I thought all cat breeds hated calicos, because they make so much damn noise. “Hey! I’m trying to sleep here!”
The noisiest cat in my current batch is white with yellow patches. The calico rarely says anything.
I’ve lived with a number of calicos and never noticed that they were particularly noisy.
Cats living together in a household seem to adopt personalities in a curious manner. A more forward personality seems to suppress the same traits in others. I have seen a few time where having sibling cats, one is more dominant, or more vocal, or whatever. Often the larger cat. But if that cat dies, the other will take on some of those traits. A very quiet cat will suddenly blossom into a quite chatty critter.
In the large, cats don’t see one another the way we see them simply because cats have very limited colour perception, being near monochromatic. Something that comes with their vastly better low light vision. But they are still very good at recognising one another. It is interesting how they are essentially indifferent to what we humans are wearing, but still recognise us.
How cats interact with humans is extraordinarily dependant upon how they are socialised in the first months of life. Mother cats tend to teach kittens some of this, but being handled by a range of humans makes a huge difference to general socialising. My sister had a number of cats, all Tonkenese, from the same breeder. My parents had couple from the same breeder. They were the most fabulous and lovely critters. Friendly to anyone. Really affectionate. Until the last one she got, who was clearly nowhere nearly as good. It turned out that the breeder had had a really bad life upset, and the entire enterprise had ben upended, and the care, nurture and socialising of the kittens had been lost.
Desmond Morris, the guy responsible for famous book Manwatching, also wrote Catwatching, and he noted that kittens need to be handled by at least 5 different people in early life. If they are, they will socialise perfectly. If not they tend to only bind with their owners, and tend to run and hide if there is anyone else about. My current cat is rescue. I can tell if anyone is coming to my front door, as he will streak downstairs long before I hear anyone.
I suspect the largest part of cat behaviour is learnt and is relatively plastic depending upon circumstances. Breed may play a part when there are numbers of cats around as larger stronger cats may dominate others, but I haven’t seen much to suggest breed influences much more. Behaviour of the mother, and how she imprints behaviour on her kittens is very important, and that will impress itself on lineages, but not breeds.
I expect smell makes for a more important part of recognizing other animals and humans. It’s why I always let a strange animal, whether dog or cat, smell me before I do things like pet them. BTW, not all cats have good low light vision. Siamese cats either lack or have a poor tapetum, so they can’t see well in dim light.
I agree about smell. This household has always had about 4-6 cats, for 40 yrs or so. Mixed, purebred, all sorts and sizes. Cat politics and disposition seem to have no rules, except they all have claws, and try to avoid using them on each other.
I am convinced that cats have color vision, because most of my cats have chosen places to sit that are the same color they are. The orange cat likes to sit on a wooden step that’s almost his color. The white cats like very light surfaces, etc.
Cat perversity in regards to camouflaging themselves from humans so they will trip and fall after stumbling over them aside, they most likely do have limited color vision. The best guess based on eye structure and some experiments is that they likely can perceive somewhat desaturated blues and possibly yellows, but are fully red-green color blind. Dogs are probably pretty similar, with maybe a little deeper saturation.
Here’s an article with descriptions of cat breeds that I saw today:
Our cat, the orange tabby in my avatar, is a rescue “domestic shorthair”. The only other cats he’s encountered are other rescues, and he’s hissed at them.
And regarding cats’ sense of smell, I don’t remember where I read that they can detect smells from a mile away. Our cat runs to the door to greet my husband when he’s still walking home, half a block away around the corner. AFAIK smell is the only way that the cat can tell he’s coming home since he’s not within sight, and it’s not a timing thing since he comes home at varying times. Unless his footsteps make a distinct sound pattern that the cat can hear half a block away?
Does this article discuss the topic of this thread?
Almost all mammals are what’s usually called red-green color blind in humans, cats are no exception. This means that red-orange-yellow-green range appears as similar hues and distinguishable mainly by brightness, while blue-violet range stands out. The hues of confusion can vary between species based on the opsins expressed by their genes, but it’s in a similar range. They have the S/blue cone and a second cone that can be either more similar to the human M/green or L/red.
The mammals with full color vision include all apes and Old World monkeys. Most New World monkeys do not have 3-cone color vision except howler monkeys and some portion of female monkeys (I think 1/3 or so) in certain species. Nocturnal or deep sea mammals like night monkeys (Aotus) and certain cetaceans and pinnipeds only have one cone expression and see black and white.
It answers the question peripherally, in that it notes behavior traits for some of the breeds. It looks like they’re focused on human-cat interaction, but the traits may also affect interaction between cats. The article describes a “laid-back disposition” for the Birman and “a very sweet disposition” for the Bombay. As for the American Bobtail, “they love companionship” which hopefully includes companionship with other cats.
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I appreciate the frustration when an OP requests a specific, focused topic, and replies go off topic. But in this particular case, I think that Dopers are doing about the best they can to give as much of an answer as they can (which isn’t much) to the stated question.
Yes, we have a large altered male cat, who is the “alpha cat”. But he is a lover, not a fighter, and his ‘dominance’ is mostly him pushing other cats from their bowl and eating a bite.
They do, but no red/green and the rest is not as bright as us primates.
They do have excellent hearing. And I was told more than once that my horses would gather at the gate to their paddock as I was coming down the driveway to the barn, out of their sight, but apparently within their hearing, and they recognized the sound of my car. Our critters are very tuned into us.
When I had five cats, all fixed, four male and one female, Stanley got along fine with everyone else. But after the two most dominant males died, he became territorial and aggressive toward the remaining male and female, to the point where I had to rehome him for their sakes. It seemed to me that as long as he was a subordinate male he was willing to tolerate those two, and he never gave the top two any sass, but once he became, in his mind, top cat, he wanted the territory all to himself. Fortunately he went to an excellent home where he could be the only cat.
For Horses, the various breeds that have been created are classified as cold-bloods, warm-bloods, and hot-bloods.
Cold-bloods are the large draft horses, Shire, Percheron, Clydesdale, etc. A calm, unflappable temperament is needed for such a large animal working to pull a large cart of valueable goods.
Warm-bloods are medium size horses, primarily used in equestrian sports like dressage & jumping, and pleasure riding & driving.
Hot-bloods are lighter-bodied, long-legged horses with more energy & high-strung attitude, used in racing, endurance, etc. Breeds like Arabian, Thoroughbred, Standardbred.
But in groups, how horses treat other horses doesn’t seem to depend on breed. Horses, as a herd animal*, have a definite ‘ranking’ within the herd, and that doesn’t depend on breed. Or even on physical size: it’s not uncommon to see a smaller mare bossing around big draft horses in a herd.
So in Horses, like in cats, disposition toward others doesn’t seem to be related to the breed.
* Quite unlike cats, which are definitely NOT a herd animal.
Cats aren’t a herd animal; but they’re definitely social.
Given the chance, they’ll live in a group of mostly related females, with an adult tom or I think sometimes a pair of brothers attached to the clowder.
The social skills, as in humans, are partly learned. Humans often take a young kitten and separate it from all other cats. Such cats may have difficulty getting along with other cats later in their lives; they never learned how. Unrelated cats who are used to living with other cats will often make friends quite easily.
— Dominance among cats can get complicated. I once had four cats who had circular dominance. Cat A was a little bit of a bully, and would sometimes push cats B and C around. Cat D, who was by far the largest, was a very timid cat, who deferred to cats B and C and was afraid of nearly everything — except that he wasn’t in the least afraid of his littermate, Cat A; and, being considerably larger, could push Cat A around and sometimes did.
Also