Dogs on Prozac? Whaaaa?
Yup.
That is an interesting article about pets. What the article doesn’t talk about is semiotics. The talk of behavior isn’t framed in terms of signs. In semiotics, there is the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the thing you do, the signified is the understanding derived by the receiver of the signifier.
I have these two cats. The kids wanted cats because we stop and pet the neighborhood cats on our walks to and from school. So I got a couple of cats. It turns out that it was kind of a rescue situation, in that they were probably not treated well. They had never been to a vet, so I got them fixed, got shots for them, and they are healthy now.
There was a period where I didn’t know if I was going to keep them as the personalities that were coming out were not ones I could live with. Both cats like to nip, not enough to break the skin, but nip nonetheless. One cat seems to be overly sensitive. If I pet her in certain places, she is very quick to nip. They lived in a house with two grown dogs and the dogs abused them, I think. I have been working to desensitize them and give them a predictable, reasonable lifestyle.
In reading the article, I was thinking about the things we do and how they are interpreted by our pets. It has been suggested that the relationship between owner and cat is that of parent to kitten. In some cases, if the cat comes to see the owner as a peer, one who can be dominated, no good end seems to result. The cat will try to exercise those dominance prerogatives as are hard wired into it’s instinctive behavior.
I try to provide the signs that a parent would give the kitten. I do the long, easy, eye-closing that cats will do. I think it is a sign of affection. I bother the cats a little bit. A mother cat will bother her kittens. One problem is that mother may have a particular behavior of which she is disapproving, and I just frobbing the cats. On the other hand, the one cat which seems to enjoy the feeling of a little flesh caught between teeth, got a lesson in how it feels the other day. She was cleaning and I started bothering one of her back feet. She started snapping at my hand. I pushed her foot forward and she snapped down on it. There was a moment of recognition where she paused and I started laughing. I had to leave the room to continue laughing.
There is a lot I don’t understand about cats. But both of these cats seem to be better mannered now than when I got them.