Step by step, she would lure me all the way to the kitchen and give me a look said that, "Now that we are here anyway, how 'bout some of that food?". A bit manipulative, I admit, but kind of clever.
Also, I suspect cats tricked humans into starting agriculture so they (the cats) would have a steady supply of mice.
I had these two little kitten siblings; no idea where their mother was but they hung around the house, because food. If the food was out they would meow and whine for food, so I would get up to bring them food and they would hiss at me for getting too close to the food bowl before I even had a chance to put any food in.
I never thought that was especially intelligent; "biting the hand that feeds you" and all that.
After dealing with many cats for two years I don't rate cats as very high on the intelligence department. They're basically autistic dogs. They are cuter though. And they don't eat poop off the street.
My cats often want to be fed or to go outside.
My one cat knows she can simply stare at me and I will get up and follow her.
He'll use that, combined with lifting one paw off of the ground to "ask" me to do something for him.
Once I follow him, he'll nudge his head in the direction of what he wants. The sink? He wants to drink out of the faucet. The counter? He wants treats out of the drawer. The pantry? He wants food. If he just sits there and cries I know he wants to be pet.
Wheelchair-height handle-style doorknobs mean my cat goes wherever she wants whenever she wants.
Baby-proof door latches are my friend.
No. That would require a theory of mind, intention to deceive and a lot of cognitive abilities that cats don't have.
The cat simply learned to walk you to the food bowl.
We had cats when I was a kid, and I would observe that cats are very good at tracking prey, at opening doors or at getting humans to open them, at figuring out who is the boss, and at bearing very, very long term grudges, but otherwise they operate in a system where the world revolves around them (apparently quite literally in terms of how they map the world).
This utility-focussed view of the world means they always get fed, but it also leads them to get stuck when exploring -- never paying attention to the fact that the neighbour's garage door does not just open, it also closes, for example!
So I have tended to see them as well-optimised, intelligent, but not necessarily "bright".
But the cat-mirror-ears video -- where a cat sees a reflection in a mirror, apparently understands that it is its own reflection and then... realises it has ears... that changed my mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akE2Sgg8hI8
There is another "cat theory of mind" video where a mother cat purposefully and deliberately retrieves an object its kitten wants to play with, that scientists have talked about on twitter, but I can't find it.
A friend of mine has a cat that learned to play fetch as a kitten and never stopped playing. So unusual.
You are likely thinking of https://youtu.be/whVMP6BqcqU
This is a very, very interesting video.
There are other interpretations (that it is for example mum/dad's favourite toy too for example). But it is worthy of discussion.
"That's my leg" or "that's my ear" seems a reasonable discovery for a cat. I doubt that there was a deep existential discovery because it happened in a mirror.
Of course, pets of a species will vary in ability, that's only normal variation. We love them because they are simple, pretty, calming, and sometimes even helpful.
The animals that we love less, we tend to eat.
There's an obvious cognitive limit compared to humans. The theory of mind in humans conjures intentionality everywhere. Despite the (sometimes wildly) erroneous notions that this can produce, there is value in cooperation. Assuming intentionality has been an evolutionary advantage for our species.
Our species domesticated cattle, horses, and dogs because we have what we call "empathy". It's our mind at work building assumptions about the other.
It doesn't take much for the human mind to start imagining intentionality and companionship. Jesse Bering [1] offers the example of the well-known film, The Red Balloon, in which a simple balloon becomes a little boy's companion.
https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/theory-of-mind-and-the-...
Humans love their pets and often project human cognition onto them. It's a human thing. People often project traits onto their children as well. Pets usually avoid some of the worst effects of this projection. ^_^
It does, except that mirrors are not truly a natural phenomenon (most animals, contrary to literature, never really see their reflection in the water, only a shadow). So there is a chance that something more fundamental and novel is going on in the cat's mind.
And in most people's experiences and the view of science, cats do not appear to ever understand it is them in the mirror, whereas other animals (some crows for example) definitely do.
Of course cats know they have ears in the sense that they can touch them themselves. And they know other cats have ears because they can observe them. The question is whether they understand that their ears are the same concept as other cats' ears.
This cat appears very clearly to be learning that, in real time.
Whereas other cats don't ever do this in mirrors. They try to reach the cat in the mirror, they try to outpace it, they try to attack it. They don't usually look in the mirror and then touch their own heads or bodies, and they are not known to be able to pass the mirror dot test, where only understanding that the reflection is actually _them_ should allow them to pass.
