Do you have a wise cat?
Do you ever wake up from a rough night and notice your cat has hijacked your pillow like he’s going somewhere? Worse, the fluffy guy, looking unrepentant, yawns as if to say, when will you get your act together, lady? Can’t you sleep through the night like I do? Does it have to be a war with the pillows every night?
Dealing with anxiety can be brutal, but you don’t have to go the mile alone with a cat like mine. I’m the shoe, and my cat is the Velcro. He’s by my side most of the time. He follows me everywhere, including the yard, and he can wait at the back door most nights before the lights go out indoors.
I swear my cat gets me! I’m sure many of you can relate as pet owners.
Our fuzzy friends are intelligent, but how perceptive are they to our feelings?
Does my cat understand how I feel?
Research is limited, but one study proved that felines can match their owner's feelings. Cats hissed in reaction to the angry photos of their owners and an accompanying sound clip of a “growl.”
Purring was less evident when cats saw their owner's happy expressions accompanied by laughter. Cats purr for reasons other than happiness. They do so in sickness, pain, and hunger.
Facial recognition in felines is happening.
Techies have also jumped on the bandwagon using Convolutional Neural Networks, which involves photo recognition that looks for patterns to examine feline facial expressions.
While it’s a far cry from the advanced symptom checker you and I use, for example, WebMD, it’s coming. Facial expressions that we thought were light years from being understood will become very clear.
The cats think we’re a bunch of hopeless morons here for back massages and dish refills.
Pour the love on thick, but don’t forget the meow mix!
Read more:
IBM (n.d.). What are convolutional neural networks? Retrieved April 30, 2024, from https://www.ibm.com/topics/convolutional-neural-networks
Jain, P., KUMAR PANDEY, A., & YADAV, B. (2023). Facial Emotion Recognition of Cat Breeds by Using Convolution Neural Network. Iconic Research and Engineering Journal, 7(6), 59-63. https://doi.org/1705255
Quaranta, A., d'Ingeo, S., Amoruso, R., & Siniscalchi, M. (2020). Emotion Recognition in Cats. Animals : an open access journal from MDPI, 10(7), 1107.