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Caring for Individual Species indoor cats may fail to receive sufficient attention to their social and predatory needs. This can lead directly to emotional dysfunction and result in behavioral problems. General mood state is a particularly crucial factor for the cat because it is largely determined by the environmental and social lifestyle in which the cat is maintained. It is difficult to identify accurately or treat any particular behavior problem, such as indoor urine spraying or inter-cat aggression, based solely on a cat’s emotional responses at the time without analyzing the animal’s general mood state beforehand and adjusting his or her care to improve it. This attention to cats’ mood states is necessary because cats, being able to detect so much more of what is going on around them, actually need to have their senses stimulated and to express the behaviors associated with detecting, stalking, and catching their prey. Some cats also need to have contact with other cats, and all will certainly need to have frequent contact with their caregivers to retain a mood of contentment in a domestic setting. The challenge of keeping a cat content indoors is similar to the challenge of keeping other captive animals happy in a small and unchanging environment where most aspects of their lives, including feeding and physical health, are managed for them. The key is often to introduce animals to the emotion of frustration in their day-to-day lives. This is just as vital to well-being as the love and attention that caregivers can offer. If there is never anything problematic to resolve in terms of social interaction and acquiring food, and there is little or no access to novel items, then a cat may become bored or obsessed with some minor aspect of life as a compensatory mechanism. It is the relief of mild frustration by overcoming little difficulties and exploring new things that produces a mood of well-being. Indoor cats can otherwise become lazy and unfit, and they may sleep even more than the two-thirds of life that cats normally sleep away anyway, as simply another means of recycling the neurotransmitters that are associated with feelings of well-being. Cats In many surveys, cats are commonly described by their caregivers as “close friends.” Most of us accept that our cat companions are as aware of our moods as we are of theirs. Mechanistic descriptions of animal behavior are being replaced by an understanding of “emotionality”— how all animals, including humans, are emotionally complex beings. This enables us to examine not only our own mood states better, in terms of assessing our general well-being, but also those of our cats. Most caregivers in Europe allow their cats the freedom of the great outdoors to behave as they wish and then care, feed, and enjoy social interaction with them when they return home. Only about 10 percent of cats are believed to live permanently indoors in the United Kingdom , but the figure is higher and rising in the United States. Cats kept in city apartments may be unable to reach ground level, and some caregivers choose to keep them indoors anyway because of concerns about their safety outdoors. Indoor cats are less likely to catch diseases and suffer injuries and are far less likely to contract parasites. Moreover, expensive pedigree cats (4 percent of the 7.5 million cats in the United Kingdom in 2002) are most unlikely to be stolen if kept indoors. Indoor cats live longer and safer lives and are likely to be physically healthier than cats allowed to go hunting and exploring outdoors. But what of their mental welfare? The cat evolved as a solitary predator at the top of the food chain. This means that each one is designed to move through a hunting environment, avoiding danger and detecting and catching prey. To do this, cats have evolved astonishing sensory capabilities and are super-sensory compared with social hunter-gatherers (such as human beings) and hunter-scavengers (such as dogs), who find food as part of a team and can rely on one another to detect and respond to danger. Supersensory, yet increasingly kept in unchanging and unchallenging physical environments (and sometimes subjugated to their caregiver’s fears or demands), neville / cats | 115 116 |  taylor / dogs The following suggestions may help keep a cat, whether allowed outdoors or confined indoors, psychologically healthy: Play predatory games The opportunity to express the innately rewarding predatory sequence of “eye-stalk-chase...

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