[Animals] The slow blinking of cats

[WilkerCSBD]

According to a recently published study, if we approach a cat and blink slowly, the animal will catch it immediately and blink back, thus establishing communication with us
A group of cats in a cafe that welcomes these felines in Seoul this week.
A group of cats at a cat-friendly cafe in Seoul this week.KIM HONG-JI / REUTERS

In one of his reports, Gay Talese takes to taxonomy and starts to classify the cats of New York City. The American journalist tells how, when the traffic slows, the cats begin to appear in herds and very soon they invade the streets, the docks, the surroundings of the Greenwich Village fish markets and every point where the garbage cans abound.

The average lifespan of a stray cat is two years, unlike domestic cats, whose average lifespan extends from ten to twelve years or more, Talese writes to continue telling us how stray cats can be classified into three "types ”. On the one hand there are what he calls "wild cats", which are the ones that have to look for life in garbage cans or hunting rats. They are usually "the most disheveled, they have a disturbed look, an insane expression and wide eyes."

Continuing with Talese's classification, we have another group of cats well differentiated from the previous one, being that of the "bohemian cats", more docile, and who live on charity, at the expense of people's food scraps. Finally, there are the “part-time cats in a store (or restaurant)”, who use the store (or restaurant) as a pension to eat and sleep, and go out for a walk at night to link kittens. Their number has decreased since the emergence of supermarkets.

It can well be said that the cat is, par excellence, the animal of civilization
However, Talese's classification, although it is a curious classification, is still a classification of social behavior taken to the animal kingdom. Because all cats belong to the same genus and species: Felis catus, whose domestic origin dates back to the Neolithic, from a distant day when cats approached the barns of the settlements in the fertile area of the Nile Valley in search of the rodents that ruined grain crops. It was then that the human being realized the help that the feline could give him if he was close to him. For this reason, it can well be said that the cat is, par excellence, the animal of civilization.

Herodotus, the first chronicler of our civilization, whose extensive coverage of history serves as a journalistic model, tells us in his book II how the Egyptians "are superstitiously fond of cats." If a catastrophe such as a fire occurred, "without bothering to extinguish the fire, they position themselves from time to time as sentries, in order to preserve the cats from the fire." Even the affection of the Egyptians reached such that, when a cat died a natural death, they shaved their eyebrows with a razor as a sign of mourning. The funerals of the cats were true religious ceremonies. Preserved in salt, they were taken in sarcophagus to the city of Bubastis where they were buried.

A few days ago the first study on the gestures that cats make to communicate with us was published. According to this work, published on October 5, carried out with 21 cats from 14 different households, every time we look at a cat and it starts blinking it means that it is smiling at us. This is the first research on blinking as a communication gesture between cats and humans. According to this study, if we approach a cat and blink slowly, the cat will catch it immediately and blink back, thus establishing communication with us.

Surely the ancient Egyptians knew it, as they also knew that we can never own a cat. The cat is our owner. In fact, every time they come to rub themselves they do so to mark their domain, to indicate their belonging, which they later recognize by smell.

Arrived here, it is possible to imagine Gay Talese in New York City, standing in front of a garbage can, taking notes about feline behavior, while a pack of cats blinks at his presence and reaches out to rub against their ankles. Gay Talese surely thought he was classifying them, when in fact it was the cats that were classifying the journalist.

The stone ax is a section where Montero Glez, with the will of prose, exercises his particular siege to scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.