Originally posted by the.lights

You've just blown your argument right out of the water with your petty jibes and infantile digs. I'm way above trading insults with your kind of personality type.
It's people like you and your kind of arrogance towards animals, and assumption that only humans have any higher form of intelligence, emotions or behaviours, that defies belief.

Wah wah wah. How dare I question what you believe on faith alone, beliefs that fly in the face of 30+ years of ethology studies and findings. Yes, I'm so arrogant, because I can't understand your "special love bond" with your furry friends. Your position has overwhelm me to simply accept your beliefs based on anecdotal evidence alone. Yes, cats are just as intelligent as humans, as are guinea pigs and guppies and frogs and worms and parasites and that common cold "thang."

For the record, I have nine years worth of memories of joy, happiness, laughter and love all thanks to my pet cat and six months of the same so far from my pet puppy - real, tangible and demonstrative evidence of highly complex emotions, love and thought processes. That's all the proof or validation I need - not the highly assumptive, opinionated ramblings of some nameless, faceless internet account.
You are the one who is deluded.

Yes, you believe you saw something, something that you are already presuming is the correct answer (and defying all facts and study) and your evidence is that what, you feel something special with your little kitty cat? If that's all the proof you need, I feel sorry for you, because I'm sure you'll age into those poor old geriatrics in some Florida retirement community who gets conned every other week by a sweet mustached man with a kind smile and a southern twang who's got a very low risk business deal for you.

I just believe when half a decades worth of animal behavior study has conclusively, time and time again, tested the relative intelligence capacity of animals that maybe we should give credence to the research that they have done. I mean, I just prefer to follow actual science and evidence over your anecdotal 'special love bond" with a small feline who's brain is the size of a baseball. Yeah, that makes me the one who's deluded.

So sad to see that, for any cat lover this is hard to watch...

There's some really sweet videos in here.

First the poor kitty trying to revive her dead friend. I found it difficult to watch and more so skimmed over it.

The story of the gorilla and his kitten All Ball. That was sweet.

And the elephant and the dog. Reminded me almost of a Pixar movie, except obviously non-animated and real.

Originally posted by WolfofWar

Ethological studies have determined that both cats and dogs have a relative intelligence with each other, and that their complex intelligence is about on part with a 2-3 year old child.

Based on the things I have read about animals, particularly dogs and cats is that this statement is accurate. Like a child, dogs and cats are eager to learn, but they have limits and are by no means dumb. I'm a cat person myself and teaching a kitten how to open doors for example is kind of like teaching a child. You can even train a cat to use the toilet instead of a litter box, so, certainly not dumb animals by any means and are eager to learn with some patience.

Having said that, does a child not mourn if one of his parents die? Sure, the child may not understand what death is, but that doesn't change that the child mourns the absence of his or her parent. You don't need to understand death to experience loss and to mourn that loss. I have read numerous articles and studies showing that animals such as elephants, wolves, chimps, dogs and cats all mourn the dead. When observed, they act depressed. A pack of wolves who lost a member act differently for weeks. For example, they howl separately instead of as a pack and will return to the place their friend died with their tail between their legs and ears down which usually means submission. Chimps, dogs and cats all show signs of depression such as not eating or drinking, returning to the place their friend died or a place the friend frequented often looking for him. A chimp even starved himself to death waiting at the place it's friend died for her to come back and died there waiting. Dolphins was even observed mourning after it failed to save a human child from drowning. A mother seal mourning the loss of her babies as they are killed by predators right in front of her. There are numerous examples of animals mourning the loss of other animals and I'll never be convinced that animals feel nothing when an animal they are attached to dies.

As far as the cat in the video, I got the impression that it was trying to get a response from the dead cat. I've never seen a cat curl up next to another cat and lay it's head down on the other cat as a ritual of mating. Something else was going on there and I don't believe for a second that the cat couldn't tell the other one was dead especially considering it is a predator and is programmed to know the difference. Cats wouldn't mourn the death of prey because what does it care? It has no attachment to it other than it looks good to eat, but these cats obviously did not share a predator/prey relationship.

It is certainly true that most animals, cats included, lack what could be called "strong" intelligence, and that all animals appear, based on available research, to have "weaker" intelligence than humans posses by orders of magnitude. It is also certainly true that animals, including cats, are governed more by instinct, impulse, and sensation than are humans (although we are certainly also governed by these factors to a large extent.)

With all of that having been said however, it is also clear that many animals - including cats - do experience neurological states we can liken to the equivalent emotion, but without the conscious awareness and contemplation thereof that we as humans experience. They certainly do not understand, think about, or even always acknowledge necessarily, those states, but they do experience them. We know that some of those emotional states appear to demonstrate equivalents of both grief and empathy in certain animals.

So while it is not factually correct to anthropomorphize those states, we can still hypothesize that the cat in the video in question might be experiencing grief. The cat's behavior is unusual, in that cats will typically react with fear or avoidance to death, even the death of an animal they have become well socialized with over long periods of time. It is of course possible that the cat is old or that its senses are otherwise dulled to the presence of a corpse next to it. It's also possible that the cat was not definitively dead yet I suppose.

Either way, it is at least conceivable that the cat was experiencing the feline equivalent of grief. Whether that correlates to being the cause of its actions, we can't know. As human beings, we are capable of cross-species empathy and the contemplation of emotional states experienced by animals which lack sapience of the sort we posses. It isn't at all surprising or upsetting to me that this video provokes strong emotions.

It certainly did for me.

[edit on 5/5/2010 by AceWombat04]

I've been a cat person my whole life. Always had at least one cat. They are phenomenal companions and very sensitive to their surroundings. This doesn't surprise me at all. Quite charming in a sad way.

I've said in the past that once we've destroyed the planet to the point that we can no longer live here, the cats will be the next ones to take the planet over. They have all that they need to do it. They're smart, intuitive, caring, nasty when they have to be and don't forget their defenses.