart enough to be ashamed.
Anecdotally, if I do something to piss minmei off, I find a small turd in the shower I usually shower in. If this is not intellect in some capacity I don’t know what is…
It’s not a question of intelligence or of shame.
Kitty is not the least bit ashamed that she peed on the bedspread because she meant to do it. She could have gone to the litter box, but chose not to. The reason why is not always obvious, but it’s usually a form of protest. Change my litter. Get rid of the other cat. Lose the baby.
Is she intelligent enough to know that you’ll be mad? Of course. That’s why she did it.
After all, you’re not really her owner. You’re her domestic staff.
Cats? Shame? What are you talking about?
My understanding is that cats can equate you being mad with their being pee on the bedspread, but not with their having peed on the bedspread. Unless you catch them in the act, they’ll forget that they were the culprit.
They might cringe and hide next time you come home and there’s pee on the bedspread, but not because they feel guilty. If you pee on the quilt yourself, leave, and come back, they’ll cringe and hide, too: all they know is that you’re angry when the bedspread has pee on it.
This is what the humane society muckety-mucks tell me, anyway: that’s why they recommend against punishment-based training for animals.
Daniel
I believe a comedian once said this: They don’t feel shame because they know you’re mad. They run and hide because you swell up, turn red, and start screaming and flailing around.
A mate of mine has a rather elderly cat who has been the only pet in the houshold all his life. A year or two back, my friend babysat a small dog while its owners went overseas. One morning, my friend was in still bed with his girlfriend, the cat stormed into the room and took a piss in one of his girlfriend’s shoes, while they watched. The cat eyeballed them the entire time.
As my friend related the story, the cat had an expression of, “I know I’m going to get in some serious trouble for doing this, but I don’t fuckin’ care. Now get rid of that bloody dog!”
Well, here’s my story. We have a really stupid cat, but one of the sweetest you’ll ever find. Anyways, sometimes when I have friends over he’ll get scared and avoid the catbox as it’s near my room. Anyways, he’ll typically end up taking a dump in the bathroom (ironically). When we discover it the next morning and try to find the cat, you can tell by the way he acts that he knows he did something wrong (even hours after the event). Now I don’t know whether he’s “ashamed” or not, but he knows he did something he wasn’t supposed too.
I don’t think its an issue of having enough intelligence but rather that they lack MORALS enough to be ashamed.
Meow…
I’ve had cats and dogs my whole life. Cat’s don’t feel shame. They always do exactly what they want to do and expect you to deal with it.
My brother recently spent a week staying here with me in my home. He doesn’t like cats and my cat doesn’t like him. He did some laundry and folded his clean clothes on the bed in the guest room. My cat slipped in when he was out and took a dump directly on his pile of clean clothing. She did it deliberately, she’s never gone anywhere but her box before. She just wanted to let him know she didn’t like him and didn’t want him in ‘her’ house. And it is ‘her’ house as far as she’s concerned. I’m in charge of food, water and changing the litter. She’s in charge of everything else.
They are not ashmed if they purposly releave themselves in places they shouldn’t, but don’t want to get caught either. Then again if then are locked in a room they will try to find a place to go if they really need to but seem embarased.
Also I noticed this embarasment when kitty misses a jump
regarding the dumping/urinating stuff, aren’t they just trying to mark/reassert their territory?
In addition to the above mentioned stuff, cats do not live in a hierarchical society. Dogs can understand social consequenses because that’s a behavior system they’ve evolved to understand. Do something that disrupts the pack, and you’re either punished or kicked out. Cats live by their own rules, not the rules of the group. It’s not a matter of being “smart” enough to understand, it’s more that they don’t care.
Shame? No. Awareness of “wrong-doing” in some social (not moral) sense, and fear of punishment? Yes.
One of our cats, Plummet, is a real greedyguts, and gobbles his food down while the other, Shadow, genteelly nibbles at his. Plummet often tries to steal Shadow’s food when he’s finished his own. He knows that if we see him he’ll get a swat on the nose and shouted at. So he gets furtive about it, and when caught, cringes a bit.
There is a social hierarchy, for sure, MixieArmadillo, it’s just that it’s very very different from dogs. For feral cat colonies, it’s more like a lion pride. There are issues of territorial ownership, sexual behaviour and so on. And then, since we castrated our little beasts, they don’t grow up to be wide-ranging toms. There seems to be some level of perpetual juvenile, in which “Break rules, then Mummy will spank” is understood.
My mom had a cat that, when pissed at her, would hide under the dining room table and when my mom walked by, would take a swipe at her leg.
And then when my mom would go on vacation with her friends (when my mom was single and still living at home), the cat would somehow manage to open Mom’s lingerie drawer, pull out all of her bras and slips and panties, and strew them all over my mom’s bedroom.
Queens (breedable females) are at the top of a cat hierarchy. Neutered males are at the bottom. When you have two cats that are identical (two non-breedable females, like mine for example), the hierarchy can be different depending on the circumstances. One of my cats is dominant with regards to food, while that same cat won’t go near a toy that lands near the other one.
when I visited my kinda-sorta Girlfriend a month ago, before I got there she STUPIDLY told her male cat (she has two females also, one of which is his sister) that he wasn’t man of the house for the week I was there.
After two days, he at least once daily pooped right in front of her bedroom door. The first two days, he would look at me in an investigative way (his sister seemed to really take to me), but then ignored me for the rest of the week. He didn’t seem to have blame me tho, but my GF instead.
She tells me that he occasionally leaves a reminder- about once a week.
For reasons that make her my kinda-sorta GF, which I will not explain (maybe someday in the Pit), I kinda admire that damn cat.
My cats know when I am pissed at them versus when I am pissed at something else. Whenever they get into a fight they break it up and run away from me when I get up and chase after them, yelling, “Dammit, stop that, you two!” Sometimes they’ll run upstrairs and hide under my bed to escape my wrath. If I get pissed about something else and they hear me yelling and swearing they don’t run away. In fact, one of them comes up to me to comfort me. Bless his little heart. He always makes me feel better when this it the case.
Our cat knows when she’s done something that I will not approve of. In fact, sometimes I’ve been tipped off that she did something because of the way she’s acting. I wouldn’t go so far as to say she feels guilt or shame, but she certainly knows that she’s committed a kitty crime.
If you’ve effectively communicated house rules on the subject to them, they know when they’ve done something you won’t approve of. Usually, though, to communicate the rules effectively, you usually have to catch them in the act at least once. If you just come up later after something they might not know is wrong, they have no idea what the hell you’re screaming about, just like dealing with humans. Unfortunately, they usual know exactly what the problem is and just don’t give a flying fuck.
About two days after giving birth to four kittens my Clio was sitting on the bed when she got the most extraordinary expression on her face, a mixture of horror and embarrassment. Then she flooded, and I mean flooded, the duvet with pee. It seemed pretty clear that some internal adjustment was the cause, that she had no more warning than us and she was pretty upset about it. So we comforted her and made no big deal out of having to change the bed.
The way I deal with misplaced cat waste in general is to show I’m pissed off at the poo without looking at or speaking to the cat suspect. I just stomp about with buckets and mops and newspaper in order to irritate and inconvenience the animal concerned. They seem to have got the idea – apart from the occasional deliberate and defiant wee on the curtains when my silly shecat gets upset (sigh). I had a routine which worked really well on an adult female who came to stay and regularly left a morning deposit in the kitchen – “oh sorry baby I’ve fed the others and I was about to get yours but I’ve spotted this poo and now you have to wait while I clean up…” I took my time over cleaning up, she got fed up with late breakfast, no more poo under the table.