Why can't my kitten just grow up and play right?

December 28, 2007 7:26 PM

My genius cat is really letting me down lately. I know she's not blind, but why can't she seem to see her toy when we're playing fetch?

I have a five-month old spectacularly brilliant (or not) Tonkinese kitten that loves to fetch. It is, by far, her favorite recreational activity, and the object of her lust is a 1.5 foot length of white rope of the clothesline/knot-tying variety. We play this little game several times daily, and it puzzles-me-nuts that sometimes she doesn't seem to be able to see the rope after it's landed only fifteen feet away. So why can't she find her toy when she seems to be on a desperate search for it?


Minutiae:

This always seems to happen when she's distracted by a noise or movement as I'm tossing, which causes her to lose visual contact with her rope for like a second, just long enough so that she'll miss seeing it hit the floor ... which she apparently has to see if there's any hope of her finding and retrieving it (seriously, wtf?). She clearly knows what it looks like; she manages to find it in order to bring it to me to play, so I don't get it.

She'll bolt in the direction she's seen me toss it in, pause within a couple feet of reaching it, as if she can't see it, run around searching for it -- sometimes in a panic -- then walk around the general area, whining loudly. She has, on an alarming number of occasions, actually stepped on or over it while apparently looking for it. If I don't get it for her, it's game-over, which happens nearly every time because I don't want to condition her to play the spectator-role in this game. And I have my pride.

She's an otherwise-smart, healthy, normal kitten. She lands insanely huge flying-jumps through the air with crazy precision, so it's not a vision problem. (And the rope is white, being tossed onto brown carpet, so it's not a color/contrast thing.) The rope makes an audible sound when it hits the floor, which should also clue her to its whereabouts.

Is she a total idiot? Crack-addled? Is she missing some essential cat sensory organ that would otherwise allow her to find her favorite object in the whole world? wtf?

posted by heyho to pets & animals (15 comments total)

One of my cats fetches (actually, he's better at fetching than our Lab, who is a trained duck dog whose job is to fetch) and exhibits the same target loss when he loses visual contact. Cats are visual hunters, their eyes excel at picking up motion; their acute hearing is used to bring them close to the target and then it's eyes all the rest of the way. Hanks of rope (or rubber pencil grips, my cat's crack) don't make sound or move around after the toss.

I use a laser pointer as a backup: follow the red dot to the missing toy.
posted by jamaro at 7:37 PM on December 28, 2007

She's looking for motion, not static form, color, or shape. Possibly the motion of the rope when thrown is quite different from the motion of other toys, and that difference is the reason for her preference.
posted by dilettante at 7:38 PM on December 28, 2007

I can't explain why you're kitty can't find the object, but I can report that my own cat had a similar problem. She used to love fetching foil balls...but only when she could track them properly. As with your tale, if (for whatever reason) she failed to see the object land, she couldn't find it again. I just kept a healthy supply of foil to keep the game going.

My best guess - completely without support - is that the problem lies in the hunting instinct. If the cat loses sight of the "prey," they're not looking for *it* necessarily, but waiting for it to move again. The game for them is not fetch, it's kill. If the prey is just sitting there, who cares?

BTW, my cat eventually lost interest in the fetch game all together. She'll still drop into stalking/pounce mode if I crumple something up, but when I throw it she's not interested.
posted by Banky_Edwards at 7:42 PM on December 28, 2007

Maybe she's bored with it sometimes? Try alternating different toys and see if that keeps her interested. Other than that, cats are very fickle and you'll never really be able to predict why she does, or doesn't do, something in particular.
posted by amyms at 7:42 PM on December 28, 2007

Both of the cats living in my apartment exhibit the same traits.
posted by dhammond at 7:43 PM on December 28, 2007

My dogs do this too... then again, they do it with food sometimes (which they can certainly smell) so they may just be stupid.
posted by MadamM at 7:47 PM on December 28, 2007

Datapoint:
I used to live with two cats who were excellent fetchers.
They were crumpled-paper fiends.

