So a typical tabby cat has a striped tail. If you look at the tail, it’s pretty obvious that the light-dark alternating stripes are something that is very easy to see even at low visual resolutions, in noisy environments or at night.
The cat seems to have about 6 different tail signals. Tail up like a mast = friend, greeting. Tail flicking violently = warn, I’m about to attack. Tail gently swishing seems to be the “activity” light on the cat, I don’t know why it feels the need to tell other cats it is busy. Tail down covering the glands seems to be submissive.
Well, if cats are solo animals, why do they have the ability to do this?
Cats will encounter each other and need to communicate. And not all cats are solitary, nearby my house there used to be an undeveloped area on a corner that was home to a large feral and/or stray cat population. I didn’t go see exactly how they lived but there were at least a dozen cats living primarily in about a quarter acre of lightly wooded and overgrown space. Un-neutered toms seem to be the most solitary and territorial in my limited observations, females and neutered males much less so, and some actually hang around together much of the time.
This is it in a nutshell. No animal is solitary, there are always other of the same species or differing species and the animals need to be able to communicate.
Although a lot of dogs, never seem to learn the warning signs of a skunk
Cats aren’t social in the same way that dogs or humans are, but they’re not completely asocial. They won’t form a relationship with a group as a whole the way we do, but they will form relationships with other individual cats. If nothing else, they socialize with other cats to mate and to raise young, and so they need to be able to communicate for those purposes.
Domestic cats are descended (mostly) from the African wildcat. It’s not a pack animal, but it’s not solitary, either; males live alone, but in ranges that overlap those of several females.
Experienced hunters don’t usually “chirp” at their prey. I’ve had a number of indoor cats who swished their tails and made chirpy sounds at bugs, squirrels and birds outside the window, and such.
Just from my experience with the two cats we have now, they are very social.
We have a mutt black and white female cat that we got from the animal shelter. We also have a solid white male Manx that we got from our neighbor.
I have to say though, the Manx is a little bit non cat like. He is a cat that forgot how to cat.
Anyway the female will come up to the male, lie down and proceed to entice the male to give her a bath. He will comply. When she is satisfied, she will slap the crap out of him. Poor guy just doesn’t learn.
On the contrary, this striped pattern is very difficult to see – a very efficient camouflage in a tall-grass environment. Big cats like tigers have that same pattern all over their bodies, and it works (see here). The USA Defense department has even developed a camouflage patter based on it, called ‘tigerstripe’.
Cats apparently display altruism. I was watching Nature and it showed a colony of feral cats at a fishing dock in Japan. When the fishermen docked with their catch, the cats ran en masse to get fish scraps, except for a mother cat whose kitten was too young for it to leave behind. Another female cat, presumably the mother cat’s sister, stayed with the kitten while the mother cat went to get food. Unfortunately, the babysitter was a little young and inexperienced and began to play roughly with the kitten and knocked it into a hole it was unable to climb out of. However, the female was able to rescue the kitten from the hole just in time for its mother to rejoin them. So, cats do seem to watch out for each other.
One of the cats who used to live with my mom used to give another one baths, too (both of them spayed females). The younger one gave the older one baths, and considered this proper and appropriate, because she was convinced that the older one was her kitten (yes, I know, but try explaining that to a cat). The older one also considered it proper and appropriate, because she was the supreme high empress of all she surveyed, and so it was only reasonable for her to have personal servants. It’s a good thing they couldn’t communicate more effectively, or they probably both would have been offended.
