Caturday felid quadrifecta: Cat sticks out tongue at sound of packing tape, Leon monologues, and Honey Bee, the blind hiking cat, and kitten-induced stress relief

November 15, 2014 • 5:26 am

There are FOUR cat-related items today, and if you don’t read them all I’ll stick beans up my nose.

Reader Alex sent a video that flummoxes all students of cat behavior. His notes:

 I’m not usually in the habit of sharing cat videos but this one has me baffled. I can understand climbing into boxes, sucking on a vacuum cleaner nozzle and giving up on life when forced to wear a bad jumper. But I can’t understand how the sound of tape can cause this cat’s tongue to malfunction.
And the video at issue:

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On August 17, I posted a series of three “Leon monologues,” in which a very young Polish tabby was doing monologues along the line of Hili Dialogues.  Now, after only three months, Leon has grown up a lot, but he’s still doing monologues on his owner’s Facebook page. Go look at his original monologues, and then read the two new ones below. A bit of the backstory again:

His human’s name is Elzbieta Wierzbicka and she teaches Polish language in the school in Dobrzyn. She had another cat, also rescued but as an adult, Bruno, who went for a walk a few months ago and never returned. After looking for him everywhere possible she acknowledged the sad fact that Bruno will not return. Then she saw an ad that animal shelter has a 7-week-old abandoned kitten who needs special care and she took him.

Leon’s survival was touch and go for a while, but he survived and is in good nick. Here is a grown-up but polite Leon entertaining guests. His monologue:
We have guests. I have to show good manners.
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And another, in which Leon makes a facepalm (or a facepaw):
I flicked through two volumes of “Order of Teutonic Knights”. Not a mention of cats.
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From Bored Panda comes a heartwarming story of a blind cat who likes to go hiking: “Meet Honey Bee, Our Rescued Blind Cat Who Loves Hiking With Us.” It’s a heartwarmer: Honey Bee, who can’t see squat, still enjoys an outing, and you can see her using her other senses to enjoy the outdoors. She lives in Seattle with a staff of two humans and four cats. First a few photos with the original captions, and then a video:
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She loves to ride on shoulders and we would take her on long walks
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Honey Bee likes listening to water sounds when we go on outdoor adventures. Her good sense of edges and drop-offs means that she can get close without falling in.
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Hiking goes a bit slower with Honey Bee because there are so many smells and sounds everywhere.
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She has regular water and snack breaks, just like us.
And a nice video:
This is a video of a hike we went on to Mason Lake, in the mountains outside of Seattle. (The song is “Solar Flares” by Silent Partner from YouTube’s free music library.)
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And this video, which can go by the title in its contents—”you can’t be stressed after sitting in a box full of kittens”—was sent to me by at least a dozen readers. It’s obviously an ad for Tidy Cats cat litter, but it’s one hell of an effective ad! I could use a bit of this stress relief, but I have no felids 🙁
h/t: Su, Malgorzata

25 thoughts on “Caturday felid quadrifecta: Cat sticks out tongue at sound of packing tape, Leon monologues, and Honey Bee, the blind hiking cat, and kitten-induced stress relief”

  1. Curious. Unless cat licks is some sort of odd sect, can it instead be a flehmen response?

    Pulling tape should give funny chemistries. I hear some instances can generate 10s of 1000’s of volts, and that much energy packed in small volumes can make something non-familiar out of plastic and glue.

    2. Oh, and of course there are plenty of potential confounds that can trigger odd behavior – potentially visible (and at a guess UV) light emission for one – if not in cats so in other organisms.

      [And links on TeraHz waves that I didn’t hunt down.]

      A sticky problem.

    3. I think the cat hears the tape as a facsimile of the sound it hears when its tongue slides across a dry drumstick. The sound in its head triggers the licking response.

  3. Considering the loopiness of neural circuits I’m guessing it’s like when you scratch your d*g in the right spot she will twitch her leg on that side as if she were scratching herself.
    The sound of the tape sounds kind of what a scratchy tongued person would hear while licking something.

  4. I think I know why the cat sticks out its tongue to the sound of packing tape. Our cat has had a penchant for licking tape (packing or masking tape). It seems that its the sweetness or ‘animal-ness’ of the glue she likes. We discovered this when we were paint prepping and packing boxes.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_glue
    https://artway.wordpress.com/2008/10/17/our-cat-is-addicted-to-eating-tape-is-yours/

    Stuff is sometimes added to the glue for stamps to make them take good, so I wonder if cats would lick stamps.

  5. My hypothesis is that the tongue reaction is a somatic reflex to the sound, similar to how one may jump at a loud noise, or kick if the patellar tendon is tapped. The cat is not startled, has otherwise normal behavior, but it also seems unable to prevent the tongue reaction.

    1. I’ve known cats who appear to involuntarily open their mouths at the sound of someone rubbing a fingernail across the teeth of a comb. So, I’m thinking it could a reflex.

  6. Thank you for sharing. Honey Bee is a really cool cat. I imagine she talks with the wildlife of the mountains and shares the words of those wildlings with her city friends.

  7. Honey Bee’s experience on the trail is exactly like Baihu’s!

    So, there you have it, folks. If Baihu, a formerly-feral kitten born to a feral mother; and Honey Bee, a blind-from-birth cat; are both happy on the trail, then that means that pretty much every cat should have a chance to enjoy the trail.

    b&

      1. Actually, yes. The similarities between the two are so numerous and striking that it would seem highly unlikely they’d be coincidental. It shouldn’t take many more examples for the patterns to become crystal clear.

        The first time Darwin saw a finch in a non-finch ecological niche probably mildly amused him. The second one probably set off all kinds of alarm bells. And the more non-finch finches he saw, the more and more obvious it became that something really worth paying attention to was going on….

        b&

        1. Darwin collected. It wasn’t until the (shot and stuffed, or soaked in alcohol) corpses got back to London and a bird specialist that they were all discovered to be finches.

  8. Why would anyone assume that the cat is responding the sound of the tape?

    Only the cat’s head is visible. The owner could be stimulating it in some other way off-camera (Squeezing its foot? Poking its belly?).

    Skepticism, Jerry, skepticism!

  9. I don’t know why the cat does it, but it is not the first cat I have seen do that. When I was a master’s student I had a professor whose cat did that. Once at a party at his house he showed us. They first learned about it when they were moving house and packing boxes.

  10. My first thought with the cat’s tongue was that the sound of tape was perhaps similar to the sound of running water and this was a cat very well neurologically primed to lick running water. But, as Smokedpaprika suggests at #4, this may also be a cat which licks that sort of tape. Or, as kevin7alexander #3 says, it sounds like licking fur sounds when done up close and personal.

    What’s cuter than a box of kittens? Traditional answer is : a basket of kittens and puppies and they’re all best friends. I’d add in a giggling baby watching them and falling over in uncontrollable glee. Perfect.

  11. In more feline related news, yesterday I submitted an application to volunteer at the local animal shelter. One of the possible jobs is socializing moggies.

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