Why haven't you heard of tigers preying on giant pandas?

Keeping cats in cities is a common thing. Cats and dogs have strong reproductive ability. According to the laws of nature, the number of cats will increase from one or two to ten or even dozens in a few years, but keeping pets in cities is different from that in rural areas, and an ordinary family can't accommodate so many cats.

Especially those single office workers, owning a cat and a dog may just want to increase the sense of companionship, but they can't bear so much? Companionship? So sterilization is the first choice for urban pet owners.

pet cat

On the issue of cat sterilization, there is one thing that cannot be avoided, that is, whether the shovel officer should put on a play. There are obvious differences of opinion in the pet circle, and different people have different answers.

Some people say that cats hold grudges. If the shovel officer doesn't show his ignorance or sadness when he is sterilized, then he will be resented by the cat. Since then? Pee in bed? 、? Be mean to your master? Retaliation measures like this will follow. Others say that people's subjective feelings should not be substituted for cats. Actually, cats don't hold grudges.

As for which of the two statements is correct, people have given evidence, including many examples of sharing their true stories with cats, but there is still no unified answer, so they have to say sincerely: Do cats really hold grudges?

cat

How smart are cats? Whether a cat will hold a grudge, the first problem to be solved is whether the cat is smart enough. Stupid? If you don't even know what hatred is, what can you talk about? Bear a grudge? 、? Revenge? And then what? Fortunately, many scientists in the world are also very interested in this problem and are committed to research, so it is not difficult for us to know how smart cats are now.

It should be mentioned here that it is not difficult to measure the IQ of animals, and with the development of science, the measurement methods are constantly updated, but even now, scientists are not sure that they are completely correct, only that they are a little more accurate than before. After all, science develops through constant exploration.

A researcher once did an experiment in which opaque cups were placed on the ground, some with food under them, and some were empty. The researchers found many cats and dogs, then pointed to the cup with food, and found that most dogs could pull the cup in the direction of human fingers and get the food inside.

On the other hand, the cat appeared? Rollover? Phenomenon, almost all cats don't cooperate and play by themselves. Later, people moved the experimental scene to the cat's home and found that cats can also read human gestures to get food. According to the experimental results, people come to the conclusion that the IQ of cats and dogs is similar.

Cat paper cup experiment

But in fact, this experiment has many flaws. First of all, because of personality reasons (which can be seen in the experiment), people can't confirm whether cats and dogs who don't understand human gestures are unwilling to cooperate or really don't understand. What is the ratio of the two?

Secondly, this experiment can't measure the upper limit of IQ of cats and dogs. For example, both doctoral students and primary school students can add and subtract within ten, but can you say that their IQ and cognition are the same? Obviously, this experiment is meaningless.

In the past, people often used the ratio of brain to body and the complexity of structure to measure the IQ of animals. The greater the proportion, the higher the IQ. This method was once widely regarded as the most effective way, and many examples supporting this theory can be found in reality, but with the progress of scientific cognition, this method is out of date.

At present, the most scientific and accurate way to measure the IQ of animals is to look at the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex. Neurons are the basic units for processing information. The more creatures, the stronger the ability to process information, that is, the smarter we often say.

Among wild animals, chimpanzees are recognized as the animals with the highest IQ. They can use tools and imitate. After measurement, it is known that the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex is 6-7 billion, while the number of neurons in normal adults is about 65.438+0.6 billion. So it's no joke that chimpanzees have the IQ of 3 or 4-year-old children.

Elephant is also considered as a high IQ animal, and the number of neurons in its cerebral cortex is about 5.6 billion, which shows that it is a high IQ animal second only to primates.

In order to find out how high the IQ of cats and dogs is, some scientists in the United States have measured the number of neurons in different types of dogs, cats and some other animals, and found that the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex of cats is about 250 million, while that of large dogs and small dogs is about 528 million. Of all the dogs studied, Golden Retriever is the cleverest, with 627 million neurons in its cerebral cortex. The number of neurons in the lion's cerebral cortex in cats is equivalent to 545 million in dogs.

Neuron data of several animals

The measured results are indeed consistent with the phenomena we observe every day. For example, in the kennel, most shovel officers praise the golden retriever, and the animals that can act as guards and blind guides are basically dogs, except for factors such as natural closeness to people, probably because of high IQ!

Although the purpose of this experiment is to judge whether cats or dogs have higher IQ, we can learn a lot from it. For example, the IQ of cats is far from that of chimpanzees, elephants and other animals, about half that of dogs and equivalent to brown bears.

brown bear

How strong is a cat's memory? After understanding the IQ of cats, one thing is clearer to us: How good is a cat's memory? After all, to bear grudges, we must first remember and then find ways to retaliate, so this is an unavoidable problem.

