The "Counting The Facial Expressions On a Cat" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Sitting at my computer, pushing the keys for this story as my smallest cat, "The Gray Lady," attempts to push me out of the way so she too can push on the keys with her paws.  Sitting next to me in a window that I have opened about three inches, is my largest cat, "Snickerdoodle."  He is about twice the size of "The Gray Lady", but the servant to her!  I have written about them a few times in the past 6 years or so, but never get tired of including them in a story or two once in a while.  My desk from where I type my stories is in our second bedroom which we use for guests when they arrive from time to time to visit with us at Woodcrest Villas in Lancaster, PA.  I was recently reading that cats have 276 different facial expressions which can be identified if you take the time to do so.  I'm wondering who it was that decided that they have 276 expressions and not...say...263 or 138 or even 27!  Who in their right mind would take the time to figure out how many facial expressions a cat might have unless they are getting paid to do so?  And then...yes, I too would do that if I was on the clock!  The story I came upon began with...Ears flattened, constricted pupils, a lick of lips.  If you've ever wondered if your feline friends' furry faces were saying something whenever they got together, chances are they were.  In a study published in the journal "Behavioral Processes", two U.S. scientists counted 276 different facial expressions when domesticated cats interacted with one another.  The study demonstrated that cat communication is more complex than previously assumed, adding that their findings suggest that domestication has a significant impact on the development of facial signaling.  The author of the study explained that domesticated cats are typically more socially tolerant than their wildcat counterparts because of the way they live in proximity to humans, so the researchers were expecting to see expression in both positive and negative contexts, but were surprised to observe 276 morphologically distance facial expressions.  And...who did the counting?  One ear raised a bit more than the other might have been because there was a small bug in the cat's ear when they were counting.  I know it's a neat survey, since I am a cat lover, and would love to earn money counting cat's facial expressions, but come on people.  Isn't there anything else to do like count how many hairs there are on the left foot of a Husky dog or how many feathers there are on a two year old pigeon?  Both of my cats were born outdoors in the neighborhood where my wife and I lived until a year ago.  They are close in age with the male a week or two older, I think!.  They both showed up on the rear deck of our home, searching for food when they were just learning to walk.  Snickerdoodle, the male, was the larger of the two and seemed to always be at the back door looking for food.  

The Gray Lady on the left with Snickerdoodle on the right!
He is telling her what movies are in town this week.
I can tell that by the look on his face...can you see it?

The Gray Lady was a very small female who wanted into the house in the worst way.  Well, one morning, while putting food out for Snickerdoodle, my wife Carol, grabbed him around the waist and brought him in the house where we immediately took him to the room that we used for an office.  He was extremely scared.  In the meantime, The Gray Lady, saw what had happened to her "buddy" and wanted the same treatment.  We decided to try and "humanize" the first cat before trying to approach the second one.  Well, she would have nothing to do with that and somehow snuck in the back door a few days later when we were putting her food on the back deck.  Oh well!  What's one more cat!  They hit it off pretty well except for the fact that The Gray Lady wanted to be the "boss" of Snickerdoodle.  We had no choice, so she became the "spokescat" for the two of them.  And...it remains the same today!  He is more than double her size and weight, but is afraid of her when she puts her ears back and stares at him.  He takes off to find a hiding place in the house.  Well, getting back to 276 different facial expressions...let me tell you that I actually can identify about a half a dozen different expressions on each of the cats, but that's as far as I can go.  How anyone could have found 276 different expressions must have been good!  The story I was reading did talk about ears and whiskers and how they moved forward or in reverse and how small the pupils constricted and how flat the cat made their ears.....etc., etc., etc.  The end of the story finished by saying they now have another goal for the future which is to conduct a follow-up study to determine what the expressions really mean.  Boy...if I only could have found a job like that when I was out of college.  Might had taken it instead of teaching high school Industrial Arts.  But then again...the cats might have driven me more crazy than my high school students did.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.