10 ms·
What cats can teach us about how to live
- kdamken 10y agoOpened up article, was met with politically charged ad asking me to subscribe, closed tab.
- kyleschiller 10y agoYeah, luckily Google has promised to start punishing this, but it does feel like growth hacking has made my browsing much less pleasant.
- 21 10y agoOpened up article, was not met with anything because I use an ad-blocker. Opened article in different browser to see said politically charged ad. I would say it's a decent ad, it just states the facts (Trump is president, thus his era began, role of media is to keep power in check), not sure why it offended you, and said publication is pretty fair and balanced in my view.
- keyboardhitter 10y agoOne can dislike advertisements without being offended by them.
- Dylan16807 10y agoCalling it out like that for being slightly political comes across as being offended to some extent.
- kdamken 10y agoNot sure if you saw something different, but I think slightly political was an understatement. Hacker news is one place I go where to try and get away from all the political noise out there.
- khedoros1 10y agoI'm running uBlock Origin, but the ad popped up. Which ad-blocker are you using?
- 21 10y agouBlock Origin + BetterPrivacy + Disconnect + Privacy Badger + I don't care about cookies. One of them did the job.
- khedoros1 10y agoPrivacy Badger and Ghostery dislike something in this version of Pale Moon, and I haven't gotten around to trying to fix things. I wonder if one of them would've caught it.
- autokad 10y agoit brought one of my cores to 100% usage =|
- yarper 10y agoPlease don't try to make cats vegan or vegetarian - and please stop anyone that does - I'm surprised the author didn't bring this up.
- baconner 10y agoSeriously. This kills the cat.
- colanderman 10y agoAnd may I suggest if you are vegan and want to adopt an animal companion, consider a rabbit (a bonded pair if you can). They are wonderful loving creatures who will cuddle next to you while you sit on the couch, and their diet is naturally 100% plant-based. They make a perfect DINK pet too since they sleep during the workday. Unfortunately many end up in shelters after someone's kids grow tired of them.
- maxxxxx 10y agoDo they chew on furniture? This is a serious question. I would like to have a non-meat-eating pet after our dogs are gone. I used to have rats but I couldn't take them dying every 2 years.
- greenhatman 10y agoRabbits live 3 years. And they eat cables.
- kyleschiller 10y agoIt's funny how we attribute human qualities to animals that literally lack the neurological capacity. Sharks are not ferocious, dogs do not love you, cats are not independent. There's nothing wrong with reasoning by analogy, and to be perfectly honest I don't know enough about animals to argue convincingly that cats don't, on some level, want to be alone, but we should understand that having this discussion is mostly just anthropomorphism.
- dabbledash 10y agoLove is not exactly long division.
- autokad 10y agoi agree, i think love is actually a low level emotion available to most animals. though i'm not an expert on neither love nor animals
- to3m 10y agoSome evidence that cats and dogs do love (or some approximation thereof) their owners: https://mic.com/articles/104474/brain-scans-reveal-what-dogs-really-think-of-us https://mic.com/articles/104474/brain-scans-reveal-what-dogs... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/its-finally-proven---scientists-test-whether-cats-or-dogs-love-u/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/its-finally-pr...
- interfixus 10y agoWe don't. We, as humans, share the qualities of other animals, in our own species-specific mix and flavour, of course. I have no idea where you picked up the notion that "dogs do not love you" or "cats are not independent". Why shouldn't they do or be? Don't or aren't you?
- mr_overalls 10y agoIf dogs don't love us in the deepest way available to a mammalian neural architecture, then people don't either.
- wila 10y ago> Marra and Santella make some attempt to appeal to cat lovers by suggesting that cats be kept indoors and allowed to work off their excess energy on feline versions of hamster wheels. Huh? A cat isn't a hamster, no way they will run in a hamster wheel. If you want your cat to run, you'll have to play with it. > “they can get a leash and walk their cats as tens of millions walk their dogs” Well.. cats can walk on a leash. I happen to do so on a daily bases, but it certainly is not comparable to walking a dog. The cat walks and sniffs around. It is the cat who determines where we go. Not the human. It is more often standing still as it is walking. Spending half an hour on walking 200 meters is not uncommon. For the rest I'm not sure what the title on the article has to do with the content of it but OK. :)
- rmvt 10y agoare you sure cats won't run in a wheel? https://onefastcat.com/ https://onefastcat.com/
- bitwize 10y ago"Cats in cubes"? Any sensible cat will demand a full office.
- DonHopkins 10y agoSome people even let their cats go furniture shopping at Ikea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQU6OXTkM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQU6OXTkM0
- slavik81 10y agoTheir price tag is interesting. They initially display $250 to get you start thinking about its value, then about a second later animate its drop to $199. When I first saw it, within a split second I judged it was probably worth $250. The drop to $199 left me feeling like I just saved $50. Somehow it was more effective than the "but wait, there's more" bit you always see in infomercials, perhaps because it was unexpected.
- hellofunk 10y agoThis reminds me a lot of how wolfs eventually became domesticated into today's dogs. It was covered nicely on an episode of Cosmos. The path they took was not unlike what is described here for cats.
- bitwize 10y ago1) Cats hunt alone but in the wild they live in colonies, and there is a pecking order. Much of cat behavior stems from colony life; for example, cat feces are a scent-marker of who's boss in the area. Cats bury their turds to disguise their scent, so that the dominant cat won't see them as a challenger. 2) Dogs have an instinctual tendency for symbiosis with humans that cats do not have. Accordingly, if you want a cat to stay with you, you have to earn its respect. For this reason a human-feline relationship can be extremely rewarding.
- Ygg2 10y agoHow do you earn cats respect?
- sien 10y agoFeed them.
- yeowMeng 10y agoPlay hunting oriented games with them.
- bitwize 10y agoThat depends on the cat. For starters, feed them, play with them, keep them company, keep them and their living area clean, don't mistreat them, etc. That's a good start. Jackson Galaxy may be a better source than I on the fine points of feline respect. All I know is it can take some time and effort -- sometimes much of the lifetime of a reticent cat. Totally worth it in the end, though.
- nol13 10y agoWait so you saying that alpha cats don't bury their poop? (well ok ddg agrees, did not know that)
- theobold 10y agoI volunteer at an animal shelter and sometimes see cats that have neurological problems or have lost a limb or an eye. I always admire how little this seems to matter to them. They don't get depressed or sad, they just carry on playing even if they are so wobbly they can barely stand or so hobbled they have to awkwardly hop everywhere.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoI have a missing limb cat. She doesn't let it slow her down, not even a little. She even somehow manages to routinely use the scratching post upright with her only front leg. She just takes everything in stride.
- freeflight 10y agoI'm not really sure what I was supposed to learn from that article or to be more specific: From cats? Because the vast majority of points made apply to pretty much all non-domesticated animals that live in close proximity to humans and probably also those in the wild. The author also seems to consider himself a mind-reader of cats, while never even considering the possibility that other, non-domesticated, animals share these very same traits. Are pigeons busy looking for a "meaning in life"? Are squirrels not "at peace with the world"? Can raccoons suffer from depression? And who really knows if cats can't suffer from it?
- george_ciobanu 10y agoWorth seeing their darker side as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/do-cats-control-my-mind/282045/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/do-cats-c...