This cat looks very much like it could pass the mirror-dot test, and that could be of interest to science.
(Though given how sensitive cats are to things placed on their bodies, how routinely they clean their own faces, and the presence of whiskers on their face, it may actually be impossible to apply the mirror dot test in a way that is meaningful)
The greatest moment is the head-turn and the wide-eyed look on her face as she is sitting down. Like: "oh this changes everything".
Because I've only ever seen cats confused, agitated or completely avoidant around mirrors.
I'd always assumed the avoidant thing was, you know, "don't look at the mirror cat and it won't look at me, and we won't have to have the fight where nobody wins".
But the ears video makes me wonder if cats don't look at mirrors because they can't quite process the implications.
No, cats do not recognize themselves in mirrors. Very few animals do.
It's just very easy for us to see all sort of human behaviors in our pets.
That is certainly the conventional belief.
But that conventional belief is founded on a single fundamental test (the mirror-dot test) that may simply be difficult to apply to cats.
Other animals were thought not to be able to recognise themselves until they passed that test.
When they pass the test, we say that animals of that species can recognise themselves in the mirror. It's a single observation.
So the question then becomes: are we so sure about that test?
If you have not watched the video, watch it a few times.
The only other really sensible explanation is that the cat only gets this far:
The mirror cat does everything I do! Every time! I know the thing on the wall has the mirror cat in. I can only see the mirror cat's ears... Ears are interesting. Do my ears look like that? Since the mirror cat matches my every movement, that must be what my ears look like. So if I rub my paws on my ears, and watch the mirror cat copy me, I should be able to confirm that interpretation...
The cat is definitely performing a slow, precise movement in order to watch what happens in the mirror. She sits up to make sure she can see it, before she does it. (She doesn't need to sit up to clean her own ears without looking). It's far too deliberate and studied; we know what cats look like when they are concentrating on movement.
That she comes up short of realising that the mirror cat is herself is definitely plausible. But even then it is demonstrating an enhanced theory of mind, because it involves predicting that the mirror cat's actions will always match her actions, that this can be used to test an idea, and that conclusions can be drawn about what she must look like when doing the same actions.
At some point, we have to accept that the idea that we are wrongly projecting our unique intelligence onto other animals is actually pretty arrogant.
So we aim to prevent this by inspecting the area prior to bed, is there anything like that out?
The cat, then, surprises us sometimes by finding new objects he has not previously used, or out of sight. A recent example was finding a plastic bag in a crevice.
Touché
I've seen my cat attempt to plot a route into my home office (which is off limits to him) with his eyes. The last tricky bit is finding a way to get on top of the HVAC piping to jump off to the high (unglassed) window leading into my office. If he can solve that, he's in -- and he knows it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46rROBUDPYI
I was playing with them with a bird wand toy and then I wanted to get back to work. So I wedged the toy's handle in the chair.
Tulie had studied how I operated the toy, and she decided to work it herself to keep Sephie entertained.
At one point the feathers got stuck on the chair, and Tulie figured out how to unstick them!
Then the dogs came by to get some water, and the cats were like "nothing to see here, move along now."
And then with the dogs out of the way, they got back to business.
Cats pay attention and put things together!
We got a timer and set it to chime when the feeder went off, which helped.
The feeder has an app that triggers an alert on my phone and now if my phone makes that alert sound, they perk up and bolt to the basement.
So they’ve also learned to associate the alert sound to food….
Eventually she started jumping onto that corner of the desk to knock the USB sticks on the floor. After all, if I wasn't going to play laser tag with her, a USB stick makes a mighty fine cat toy!
Interesting that yours is a calico. Tulie is a tortoiseshell, which is basically the same thing without the white background.
But as far as I know, she never regret her decision.
However, my dog is orders of magnitude smarter, and has taught herself:
- Lying. She barks "at the mailman" about 10 minutes before he arrives, so I'll put her out when he's in the area
- Mirrors. She understands that her reflection is only a reflection, and will look at herself to see if her fur is ruffled on her hindquarters
- Language. Dogs are often taught to communicate with buttons that trigger a word. The conventional wisdom is that it takes a dog about a week to learn to use them. She taught herself 5 separate buttons in 20 minutes, and uses them to this day, chaining them together to express her thoughts remarkably clearly. For example, she used "no" + "time for bed" in the morning when I hadn't refilled her water yet.
