Chinese Boy Claims To Have Cat-Like Night Vision

So your stance is that mother cats who have no particular reason to prefer a litter box over the dirt in the yard (and may have never seen a litter box), teach the kittens to use a litter box... even when there is no litter box to teach them with? How do you explain that kittens acquired just after weaning also use a litter box automatically?

Cats instinctively dislike being messy, wet, and waste odors. Just as all cats instinctively pick at food in a delicate and selective manner and in general take almost every action in a careful deliberate way unless panicked. They all have a COMPULSION to chase and stalk that is triggered by certain movement patterns. I don't know that anyone has made a deliberate study of incubating a kitten from birth and keeping it in isolation from other cats into adulthood but it seems unlikely that every cat from the first evolution of cat to modern day has passed on the exact same training in this regard. Nature is a far simpler solution in this regard than nurture and therefore all else being equal is most likely correct.

That said, I do concede that cats definitely do teach one another even when they aren't mother cats. If you succeed in toilet training one cat in the house it will most likely teach the others. The same with using cat doors and other tricks. In some respects despite not being pack animals cats are actually quite social. I haven't seen dogs teaching one another advanced behaviors like this.

I would even concede there are aspects of waste disposal that are likely trained. Burying behavior seems to be in my observation. Some cats bury in a deep and carefully buried hole, others just toss back a couple pawfuls of dirt. Generally these behaviors seem to be common to cats from the same litter but they aren't static. Some cats change behavior in this respect and that may be because they learn from other cats or just that they discover on their own that they prefer the results of a deep careful bury.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/nE29NZj4Q9M/chinese-boy-claims-to-have-cat-like-night-vision

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