Animal Grief

[bunn]

I just read Cat Confidential by Vicky Halls, a book about the behaviour of cats, kindly lent me by chainmailmaiden.

It had many interesting points to make, but my attention was caught by one line that was almost an afterthought, about cats that appear to grieve for companions that die:

"Whether it can truly be evidence of a grieving process as we understand it is debateable...are we merely seeing a withdrawal response to an addictive relationship that has suddenly ended?"

You get this kind of thing quite a lot in pet behaviour books. The writer is aware that they are dealing with a different species with very different behaviours and capacities, does not want to be accused of over-emotional response or projecting human behaviour on an animal, so from time to time during the book, they put on a sort of little virtual scientific tin hat and come out with this sort of thing.

I think it's a bit silly. Do we have some sort of British Standard Grief Unit? Is grief (or joy, or love) measurable in any meaningful sense in human beings? I don't think so.

People react to these emotions very differently, mean different things when they say those words.

Grief is an english language word: of course it's not going to mean exactly the same to me as it does to my non-English-speaking cat, but dressing it up as a 'withdrawal response' - how does that help?

Grief is the word we use to describe that sort of behaviour: it is not a precise word, and it's not suitable for detailed analysis. People grieve for objects, sometimes. If an old man grieves for his dead wife, having not having shown the poor woman any overt affection for the last 20 years, is that not "a withdrawal response to an addictive relationship that has suddenly ended"?

Talking about animals as if they were human beings in little fur suits is not a good idea. But talking about vague human concepts as if they had a precise definition and were consistent across all human cultures and individuals is equally silly, particularly when it's done in the interests of a sort of faux-impartiality.

Actually, while we are at it, almost all animal behaviour books I have read tend to assume that the animal has a 'state of nature', a 'natural' behaviour structure - while totally ignoring the fact that an animal's natural environment is shaped by other inhabitants of the ecosystem. Surely the ecological niche inhabited by the cat or dog is shaped by the fact that they live within a human culture?

Comments

[tena524.livejournal.com]

I bumped into your journal through the Greyhounds list, and was fascinated by this set of posts. In addition to Casey, we have 7 cats, indoor only. I don't know how strongly recommended indoor living is in other parts of the US, but it has been brought up by every vet I've ever used here in the Northeast, discussed in terms of health risk factors. I've always been told that indoor cats live longer healthier lives. I've found that to be true.

I don't know how well your theory of inadvertent breeding for certain national characteristics works, as most of the house pets I know (including all of mine) have been neutered. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how you could test it in practical terms.

As for keeping cats indoors, I currently live in a rural New Hampshire, home to a surprisingly large population of coyotes. When we first looked at this house, the prior residents told us they had moved in with 3 cats. Two years later, they had one. One went missing, but the other was clearly coyote prey (they found the remains in the woods nearby). The coyotes are our most common cat predators, but we have a few other native carnivores in the area as well.

As a child growning up in surburban New York, we always had cats. That area didn't have the predatory wildlife issue we have here in New Hampshire, but every pet we had was either hit by cars or came frighteningly close. Some survived their accidents, some didn't. However, the oldest cat we had died at eleven years old. The rest only lasted two to four years each, and we scraped the majority of them off the pavement in front of the house. Since I started keeping cats indoors, most have lived into their late teens, and succumbed to various geriatric complaints.

Later, I moved from New York to Boston, Massachusetts. When I adopted my first city cat, he stayed indoors because there wasn't any practical way to let him go in and out from my top floor apartment. Later on, I lived in another apartment that had a porch with nearby trees. Of the three cats I had there, only one ventured down a convenient trunk. Henry never quite figured out how to climb back up. After twice finding himself stuck in the courtyard with no exit(howling for rescue), he apparently decided it wasn't worth it and stopped climbing.

I've had a few former stray cats over the years, and lost one of them to feline leukemia, one of those health risk factors the vets mention. This was about a year before the vaccine came out. The other, Itzak, had a permanent limp from a badly healed fracture of the left hind foot. It's anyone's guess as to how he got it, or how on earth he survived the streets with it.

Yes, my indoor cats spend many an hour perched in windows. Yes, they hang out at the back door all the time (it's mostly window as well). However, when they've had the opportunity to go out, they generally haven't gone more than 10 or 15 feet from the door. I occasionally let them chase squirrels off the porch, but only two of the seven will go for it if I open the door.

I can't say I think all cats should be indoors, or all outdoors either. I think we each have to make the best choice we can, given our circumstances. I can tell you my cats seem happy indoors. They certainly seem to find ways to keep busy. A common saying around our house: "Anything not nailed down is a cat toy."

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting (that your cats didn't want to go more than a short distance from the door - and also about the accidents and illnesses) and could be supporting evidence for my (admittedly rather wild) 'US cats have evolved a safety mechanism due to a different environment, and are better adapted to indoor-only lives' theory.

We have 6 cats here at the moment, and I too have had indoor-outdoor cats all my life (all moggies of British stock, until our recent acquisition of 2 Bengals). I've never had one that was so cautious about moving away from the house as the cats you describe (in fact, Kjetil often comes for walks with my hounds, and will go for a couple of miles quite cheerfully).

We have had no illnesses or injuries as a result of access to the outdoor, and only one death. All my family indoor-outdoor cats died of age-related conditions. My cats are enthusiastic climbers and I've never seen one get stuck anywhere. Keeping them in, when we need to do that, is a really difficult task.

I mean, yes, when the cat doors are open, they are often all inside sleeping on the sofa, but try and stop them going outside and it's like trying to catch soap in the bath: you think you've got them all inside and then somehow they slip out!

We have lost one cat to traffic (before we moved here), and I honestly think that was partly a behavioural/emotional issue that I should have spotted and dealt with. We had a cat that had been hand-reared and was an only cat. She had been indoor-outdoor since her vaccinations were completed. When she was 3, we got 2 more cats 'to be company' for her, and she was utterly horrified by the whole idea.

We thought she'd come round with time and didn't really realise how serious this was: instead, she was stressed, she went much further than usual, out of her normal range, and was hit by a car. We should have realised how traumatic this change was for her, and kept her in until we were confident she was OK with the other 2 cats, or until we'd established she could not live with them and returned the new pair. She felt her house wasn't a safe place for her any more and I'm pretty sure that was the point at which she got into trouble.

[tena524.livejournal.com]

I think the numbers lost to traffic depend in large part on the location. We lived way out on the edge of town where the speed limit was a theoretical 35 mph, but it wasn't unusual to see cars go by doing 60. Our house was in between two hills, so inevitably cars coming down hill were going much faster than they should have been.

Most of our neighbors had similar experiences with their household pets, unless they fenced in their yards, as our next door neighbor finally did. Some trained their dogs to stay within certain boundaries, but I can remember one young as-yet-untrained puppy was lost to a speeding motorist, right in front of its young owners.

Up here in New Hampshire, people often drive the back roads at much higher speeds than those posted as well. We live on a dead end, so we don't get much traffic out front, but the road behind us is a short cut for a lot of local traffic. I've seen a couple of former pets on the side of that road, and stopped for a few feline & canine wanderers as well. Scary.