But that's why dogs are so popular: they're calibrated to our psyche. They understand human gestures incredibly well.
What gave away his game was that sometimes his hind leg didn't quite get off the sofa. It was like a kid that took cookies for the cookie jar, even managed to get it back where it was supposed to be but then left obvious crumbs.
My dog does this too, and it's endearing.
They understand making a specific sound produces a specific result. It's a bit far from language.
She goes out and comes back when i call her and understands that she can wander outside only if she comes back when called. I put bells at the door that he uses to tell me when she wants to go out and rings the bells on the otherside when she is ready to come back in. Plays hide and seek, fetch ect with my nephew. And above all i feel like her emotional intelligence is on another level. She knows how to read minds. Best cat I've ever had!!!
Also, what breed is your dog? Is it one of the famously clever ones like a Border Collie?
She did plan an escape for over a week once, but that's a different story...
He gets spooked when he sees his faint reflection in glass, for example in front of the fake fireplace.
Part of it is that dogs and cats identify each other by smell as much as, if not more than, sight. A reflection may not register as a real dog/cat to most of them.
Also, our dog being a BC that means that, at times, he wants to herd our cat, after long bouts of staring at said cat. In response to all that the cat has invented and performed very smart avoidance techniques that he hadn't use with us before the BC came into our life (the cat was with us first, for about two years).
And that's just two quick things that sprung to my mind on learning the article, there are many others. There's also the misconception of "cats don't love/care about their owners" which is just a stupid stereotype.
After he passed, they now do this with my mum. In the mornings they will wake her up by licking her forehead, ever so gently.
I guess you can read in to their behaviour what you will, but to us it feels like empathy. Not sure what we would do without them.
When I was in high-school, I had a fish, a Banded knifefish, who welcomed me home every afternoon by standing upright on its tail by whatever side of the aquarium I was. I gave it food at the end of a stick and played games where it would hunt the food. If sometimes, if I stopped moving the stick it’d come to my side of the aquarium and stare at me until the stick started moving again.
I guess you can read in to their behaviour what you
will, but to us it feels like empathy
I felt quite certain "empathy" wasn't part of this set of skills.
But something recently made me question it.
A few weeks ago I saw a video from the Russia/Ukraine war that made me visibly upset. I became distressed and said "no no no NO" and hastily pounded the keyboard to close the window and went into an adjacent room to sit down, actually crying a bit.
My cat became very alarmed and followed me into the other room, looking at my face, and urgently rubbing himself against me.
I'm very close to my animals and I try very hard not to anthropomorphize them. I think it's actually a big disservice to do this. I try very very hard to think about how they experience the world in their own unique ways with their unique, non-human minds.
But this felt utterly unmistakable. He saw that I was upset and comforted me.
And he did this with no real prior data to work with. At least from me. I had never been visibly upset like that around him before.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
* Phone ringing, getting on towards 3-4 rings
* Cat sprinting down the stairs, jumps up onto bookshelf and waits
* Cat listens to the machine pick up the caller and the message they leave
* Caller hangs up and the cassettes go all clickety-clack
* Cat then reaches with his paw around the bookshelf to smack the big blue button
* Message plays back again and is now marked read, light goes out, and no one knows we were left a message
Over the years we saw him do this a number of times! Once he hit the wrong button and overwrote the outgoing message with the sound of himself purring.
They generally do what they please when they decide to do so. And they know it. How many people in your household can say they have this unbridled freedom?
Once you realise that the cat(s) in your abode and life have the luxury to pick and choose their course of action, or lack of it, at their whim the more you understand that they rule and occasionally oversee and direct proceedings.
In my house the cat runs the show. Then my wife. Then my two dogs and then me. I'm sure others on here can relate.
One of my cats wakes me up every day around 5-6AM to get food. She does so by making just enough noise to wake me up, but not my partner (she's doing it on my side of the bed, etc). She also does that when she's not hungry, but her sister is.
The other cat - of course, orange one - wakes me by trying to totally destroy something.
What we now know as domesticated cats have extra special set of skills..they know how to create and retain memories. They understand reward based stimuli.
There has been enormous research done in the field of cat genetics. UC Davis leads with the cat genetics lab and esp for their work on cat coat genetics.
But we also know what genes changed and evolved for their intelligence as they morphed from feral to domestic.
