We live in a small (600 sq. ft.) apartment with a cat. The cat has left the apartment twice (vet visits) in her entire life - yet she doesn’t go crazy out of boredom. She makes no attempt to leave the apartment, and doesn’t express that much interest in the outside world other than the occasional glace out the window.
So - why doesn’t she go crazy or feel confined? I imagine (comparing the scales) that it would be similar to if I lived in a large gymnasium that I could never leave. I’d go mad.
Do animals have no innate sense of boredom or confinement? How small a space can an animal like a cat live in before getting restless and feeling confined?
Animals, so far as we can tell, don’t really think abstractly like humans do. They don’t say “What if…”; instead, they simply accept their reality as long as all their needs are met.
Granted, cats need to play. That’s related to hunting instincts. But they don’t need to get out of the house for a while simply because they’ve been in all week.
All sentient living beings need/want mental stimulation. The difference between you and your kitty in being content to stay in the apartment comes down to your vastly different mental abilities.
Things have to fall above a certain level of ‘interestingness’ to be worthy of notice and having attention paid to them. For kitty a speck of dust floating in the ray of light from the window can meet the bill, as can the wadded up ball of paper, or a pillow tassel that sways slightly due to a breeze, or the feel of a carpet’s nap when you writhe around on your back on it. For a human…well, it takes a bit more than that.
Humans have language, and thus the ability to catalog and categorize and remember in detail what they have seen & done, and realize when something ‘new’ is actually just a different version of something they’ve already explored and learned about. At some point in babyhood/toddlerhood humans notice the floating mote of dust/paperwad/swaying tassel/whatever. They watch and study it until they’ve had their fill, and that’s that. Absent a dose of LSD or specialized research into the science of something, they’ll probably ignore almost every other floating mote of dust, etc. as beneath notice.
As a result, you and your kitty experience your apartment as different places. To kitty, it’s a realm full of fresh, interesting things to play with and lovely places to snooze, while you have pretty much exhausted all the ‘entertainment’ value of everything in your apartment other than those very recently acquired objects or objects that in fact change, like the content offered by television and radio.
Add to that the fact that you are well aware that a vast world of fascinating-on-the-human-level things lie outside the walls of your apartment, and being trapped inside away from it all can drive you stir crazy. Kitty also knows there is an outside world (I’ll bet she sits on windowsills and watches it goes by) but there is still more than enough inside to hold her attention, so the rest of the world will just have to wait.
Perhaps if you’d been locked in the gym since you were a baby, and had no knowledge of the outside world, you’d feel more comfortable in it and have no desire to leave.
cazzle, we’re all born and raised on the ground, but plenty of us want to go into the air or even space simply for novelty.
There are personality types at work here, and some people are perfectly fine living in one small town their whole lives, but humans innately seek out novelty. It’s hardwired.
Only observation; she doesn’t scratch at doors, doesn’t seem to investigate ways to escape, and always seems purely content within the confines of the apartment.
I recall a variety of experiments to demonstrate the development of vision in cats. In this particular experiment, visual discrimination of vertical and horizontal lines was being tested. One group of cats was raised in cages/boxes with only vertical stripes, another with only horizontal stripes. Sure enough, those raised in the vertically-striped boxes had poor discrimination of horizontal stripes, and vice versa.
The account of these studies mentioned that although you might find it pretty dull sitting in a striped box all day, the kittens seemed quite content to sit and stare at the stripes for hours on end.
Every cat we’ve owned would occasionally do a mad dash around the house. I’ve always thought these dashes were the result of frustrated hunting instincts or something.
I’ve heard cat dashing referred to as “the zoomies”. I think it’s just an adrenaline rush; I would compare it to taking your dog for a walk to release his energy. With two cats, they can chase each other.