BBC viewers: don’t forget to watch The Secret Life of Cats tonight at 2100 BST on BBC 2. That’s just three hours from now, and I expect a report or two. The show documents the lives of cats as seen from videocameras mounted on their collars, which include a GPS sensor to track their movements.
The BBC link is here, and, in the meantime, you can prepare yourself by looking at the cool interactive graphs at this BBC site. Click on one of the ten moggies at the top and it will show you that animal’s rovings on a satellite photo.
Here, for example, is a map of Sooty’s rovings over one day. (There are also small videos showing momentous events, like Sooty’s encounter with a fox):
That’s a lot of perambulation for a cat!
The BBC website also describes how this interactive page was made.
h/t: SGM
I saw a snippet earlier on the beeb about this. Amazing that beloved pets have only just been monitored to this degree.
Very insightful and I love how they will actively enter a foreign catflap and steal food of other moggies.
I couldn’t actually see the fox in the video. Can anyone give a hint about where + when to look for it?
I didn’t see a fox either.
There was a highlight circle in the lower right of the screen, in the last 15 seconds or so.
Got it – thanks!
What do they mean when they say Hermie is a male, but then that “he’s” an hermaphrodite? If Herme’s the latter, he’s just as much female as male.
I certainly hope they stabilize the videos for larger consumption. The constant back and forth motion of the cat’s strides made me a bit queasy. Not something I want to endure in large doses.
I thought it was really cute…but yes, difficult to watch for very long.
A testament to the visual stabilization that our vestibular systems provides us. It’s easy to take for granted.
A consequence should be that watching these for long enough will allow the brain to get used to them.
I would love to do this with my cat. I have a feeling, certainly now it is hot, that I would get a lot of footage of cool darkness under the deck, or of the back of my head when she sits under the fan in my office, but there would be the brief evening wanderings and loud encounters with her tortoiseshell nemesis next door, or the occasional showdown with possums thieving from her food bowl.
Just finished watching this. Was a great show and interesting. Probably one of the most interesting things was the two types of purrs. One that’s relaxed and the other that’s for wanting food. What made it more interesting was that one (I believe the relaxed one) had a peek frequency similar to that of a crying baby which is why we feel so connected to cats. There was a lot of talk of how cats are evolving and that we are the cusp of the next stage of evolution.
Could be wrong, but I thought it was the other purr type [can’t remember what it was called] where the cat is asking for something from a human?
The first purr type was “non-solicitation”, and the second was “solicitation”.
Good show
The women seem to be the bosses in most of those houses… 🙂
I would like to see more evidence that raiding each others food bowls is causing the cats to take less wild prey as this programme suggests. I have the feeling that 0.5 prey/week/cat is a gross underestimate for those cats that range outside the house.
One of em brought back a rabbit. An actual rabbit.
We were once presented with the sight of a fully grown and very dead white rabbit just inside the catflap. I have no idea how Monte got it through. We quickly disposed of it, just before the next door neighbour came asking if we had seen their pet rabbit, which had mysteriously disappeared from its hutch…
Greetings,
Fascinating programme!
As an aside, one of the cat expert presenters, John Bradshaw, has written a book called “In Defence Of Dogs”!
They found that the cats didn’t kill that many creatures – about 0.5 kills per cat over the week of the study. Mainly, they thought, because the cats were visiting each other’s homes and eating left-overs!
The cats appeared to “time-share” the area – some cats whose territories appeared to over-lap due to crowding would split the 24 hours: one cat would do daytime, the other night, in order to avoid conflicts, particularly actual physical fights.
Perhaps the most fascinating discovery amongst a number of interesting information was to do with purring.
There are two types – unsolicited (when owners stroke their cats) and solicitation (when the cat is expecting something).
The latter differs from the former in that it features a sudden spike which happens to be at the same frequency as that of a baby’s crying – a fascinating adaptation to cohabitation with humans perhaps!?
I wonder what Prof. Coyne would make of that?
Kindest regards,
James
They also said it might be the late spring that meant they were less likely to go out hunting.
It was Cat Lent, and they were fasting.
I think they must have missed the data that the Daily Mash saw
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/cats-head-straight-to-cat-pub-2013061472194
They also missed cats mugging humans, partying, visiting night clubs and punching people -www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0jdjRrzIyw – I was expecting this documentary to reveal more of this behaviour.
What had really ‘evolved’ here was the technology. I recall that several years ago there was something similar on the BBC where some farm cats were tracked and they found that the toms had very large areas that they patrolled. There were no cameras then, I think, but just tracking devices.
The programme did not make clear whether the behaviour was from neutered animals or whether there was a male/female difference.
I would expect neutered animals tpo be more docile & less adventurous.
Near the start of the show, when the first days GPS data came in, they said that male cats have a range of around 100m away from their homes, female cats range at half that. But they did not mention whether they were neutered or not.
Fascinating, I’m watching this now. I learned that cats have glands in their cheeks and they rub faces with people in a way of marking territory. I always thought cats did this as a sign of affection, like a hug, I feel so used and violated.
But I bet you go back for more…
Try here:
http://www.eyenimal.com/fr/products/cat-videocam-1.html
And search ‘kitty cam’ on youtube.
The GPS stuff and the number of cats monitored in a week makes this programme interesting.
Entertaining documentary. The time-sharing of space was a new one on me, but a lot of the rest definitely makes sense if you’ve ever owned a cat.
Even in urban areas cats can have quite a range – a neighbour bumped in to his cat, neutered male, one night over a mile from our apartment block!
Did the cat pretend not to know him?
It was quite insightful with a couple of surprising findings (to me).
One was as other commenters mentioned the different purr types.
The other was the difference in behaviour between a single cat household and a multi-kitteh household. In the multi-kitteh household whilst not exactly pack behaviour they tended to roam togetherish and shared a common territory.
They suggested this may be behavioural adaptions to cat domestication. I think the more likely hypothesis is that it is due to the cats domestication of humans!
The happiest bunch appeared to be the feral farm cats. Perhaps the idea that cats are solitary animals is an urban myth propagated by single cat owners?
It appeared that living in a large social group is a more natural state?
Even a 0.5 kill ratio per cat, is more than enough to justify the belief that outdoor and feral cats play a significant part in the decline in small mammal and bird populations?
Would this now justify a cull?.