The most relevant one to intelligence are glutamate receptors that aids learning and memory. Domesticated animals have evolved to developed more coat variations and pigmentations than wild animals. This is why you don’t find a calico tiger but not only are there calico cats, but we also know that their genes guarantee that almost all are also female. Male calicos are sterile and short lived.
It is in the area of cat coat genetics that UC Davis VGL has made enormous strides. There are five key traits that facilitate domestication and one of them is the wide variability in pigmentation/texture of coats.
Even though cats have been around humans, they were allowed to be ‘wild’ and have resisted the intense pressure to adapt for full on domestication.
In a way, they have been more useful in agrarian societies in their undomesticated state and largely due to their hunting instincts…..which once tamed and trained is no longer as effective. Hunting rodents is a far different job that herding docile domesticated sheep.
If you look at the base sequences in their DNA you can clearly see whole runs that just spell out “CATCATCATCAT”.
It certainly appears that way. Dignity in domestication. Psychologically, cats seem to have a very healthy sense of self-respect.
All of my favourite authors are cat slaves.. notably adore their extensive cat quotes..Heinlein, Mark Twain..and of course, P.G.Wodehouse
and not to forget the illustrator of my namesakes..Edward Gorey
And of course, even Spock approved.
For years, my rescue cat has had an annoying habit of gently plucking at my clothes with her claws for no apparent reason. Then one day I had an epiphany. I discovered that scritching the top of her head made her stop plucking my clothes. Now she gets head scritches whenever she wants.
So from her perspective I am thoroughly stupid, yet capable of learning simple tricks given enough repetition and reinforcement.
“Whereas dogs have been bred for utility, cats have been bred solely for appearance.”
My understanding was cats largely served as pest control from the human perspective. It’s probably why they continue to hunt even when well fed.
We know that dogs were definitely bred for utility.
But cats were already effective pest controllers and may simply have moved in with humans after being tolerated.
Cats never needed selective breeding for the jobs they already did; they definitely have been bred for appearance more recently.
[1] https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/wc/adverb-placement-gene...
- Have you ever seen a "cat raised by dogs"? They develop the same mental schemas around socialization that dogs do; begin to understand the sort of "pack" structure and reward norms that dogs think in terms of; and so end up trainable exactly like dogs, using e.g. social-status gratification/reassurance as a substitute for food. And often, you won't actually have to explicitly train a "cat raised by dogs"; cats are seemingly highly skilled at modelling (i.e. witnessing others earning rewards for a behavior, and then self-motivatedly learning to mimic that behavior), and so a cat that hangs around trained dogs may teach themselves "tricks" it observes the dogs doing.
- Have you ever seen a cat taught human language using AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) devices, a.k.a. "button training"? They can very quickly absorb human mental schemas, learning to not just to favor "using their words" to signal their needs, but also, through that, to begin modelling the world narratively, telling stories about what they witnessed other-person A doing to other-person B. If you communicate the terms "soon" and "later" to them, they will begin asking about the future, expressing a curiosity about whether events (e.g. a person coming home from work) will happen near or far in time. These are not things that cats seem to instinctively think about, until they have the mental schemas to think about them; but once they absorb these schemas, they do engage with these topics!
I think human style intelligence we appreciate so highly is useful mostly in relation to other humans.
There was one cat who lived permanently at the clinic. She would be crated every night before we left. She would often get out of her crate and we'd find her roaming around the clinic the next morning. The cage required that you press two pins towards each other. It's surprising that she figured this out but also that she had the dexterity to reach outside the cage and do this.
She was one of the smartest animals I've ever interacted with. You could see the gears in her head turning when she wanted to figure something out.
One of them has learnt to do basic tricks for treats, and has also learned to turn on two different robot hoovers by pressing the right button - she only does this late at night, which I take either as attention-seeking or just boredom? The other one is the Zoolander of cats.
Beyond this, they seem quite limited: sleep, eat, wander around, watch the world go by, occasionally hang out with us, sometimes play or hunt.
A 16 year old cat deserves to do whatever the hellz it wants.
For instance, my experience is that they can quickly understand the function of a door handle and even learn to operate it in order to open the door.
> Other tests include the ability to learn and remember. Is the ability to learn by rote a sign of intelligence? If so, any avian mimic is intelligent.
