I know cats can't smile but...
It really looks like he's smiling in his sleep 🥺
It really looks like he's smiling in his sleep 🥺
That's really cool! I have been convinced for a while that cats have really expressive faces based on how easily I understand my own cats, nice that there's some evidence of it.
I just think you gotta give yourself credit for being able to see what’s clearly happening in front of you. Science is great but it can be faked and mistaken so you also gotta be able to trust your own perceptions.
Yeah but AFAIK they don't have one that is similar to a human smile.
(In appearance not in meaning)
But they do? I mean, here’s an example if you’re skeptical: https://lemmy.world/post/9686610
I'm sure its just the lighting, his face being smooshed into the blanket and also part of his face being obstructed by the blanket.
Could be. But that seems more elaborate than “as you’d expect, cat smiles look like human smiles and mean the same thing”
It just means smiling appeared before our common ancestor, or that we co-evolved like bees and flowers to have a working interface for emotional communication.
It’s in all organisms’ best interest to succeed in communicating with other organisms. There’s a universal selective pressure toward universal empathy. Like you can tell when a hornet’s anxious or a spider is scared.
It just so happens we’ve been next to cats for long enough we got highly specialized at reading each other.
It's not that they can't smile, it's that they rarely want to. They're little murder machines because they are just full of spite under all that floof. Probably only smiling because he is dreaming about murdering something.
My cat would beg to differ, he always smiles when I grab his treat container, then he proceeds to shout at me until he gets his treats.