Why do cats slap each other?

May 3, 2022

While chickens work out a “pecking order,” many cats slap each other to establish a social rank. But that’s not the only reason. They may be playing, or fighting, or just communicating with each other. It’s hard to tell, because cats can be inscrutable, reports Animal Path.

To distinguish between the different reasons for slapping, you need to look at the context and your pets’ body language.

Initiating playtime: Cats can initiate playtime by slapping each other. Think of slapping as an invitation to play. If you watch the body language of the cats involved, you will see that there are no signs of aggression. The claws are retracted and nobody is making hissing or screeching noises.

You might not notice it, but your cat also does the same thing when he wants to get your attention, whether to ask for something or to play.

In such a scenario, there is no pressing need to intervene. Allow your cats to slap each other, run around, and have a good time.

Reinforcing social rank: Many people think of cats as solitary creatures, much like some big cats. However, cats are social creatures that form bonds with their parents, siblings, or even non-relatives if they are introduced correctly.

If two cats have not yet bonded, they will not groom or play with one another.

In an ideal scenario, all of your cats share an equal rank within their group. But just like in a pack of dogs, some cats emerge as the dominant ones.

A cat can assert his dominance over another cat by slapping him. While this is nothing close to a real fight, it should be a cause for concern for you. Tolerating signs of dominance can lead to full-blown aggression which can be stressful to your cats and you.

Fighting: One time you see your cats getting along just fine and then you suddenly hear a commotion between the two—with both cats testing each other by attempting to slap the other one.

Real fighting is vastly different from play fighting. You will see that when two cats are locked in actual combat, the claws are unsheathed, ready and waiting for the opportunity to attack the other one. The ears are pulled flat to the back of the head while the two aggressively meow at one another.

Generally, cats try to avoid fights. But when backed into a corner, even a timid cat will not shy away from defending itself by getting into a fight with another feline.

Illness: A cat may slap your other pet and show uncharacteristically aggressive behavior if he is suffering from an undiagnosed medical condition. When a feline is in pain, he may not be as receptive to invitations to play. He may also be irritable in the presence of other members of your household.

Slapping an object: Cats may play with objects by slapping them, especially toys. His action simply means that he is enjoying playing with you and his toys. However, take note that cats can get bored with their toys. This is why it is important to rotate your pet’s toys from time to time.

Should you worry if your cats slap each other? Should you be concerned if your two cats slap each other? There is no definitive answer to this question. You will need to consider how each cat behaves, watching for signs of aggression and ill intent. Allow your pets to play with each other but be ready to intervene if things begin to get out of hand

Research contact: @animalpathorg

March 24, 2023

The world’s top alien hunter is about to embark on his most ambitious—and potentially, historical—mission yet, reports The Daily Beast.

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.

There is compelling evidence that the half-meter-wide meteorite, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, traveled from outside our solar system. And that it’s made of extremely hard rock or metal—a material that’s hard and tough enough to prove the meteorite isn’t a meteorite at all. Maybe it’s an alien probe.

It’s a long-shot effort. After years of work, Loeb and his team have, with a big assist from the U.S. military, narrowed down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s likely impact zone to a square kilometer of the ocean floor, nearly two kilometers underwater. But the fragments themselves are probably just a few millimeters in size. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Loeb is basically preparing to look for big sand in a square-kilometer patch of small sand.

It’s worth the risk, Loeb told The Daily Beast. Any fragments the team recovers could turn out to be “technological”—that is, clearly manufactured and thus strong evidence of the existence of aliens. Or maybe they’re not artificial, but are made of some super-strong material that we’ve never observed until now. A rare metal forged in the hearts of neutron stars, for example.

In any event, “we will learn something new,” Loeb said.

The expedition is almost ready to depart for Papua New Guinea. “We have a boat,” Loeb wrote in on a post on Medium on January 27. “We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions. We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer.

“And most importantly,” he wrote, “today we received the green light to go ahead,” referring to the approval of Papua New Guinea’s for the mission.

The plan, Loeb said, is to deploy a variety of custom sand-sifters—some with magnets, others like huge sieves—and methodically search the seafloor for two weeks. The main reason it’s taken eight years to organize the mission is that, first, Loeb and his team had to figure out where the meteorite’s fragments came down to Earth.

It was easier said than done, since no single instrument precisely captured CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s journey to the seafloor. But if anyone was motivated to try, it was Loeb. While these days more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that we’re probably not alone in the universe, Loeb was banging that drum even when it was unpopular.

When a very odd, shiny, football-field-size object streaked across then out of the solar system in 2017, Loeb was among the first scientists to say out loud what others may only have been thinking: This object, which scientists later named ’Oumuamua ( Hawaiian for “scout”), might be an alien probe.

And Loeb isn’t afraid to put his money—well, his donors’ money—where his mouth is. In addition to studying strange interstellar objects such as ’Oumuamua, Loeb through his Galileo Project is painstakingly building humanity’s first global network of small telescopes , which will scan the sky for alien craft, or at least the remains of alien craft.

To narrow down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s impact zone, Loeb needed data from two sets of instruments. The first set was from U.S. military missile-warning satellites that, thanks to their sensitive infrared sensors, tend to also detect meteorites while scanning for missile-launches.

These satellites can not only provide at least a vague indication of where a meteorite is heading; they also capture images of the fireball that results from a meteorite’s fast, hot trip through Earth’s atmosphere. The timing and intensity of a fireball can tell us a lot about a meteorite’s composition. Basically, the longer it takes for the atmosphere to ignite a meteor, the tougher the meteor is.

After much wheedling, Loeb convinced the Pentagon to release the full fireball data for CNEOS1 2014-01-08. They indicated the 2014 meteorite might be the hardest meteorite on record.

The second set of data Loeb needed was much more precise telemetry for the meteorite’s path than the military could provide. So, he checked on nearby earthquake sensors. “We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer located at Manus Island,” which is part of Papua New Guinea, Loeb wrote at Medium.

Armed with the two data sets, Loeb and his team were able to narrow the likely impact zone from 100 square kilometers to just one square kilometer. “This reduction in the geographic uncertainty of the … fireball improves the search efficiency in the forthcoming ocean expedition to recover its fragments,” Loeb and company wrote in a study, not yet peer-reviewed, that appeared online on March 13.

After having arranged funding and manpower, narrowing the search zone, and getting the Papua New Guinean government’s approval, Loeb and his team are now putting the finishing touches on their special sand-sifting equipment for recovering magnetic meteoritic debris from the seafloor.

Once it’s all ready, hopefully this summer, Loeb and his team will set sail.

Expectations are running high. But Loeb said he’s bracing for disappointment. “There is a chance it will fail,” he said of his expedition. Even success could be something of a letdown, if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.

It’s important to frame even that secondary discovery as a major advancement, Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast. “This could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor—and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites.”

Maybe Loeb and his team will go to all that trouble to find the remains of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, only to confirm it isn’t an alien probe. But don’t expect a setback like that to cause Loeb to give up his search for evidence of extraterrestrials. He said he understands how convincing the proof needs to be, and how hard it might be to find it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.

Research contact: @thedailybeast