They could find the precise ball you threw amidst many other highly similar balls. Even when they couldn't see it land.
[A favourite game was to move a couch about 5 inches from a wall and throw paper behind there. Seeing a fat cat *dive* headfirst into that small a space [at a dead run] was not the highlight. The highlight came 4 minutes later when a cat head with paper ball clenched in its mouth would triumphantly emerge, followed about 15 seconds later by one fully extended claw, and 15 seconds later by the other one, as the end of a valiantly claustrophobic struggle to return the paper for another round.]
Many nights were spent distracting the cats while the paper was in mid-flight, puzzle-style. The successes were spectacular. How do they hunt a stationary ball of paper?
Your cat makes way more sense than those cats.
posted by Acari at 8:05 PM on December 28, 2007 [2 favorites]

Fresh scent.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 8:11 PM on December 28, 2007

I had a male cat who lost his "prey," too, and exhibited otherwise top-notch "being a cat" skills. I agree with the notion that the interest is in the movement--not so much the object itself. This same cat could entertain himself for an hour with the Crazy Ring, but didn't get into torture-and-kill sessions with other objects like the rest of the cats.
posted by bonobo at 9:12 PM on December 28, 2007

Just in passing, cats have terrible color vision. They trade that off in exchange for having far better night vision than we have.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:35 PM on December 28, 2007

I think it's something about the movement. When it's not moving, it's not 'prey' anymore, it's just furniture/background-noise. Several cats of mine have done similar stuff: they'd love to chase after something you were moving, and if you threw the toy they'd chase it, but if it was just lying there on the ground, they'd ignore it completely.

I have no idea what goes on inside the kitty brain, but I think it's almost like they don't perceive the non-moving object as being the same thing as the moving object. If they don't see it land, it's like the object gets put into a different mental category when they do see it; instead of something to chase after it's just a dead object.

Trying to analyze it though will just drive you mad. (Which perhaps is the point...)
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:53 PM on December 28, 2007

Cats have evolved two interlaced sets of optic ganglia, quick-response "Y" nerves that have large fields and are superior in discriminating fast motion and, predominating in the fovea, slower "X" nerves that have smaller fields and are better at seeing contrast and color. So it's natural for a stationary object in a cat's peripheral vision to become less visible to the cat - and useful, since in nature cats are predators not prey and don't care very much about anything that isn't moving. (Of course they eat carrion too but they find that by scent.)

Pressure to the feline optic nerve damages Y axons first so I guess it's unlikely that trauma or congenital skeletal malformation has by partial occlusion left your cat able to see only objects in motion. It is possible though that your cat just naturally has fewer X nerves and is particularly attuned to fast-moving objects - it would explain both her fascination with the moving-rope game and her inability to track the rope once it lands.
posted by nicwolff at 1:49 AM on December 29, 2007 [6 favorites]

Thanks to all of you for your insight. I'm kicking myself for not having considered this right off the bat! Now that I've read these responses and linked articles, it makes perfect sense.

nicwolff, that was some interesting reading, although I must admit to being a little squicked out by it. It's hard for me to read scientific papers that include lines such as,

"... we have applied pressure to the optic nerve of a cat sufficient to cause conduction block of the t1 response (the response of the Y optic nerve fibres). A greater pressure, usually sufficient to cause a transient block of the t2 response (the response of the X fibres), leads to degeneration of the Y axons caudal to the block."

The difficulty for me lies in the intrusive visual images I get when I think of how they "applied pressure to the optic nerve." I mean, sure I'm glad someone did the research so that I wouldn't have to, but I'm weak like that, and it makes me shudder to think about it. Loved the explanation, though, so thank you very much.

Heh. And I was worried it was the kitten who had a disability. D'oh!
posted by heyho at 11:23 AM on December 29, 2007

I know! I thought about adding a "warning: lab cats lead hard lives" but figured the language was clinical enough to distance us all from the sad and ugly reality. Sorry!
posted by nicwolff at 12:53 PM on December 30, 2007

Pfft. Thanks for it; it was quite helpful :)
posted by heyho at 11:49 PM on December 30, 2007