I would argue this shouldnt just be dismissed like that. I would argue that mimicking is a sign of intelligence - The fact that a toddler can mimic an animal, even if that animal has vastly different anatomy, seems very intelligent. It suggests an understanding of the similarities between function of body parts, even if the form differs significantly. Why would an avian mimic not be a sign of significant intelligence, such as understanding vocalizations and how they happen? A bird rarely has to sit there for hours trying random sounds to mimic another sound, it understand and knows what to do, does it not?
But those sound boards that let pets communicate with words and concatenate have been okay at helping me move past our tests of intelligence. We cant even communicate with other humans that cant dont talk back or use fingers.
I’m also less convinced that human behaviors are not just reward seeking patterns chained together, so I cant dismiss a pet’s use of a sound board as just trained behavior for a treat - at least as a reason to dismiss their intelligence or weigh that action any way at all
I would say its evidence of understanding and that the animal is aware that they cannot use their vocal cords to respond to us and just give up trying that
[0] https://sciencenorway.no/ulv/wolf-packs-dont-actually-have-a...
Appreciate with some reservations this lead:
“I personally consider these experiments cruel and gratuitous (their medical benefit to humans is too often dubious) and though some such experiments are referenced here, Messybeast.com does not support this form of experimentation.”
I understand the political context of starting this way, and as a cat lover it resonates too easily even with me.
But in essentially all western-eastern-northern-southern societies (modern or ancient) that routinely kill and eat such clever beasts as cows, pigs, monkeys, horses, sheep, goats, bunny rabbits, octopi, and all manner of birds, I wonder if “gratuitous and cruel” are the right words. And this wuestion is especially relevant when, as you admit, so much of your cool overview relies on that scientific work. This is cognitive dissonance at its best—-well intentioned but still unrooted. Too “woke” for me.
I would say no: You cannot have this particular cake and eat it too!
And definitely not true the this “gratuitous and cruel” work was either gratuitous and cruel or that it has not contributed greatly to clinical care of humans. It has. Half of what we know (a bit rhetorical) about brain plasticity and repair following brain damage comes from exactly this type of work.
It is intellectually disingenuous to be squeamish, even if a cat lover, if you then use these finding.
And if one is NOT also a strict vegetarian, then please stay silent—-you have no standing in this court of ethical conundrums.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_ChDCS_z2o
Her favorite word? Mad.
I was a biology nerd before I became an IT nerd and during my (non scientific) studies I found that many species are way more intelligent than what we give them credit for.
When I studied at university (discontinued, switched to IT) I also found evidence to underline some of my personal findings.
My cat knows when it's 9pm since that is treat time. She can be sound asleep but at 8:59pm I hear thump thump as she hops down from her sleeping spot. It's not that she is detecting me doing something. I watch streaming video at random times stopping and starting it. There is no obvious cue that I can think of that is allowing her to know the time. Not even sunlight is a cue since the light is wildly different here due to being on the 49th parallel and the seasons. She even adjusts for daylight savings and standard time but it takes about a week.
To me the sign that cats are definitely intelligent is their ability to make us think so whether they are or not:).
When I would walk away, several times he would anticipate my path and run in front of me and lay down to block my path, apparently to receive some more affection.
I’ve had some super affectionate and at least not-dumb cats, but I was still really surprised by this guy’s apparent intentionality. And all for affection - it’s not like I’d had any cat treats on me to give him.
Interesting that female cats form more social, cooperative groups. I wonder if this explains why our female cat seems more sociable and human while our male cat is more aloof.
The first time I got scared cause I didn't want the mouse to get in the house and I didn't know who was knocking on the door but I think it was half-dead...oh yeah I forgot to mention that all the mice were still alive.
I'll never understand that behavior..she was well fed.
She would walk over and start talking - almost literally. Her trills and mews vere so varied in pitch and length that it sounded like speech. And she responded when we talked to her.
This made me feel dumb, because I obviously couldn't understand what she'd talk about. Well except that one time she detected a leak in the central heating and alerted me to it.
Anything else they are not very intelligent. Let’s not make cat videos confuse us.
It convinced me that cats are aware of themselves as reflections on a camera or mirror and are much smarter than I thought. To realise something was wrong with their owners face.
ahahahahhaha this one from another part of the site is great. Love the content, love the '90s hypersimple design. I gave her a donation and she quickly sent me back a personal note.
I started leash training my cat at about 6 months and he is 4.5 years old now.
People are regularly astonished to see a cat content on a leash at all.
