GoKawiilBy looking through a cat’s eyes and listening, we can create spaces that reflect a cat’s world.
Current cat enclosures like window boxes are all-or-nothing designs which, while good for ventilation or simple construction, expose cats to extremes of exposure at the cost of control over their visibility or the intensity of sound/sight. Applying these principles could improve cat window boxes through features like sound baffling, opaque retreats, and clear vantages that balance seclusion and stimulation.
This essay proposes non-anthropocentric principles for cat-friendly architecture flowing from a cat’s-eye-view. Thoughtful cat-itecture enriches cats’ environments with: options of gradation, prioritizing soundscapes over sight-lines, and simplicity of use.
I suggest that cats have innate sensory preferences that existing cat-architecture (like ‘cat window boxes’) is blind to, and so fails to accommodate: while driven to monitor the outside world, they are highly sensitive to risk and personal exposure, and want to constantly adjust how much they can see or hear, or be seen or heard.
To help my increasingly-elderly cat get to his cat-flap, I installed a ramp of cinderblocks on the inside & outside. The ramp worked well, and had the unexpected benefit of giving him more options in approaching the cat-flap beyond just ‘on’ or ‘off’, so I could watch how he would approach the cat-flap over the course of the day. What I noticed was something I’d suspected for a while: he acted like he had a ‘novelty’ or ‘risk compensation’ drive akin to temperature or hunger or thirst, where he craved a certain slowly-changing optimal degree of risk/stimulation, and would adjust his position to maintain his position on the inverted U-curve.
This outside-observation drive would be consistent with other observations about useful cat toys simulating the hunting kill-chain & knocking things over to test playing-dead: long-term monitoring of the outside while as invisible as possible is clearly useful preparation for hunting, as the cat can learn about prey movement patterns, what animals pass through when, what rivals or threats may be about, and so on. (We can answer Bradshaw’s question about what his cat thinks watching the outside for endless hours by noting that this information all expires, because the environment is non-stationary & changing, and so it can never become permanently unsatisfying any more than drinking water to quench thirst can become unsatisfying.)
What is the cat’s-eye view of how best to watch the outside? I interpret this as risk compensation: there is a certain amount of stress or eustress he is willing to endure at any moment to watch the outside, which is an intrinsically-rewarding behavioral drive for a cat, but it still has diminishing returns (just like eating or playing or sleeping); so as the risk changes outside/inside, or the internal reward diminishes, or his overall energy level changes, he will adjust his position to match. The environment offers both exposure to danger, and protection, and a cat will navigate this “landscape of fear” by making good use of fortifications for cover, like corners, edges, ledges, elevated surfaces, and especially love boxes to hide in (even illusory boxes!).
Back & forth. Like a cat hovering at the door deciding whether to go out , the setpoint changes over the course of the day—highest in the crepuscular periods of dawn/dusk (when cats tend to be highly active), and then decreasing in between, depending on the activity outside.
A sudden unusual event (the arrival of strange humans or large animals like turkey vultures, bald eagles, or deer; yard work; airplanes; bad weather) would spike the risk, and he would retreat step by step. Long quiet periods would see the opposite, with advancing, culminating in leaving the outside ramp behind and boldly stalking the wilderness. Are there strangers outside? Concerning—retreat one step. His owner goes outside for a computer break, thereby scaring away enemies & making outside safer? Sitting around would be boring, so advance two steps. Did some extremely loud and unusual noise just happen, like a riding lawnmower starting up? Extremely frightening—retreat 3 steps! It’s been quiet & boring, and he can’t hear any birds from atop his ‘cat condo’? Try to get a better view of everything, so advance one step… And so on.