This is how you know if your cat is in pain

How do I tell if my cat is hurting or in pain?

That’s a good question, because it’s not easy to tell if your cat is in pain. In fact, research shows that most of us can’t tell if a cat is in pain.

In many cases, it will try to hide it.

It is of course, not to be overlooked if your otherwise cuddly cat turns its head and hisses at you, bites or runs away when you pat it down the back. But cats, like people, can have pain that is not related to a specific injury.

And how do you discover if the cat has pain in the head, bones or muscles? Or if it has a stomach ache?

How to tell if your cat is in pain

If we ask science, the safest thing to do is look at your cat’s behavior and body language.

If your cat is in acute pain, it may appear depressed and quiet, as well as not wanting to move.

It may seem tense and try to hide. The cat does not respond to petting or attention. Some cats become manic and aggressive, growling, hissing and rolling around.

Many of the signs that your cat is in pain are subtle. And because they don’t come from one day to the next, you might think that they are just signs that your cat is no longer quite young.

Here are some signs to look out for:

The cat stops grooming its own fur. It hesitates to jump up on its favorite spots. It starts feeding outside its litter box. Some cats start to limp. It sleeps more and more.

How to help your cat with less pain

If your cat is in pain, you can help it in several ways until the vet’s pain treatment works. Because just as for humans, care has an effect on how much the cat thinks something hurts.

Pain is an emotional and subjective state. A cat that is freezing, wet, scared, hungry, thirsty or unable to empty its bladder suffers more than an animal that is warm, comfortable, well fed and safe.

If your cat has to go to the animal hospital, you can give it its toys or blanket from home. The same if it has a favorite basket it usually sleeps in. Because a safe cat has less pain than a scared cat.

If your cat has symptoms, you should take it to the vet. The vet can investigate whether your cat is doing something wrong that is causing it chronic pain.

You may not realize how impaired your cat was until you see how well it does after receiving the proper treatment from the vet.

Did you know cats decode our movements through sounds?

In the interesting world of the cats’ senses, there is still a lot to discover. New research has revealed that cats are able to create ”mental charts” with guidance from sound signals. This discovery sheds light over the deep and complex ways that cats understand the surrounding world.

Recent researchers have found interesting insights that reveals that cats create a ”mental chart” to identify where humans are located based on sound. The tests involved playbacks of humans who called the cats name and after which the same sounds were played through a speaker that was located in another place and created the impression that the sound came from a more distant position.

Surprisingly, the cats reacted when the well-known voice came from a place, they didn´t expect based on earlier sound impressions. This discovery indicates that cats use sound signals to find out where their owners are, earlier this was an unknown cognitive ability in cats.

The cat’s mental chart

Generally, the cats showed the biggest surprise when their owners familiar voice seemed to teleport from one place to another. This indicates that cats had created a mental picture of their unseen owners and mapped their locations based on where they first heard the voice.

To have the ability to create a mental picture of the surroundings is an important characteristic in complex thinking and these results give new insights that can inform future research in cat cognition.

You can read more about the research project here.