My cat poop in the bath

Clav said:
Not strictly true, cats have no concept of pointing and will just look at your finger. Dogs do though and can be trained to respond to a variety of gestures, including pointing. My dog will pick up the toy I point at or go in the direction I point when required.
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^^^^^^ that

and some breeds were bred to point too hence why they are called 'pointers'
 
Clav said:
Not strictly true, cats have no concept of pointing and will just look at your finger. Dogs do though and can be trained to respond to a variety of gestures, including pointing. My dog will pick up the toy I point at or go in the direction I point when required.
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Aye but training a dog to do something on a given gesture isn't the same as knowing or appreciating what that gesture is, it's just associating an action with a reward.

Humans on the other hand have an inherent understanding of what pointing means. Take an untrained dog and a toddler who never experienced pointing before, point and the dog would just look at the end of your finger whereas the child would look in the direction your were pointing.
 
RomanNose said:
Offtopic but over the last week our family has been hassled by this cat, the first thing it did was stalk us and then when we opened the front door it ran in. Then it started going into our garden and just sitting there. This morning it decided to bring a dead bird and leave it outside our front door.
I don't think it likes us for some reason.
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A cat bringing you stuff is a sign of affection.
 
Our cats poo and pee in the toilet, it took nearly 1 year of training using Litter Kwitter.

Occassionally, I get woken up at around 5am, to the sounds of PLOP, PLOP, PLOP, it's comical
 
estebanrey said:
Humans on the other hand have an inherent understanding of what pointing means. Take an untrained dog and a toddler who never experienced pointing before, point and the dog would just look at the end of your finger whereas the child would look in the direction your were pointing.
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Even in humans such behaviour is learned. We aren't born with an innate understanding that an outstretched arm and finger indicates the path to an object of interest - but we are capable of understanding the gesture far more quickly and completely than a dog (or other trainable animal) - even from a very early age. As children our brains are primarily designed for such rapid uptake of information, and our intelligence and problem solving abilities allow us to understand the gesture at a completely different level to a dog or even (say) a Chimpanzee.

... An interesting but related topic is "gaze following". If you walk past someone staring at the sky (or a building or something else out of the ordinary) then your conditioned behaviour is to look there also. This is a behavioural trait that is shared by most primates, but is not observed in other animals despite rigorous training. (e.g. basic outline of gaze following). This is an example of a different kind of recognition - in gaze following we're not just associating an action with a reaction, we're recognising another beings "sense of self", and how it relates to our own existence. It's a derivative of empathy, which is not a common trait among the animal kingdom.



Going back to the "pointing" aspect again, cats can also be taught the implication of the gesture to some degree. If I walk past my stairs and point up them, then one of my cats understands this as a signal that I will be gong up to bed soon, so she chirps happily and trots on up to get settled on the bed. I sleep very odd hours so it's not necessarily a time-of-day related thing. Obviously she doesn't understand this gesture at the same level as a dog, who doesn't understand it to the same level as an ape, who doesn't understand it to the same level as a human. She could never reciprocate the gesture, or even or understand its application to other scenarios - but still, it's a conditioned response based on an action - the same way that human children learn. The major difference is a reduced abstract problem-solving ability in comparison to a dog -> primate -> human.


I find animal behaviour fascinating. The more you look at it the more you see the origins of our own skills and the way we view the world :)
 
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Duff-Man said:
Even in humans such behaviour is learned. We aren't born with an innate understanding that an outstretched arm and finger indicates the path to an object of interest
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Not an expert in the field but I remember them saying something on Qi about it and how the human eye naturally follows the line of a pointing finger.

I'll try and remember which episode so I can be a bit more specific
 
estebanrey said:
Not an expert in the field but I remember them saying something on Qi about it and how the human eye naturally follows the line of a pointing finger.

I'll try and remember which episode so I can be a bit more specific
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It's probably related to gaze following, which is well documented and has been heavily studied (see above - plenty of stuff on google also). Pointing one way while gazing another would be an interesting test... Of course, this test would need to be performed with children who had not yet been exposed to pointing, which may be difficult since it's such a commonplace human gesture.
 
Both of ours go in the bath if they're caught short. It's quite amazing watching our biggest cat having a wee in the bath - he aims it down the plug hole and rarely spills a drop. It's not ideal, but now we know they do it, we've long since done away with litter trays. Likewise we bleach the bath regularly, but we did that anyway.
 
One of our cats sometimes poos in the bath, the other poos either in the house on the floor or right outside the backdoor.

Best thing to do is grab them by their scruff and shove their face in it, then throw them out the back door (the 2nd one obviously is already out the backdoor, so I just chuck them on the garage roof instead)

They dont learn, but what can you do!
 
Cats are clever that way.

When Echo needs to hairball, he always jumps off wherever he's sitting/laying and does it on the floor.

He pee'd on the bed once, when he was a kitten, and I rubbed his face in it (I caught him in the act, don't do this unless you catch them red... paw'd), that was the last and only time he's ever done it :)
 
One of my mates accidentally locked his cat in a room when he went out during the day.

He came back to the cat clawing and scratching at the door to get out, and figured he would have a "mess" to clear up, but the cat had actually gone into the shower in the en-suite and "gone" down the plug hole (number 1 not number 2 ;)).

Cats > dogs a million times over =D
 
My cat has pooped on the bathroom floor once or twice. She usually runs upstairs and starts crying outside my door that she wants to go out, so it was my fault for not hearing her I guess.
 
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