So can cats remember? Ask different shovel officers this kind of question, and you will get different answers. There is not much nonsense. Look directly at the research results. According to a study by the University of Michigan, the short-term memory of cats is only 16 hours, which is longer than that of orangutans and monkeys, while that of dogs is only 5 minutes.

cat

According to this study, many people come to the conclusion that cats can't remember hatred, but is this really the case? In fact, so far people's research on memory is only the tip of the iceberg, not even a little.

There are many kinds of memories, such as long-term memory and short-term memory. The simplest example, you may forget what it is now. Kepler's third law? Don't remember? General formula? How to write, but you must remember who you secretly loved in high school.

Of course, analogy itself is unscientific, and it depends on some specific scientific research.

A research paper in Behavioral Science in 20 17 mentioned that in two experiments, nearly 50 cats were able to remember which bowls contained food after being taken out of the room 15 minutes.

However, a paper published in the Journal of Applied Animal Behavior Science in 2008 revealed that cats also have some performances in spatial memory. They can remember what food they have eaten in translucent cups, but as cats get older, their memory will decline, which means older cats make more mistakes.

Cat experiment

In 2006, there was also a research paper on the memory of cats in Animal Cognition. The experimenter hid an object in four boxes, and the cat had to wait 0 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds and 60 seconds to find the object. Experiments have found that most cats find it difficult to find objects after more than 30 seconds.

So does this mean that cats have poor memory? Monique, an assistant professor at Oregon State University? Hu Delei said that 75% of the dogs in the world are not their own pets, and their choice memory can help them survive well.

This also applies to cats. Cats are essentially carnivores. For example, when a cat is chasing a mouse, the mouse hides behind an object, and the probability that it will still be there within one minute is very low, so it is unnecessary for the cat to remember this scene.

The cat caught the mouse.

Many people actually misunderstood this experiment. 16 hours is not a cat's memory time, but its short-term memory is only 16 hours. For example, we ordinary people don't deliberately remember what we eat for three meals a day, but we can still remember it in a day or two, but it won't work after a long time. This is the case with cats' memory 16 hours.

If a stranger interacts with a cat, it can remember the stranger within 16 hours, but it will be forgotten for a long time. How long is the long-term memory of cats? At present, there is no relevant research conclusion in this respect.

Researchers at National Geographic once did a study and found that most animals basically only have a short-term memory of 25 seconds. In fact, the information stored in their brains is related to survival. Relatively speaking, the short-term memory of cats is extremely long.

Scientists cannot predict how long the cat's long-term memory will last. They can remember their owners and people who interact with them frequently. If you interact with it frequently enough, the cat will probably turn it into a long-term memory and even remember you two or three years later.

Do cats hold grudges? In fact, as cats get older, their ability to transform memory scenes into long-term memories has improved. Generally speaking, a cat's short-term memory is only 16 minutes, and most things that happen in this 16 minutes will not be remembered unless something particularly bad happens.

For example, when we want to take cats to the vet, we often keep them in cages. However, after a long time, when the shovel officer took out the cage again, he found that the cats immediately showed abnormal behavior and hid in most cases.

A cat in a cage

Pet cats also belong to cats. Among cats, some big cats also like to hold grudges. Large cats such as lions, tigers and leopards are extremely aggressive, so people often anesthetize them before treating them or performing other operations. In many of these videos, we found that the staff would blindfold the big cat. Why? There are two reasons:

First, because anesthesia is only temporary and will weaken with the increase of time, blindfolding is to prevent light from stimulating them and preventing them from waking up soon; Second, because the big cat loves to hold grudges, he blocks his eyes and can't see the staff, so he can continue to work in the future. A blindfolded lion

This is not nonsense. In a big cat adoption center near Tampa, Florida, USA, veterinarian Miller once had a lens removal operation on a lion. Later, it was found that the big cat seemed to hate Miller and showed great aggression to him. Even through the cage, the lion will show aggression as long as Miller approaches. This never happened before the treatment, and even the lion allowed Miller to get close to himself.

Coincidentally, Indira, the star tiger who participated in "Python Disaster 2". After retiring at the age of fifteen, he also suffered from eye diseases. The Veterinary Teaching Hospital of the University of Sydney operated on him. Due to proper protection measures, the tiger didn't see or remember the vet. When the veterinarians visited him again, Indira didn't show any unusual behavior.

tiger

Again, although the analogy method is not very scientific, it has to be guarded against! Cats have more short-term memories than most animals, and they have the ability to turn impressive events into long-term memories. Whether based on research theory or reality, it tells us the possibility that cats may hold grudges, so why? Sterilization? Will the cat remember this big event? It's hard to say.

However, it is possible after all, and the probability is not small. My suggestion is that you should have some acting skills. If you don't act, you may get into trouble. Of course, in the next sterilization process, the shovel officer had better not show up.