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Round Faced, Big Eyed Cats are super cute but can you really tell how they’re feeling?
Cats bred with exaggerated facial features like round, flat faces, and big eyes, might be harder to understand emotionally.
It takes Potato, an eight-year-old British Shorthair cat, forever to eat. Her owner, artist Grant Conboy, says that this isn’t because of her couch-potato temperament as her given name implies. “The bowl just becomes too deep for her face because she has a flat face, eating in a bowl… the geometry of it doesn’t work out.”
A British Shorthair cat’s skull is brachycephalic, its defining characteristics being a very shortened muzzle, shallow eye sockets and narrowed airways that can cause breathing difficulties. Conboy points out that Potato does, in fact, snore very loudly. However, a new study led by Lauren Finka, a post-doctoral research associate at Nottingham Trent University, found that health difficulties are not the only problem those traits may be causing.
Decades of selective breeding for exaggerated features particularly in cats with brachycephalic skulls, like modern Persian and exotic shorthair cats, have resulted in cats with very flat, very round faces, and saucer-like eyes. Cats like Potato were likely bred as a result of human preference for infant-like features that tap into our nurturing instinct.
After analysing over 2,000 photos of cat faces, Finka found that these exaggerated features, though super adorable to us, negatively affected animal’s ability to effectively communicate and express their emotions to us. While Finka and her colleagues could clearly differentiate between ‘pain’ and ‘no pain’ expressions in the faces of domestic shorthaired cats, they found that they could not reliably differentiate between ‘pain’ in domestic shorthaired cats and the various other breeds with ‘neutral’ expressions. “In particular, brachycephalic breeds scored more highly for pain-like features, while some cats scored much lower,” she explains.
Like dogs, cats’ facial expressions often change depending on their mood and how they are feeling. Cats faces exhibit different expressions…