But what’s amazing is how much preference, analysis, and decision making you see a cat demonstrate when you spend so much time with them.
Also, claim that cats are breed only for appearance is not completely true, in villages good rat-catchers will breed and not-so-good rat-catchers will have their litters drown.
This strikes me as a dubious statement. Or perhaps I am reading more into it than is really there. Perhaps it was true a hundred or more years ago, but now it seems to me that dogs are overwhelmingly bred for appearance.
It's so refreshing.
In some intelligence circles cats are referred to as "St. Up ID" aka "St. Uppity" because they always like to show your their asses ... almost as if they're begging for some sort of trophy or something.
On the other hand ... over time, cats have developed mice/Rat & human mind-altering poop:
https://www.nbcnews.com/healthmain/cat-poop-parasite-control...
... leading to incidents such as:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ4Y27RQaZk <== notice none of the cats manage to "eat The Rat" aka The Emperor: https://www.trendstees.com/product/emperor-pikachu-t-shirt/ ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bhDAJUk-vU
https://quinzo.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/shocking-german-bish...
Same video (shorter), with Russian comment-a-Ri: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPK_ij0llc8 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTt4k3lh9Gc
Here is another famous scene from Belgium: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/cat-instant-karm...
So basically, cats poop, Ratz eats the SH!I.T. code, becomes fearless, cat attacks what it assumes is free food and learns a lesson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uSfLDuRtOM
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZulOGB9yXlY <== starts off with "cocaine"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bv4KGhtFt4 <== Cocaine Marley fought with the Crips because she got jumped in; she's "Big Blue" ... has "Lincoln Tunnel-vision" and "rolls like a marble" ...
Early example of a PHD candidate's example of Ai: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/6008-sumo ... https://tenor.com/view/obviously-defective-tomax-xamot-gi-jo... ... unless you keep insisting on playing it ... then it gets harder exponentially quickly at the later levels ...
At "2:48" is the NSA/Se Cutey Ri's opinion of MSM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXKOIKBCC8c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS4RpBR0Zn0 https://giphy.com/gifs/IntoAction-eH4H6NP5XePcxnO6wU
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/oct/14/freedomofinfor...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fbi-reveals-its-suspicion...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bortnikov#:~:text=Al....
http://thealexandernj.net/ Front view:
https://tenor.com/view/voltron-linkup-gettogether-gif-561031...
aka "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFN3l2NuoE0"
Top view from outer space: https://www.amazon.com/Lolita-Jeremy-Irons/dp/B00001IVFG
This is a random scene from the film: https://voltamagazine.wordpress.com/2020/11/02/decoding-the-...
This is a bizarre random movie theater closing of a place that had some great reviews on Yelp ... yet closed for "undisclosed business circumstances":
https://www.google.com/search?q=edgewater+multiplex+closing&...
https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-outer-worlds/the-outer-worlds-c...
It had great cheap ticket rates and even cheaper matinee rates ...
Unfortunately, messing around with the National "Se Cuty Ri" Agency is a very expensive proposition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPn82XZgTMA
https://tenor.com/view/super-milk-chan-anime-adult-swim-gif-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQW2FFt3-A8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGQvlx4LDqg
https://tenor.com/view/i-got-a-solution-idiocracy-solution-t...
https://www.google.com/search?q=donald+rumsfeld+smile&tbm=is...
This is what Donald Rumsfeld was trying to give endless clues about what "Pentagon" is a "Ran MAGA/Anagram/Spell-s-witch" about (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-9169611/Rihann...):
https://www.yahoo.com/video/pentagon-35-trillion-accounting-...
https://tenor.com/view/destro-marvel-animated-such-bottomles...
In the past this trainability was associated with intelligence but modern studies indicate trainability and intelligence are not correlated as closely as we used to think.
In short: you train a dog, your cat trains you aka the old joke about dogs having masters and cats having staff is probably true.
Wolf packs are generally a monogamous pair with their recent offspring.
And feral cats certainly form colonies, though it seems like what research there is has the primary cat social groups being a female and her young and extending from there to multiple females and their young.[2]
Really for both wolves/dogs and cats it seems like environment strongly influences social behavior and there is a large amount of variance.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2021-04-wolf-dont-alpha-males-females.... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7149619/
"Because we judge intelligence by comparing other creatures to ourselves, many popular accounts of cat behaviour describe learning as though cats are mentally defective humans rather than highly specialised carnivores."