Do cats really have Asperger's Syndrome?

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My applehead siamese does. That's what drew me to her at the breeder's! She'd stepped in poo while climbing out of her litterbox to meet us, and I thought...here's someone I can relate to - I do this all the time metaphorically! She's very attached to her routine, yowls madly when I leave the house, will only eat one kind of food, stims by rubbing the side of her face compulsively when overstimulated, and yes...she actually bangs her head on the footboard of the bed.

When you mean something non-literally, you don't use a synonym for the word LITERALLY! Is that so hard for YOU to understand? Perhaps they meant for it not to be taken literally, but they failed to use a phrasing that could be logically argued after the fact to not be meant to be taken literally.

I can't be held responsible for someone else's failure to master the English language. I understand the intentions, but not the idiocy in actual practice.

Besides, you're not the topic starter. How do you know the person isn't just plain stupid? I've experienced this phenomena time and time again with my older brother, where someone decides after the fact to insist they meant something stupid they said "not literally" so as to free themselves from blame.
I hate jews. No no I was just talking figuratively, don't get mad at me, get mad at yourself for not reading 'between the lines!'

Asperger's Syndrome is not a single, nuclear entity; it's a set of traits that are related to each other. If these traits are sufficiently present in you, a qualified psychologist will diagnose you with the AS label if you so desire. It is not a silly question to ask whether traits that are present in you are also present in another living being or perceived category of living beings, human or not. And indeed there are a number of traits that cats often appear to have in common with many of us AS-labeled humans:
- no flocking together or other social inclinations, outside of 1-on-1 interactions
- language-free thinking, closely linked to sensory input
- need for complete oversight over the situation one is in, profound dislike of sudden changes, hecticity and noise
- need for comfort, food, water, something interesting to do & experience, freedom from impositions by others, and very little else

That wasn't the question though. The question was "Do cats have asperger syndrome?" Not "Is the natural state of a cat similar to that of a human with asperger syndrome?" To the latter question, I would say "in some ways, vaguely similar" but overall, cats are still more different from a human with aspergers than Oprah is from a human with aspergers.. though I might be going out on a limb to say that.

I really like animal behaviour. It can be fascination watching them. Generally speaking the more intelligence and self awareness they have the more individual they can be.

My cat couldn't be further from it, really.

1) He is highly verbal. If his nickname comes up, even in the course of ordinary conversation, he looks up and mews.

2) He seems to understand if I am ill and doesn't bother me at those times... although he still hovers around me, as if he is worried. He seems to instinctively understand if I am feeling down and tries to comfort me. What is this, but empathy?

3) He maintains excellent eye contact with me, and greets me in a very friendly manner when I get home.

4) He loves attention, and loves to play.

5) When he sees others of his own species outside, he wishes to go outside and play with them.

6) He watches birds and squirrels constantly, and seems irritated with me that I won't let him out so he can kill them. :p

He is not friendly to all humans, though. If a door-to-door salesman, missionary, etc. comes to the door, he hides. It is as if to say, "Those men are strange and annoying, Mommy! Don't let them touch our food!"

Then again, even by the standards of humanity, this behavior is quite normal. lol

I'm not sure what was unclear in what I wrote. Since, as I mentioned, "having Asperger's Syndrome" means "having the traits associated with the label ''Asperger's Syndrome''", any entity that has those traits has Asperger's Syndrome. We may then disagree as to whether a certain entity has those traits or not, but that's another matter entirely.



Cats certainly look more different from human Aspies than Oprah does. And male human Aspies could have made babies with Oprah but not with cats (though hopefully this disturbing possibility didn't actually happen). But if you agree with me that an entity (anything and anyone, you, me, mice, electrons, pizzas) can be defined as the entirety of (1) what it does (output, how it affects its environment) and (2) what it experiences (input, how its environment affects it), then it's not so clear at all whether human Aspies have more or less in common with Oprah than with cats. It depends what you're looking at, which aspects of an entity have the greatest perceived relevance to you. I find it to be important defining traits of Oprah that she is social and craves attention from many, and that she is likely to experience her environment as well as her own thoughts through words. And I find it to be important defining traits of most cats as well as myself that our minds & senses are single language-free continua, and we are largely solitary. Based on these circumstances, it is much easier for me to understand & predict the behavior of cats than Oprah's behavior, and I experience cats and me as having something meaningful in common, while any similarities between Oprah and me seem largely superficial.

Close, but no cigar.

AS is a development disorder that is evidenced by a set of traits.

Just because you can see traits in an animal means nothing. Any, like I said, IMHO dogs display more traits

neurodevelopmental

If it makes you feel any better, you weren't unclear. I just don't think you understand that the only reason Asperger's Syndrome has any meaning is THAT it's contrasted to the natural state of a homo sapien. If we were to accept as true that say, a cat acts in all the exact same ways as a human with aspergers, the cat still would not have aspergers syndrome.. it would have.. normal cat syndrome.

You're mistaking the outward appearance of a cat's behavior with the intrinsic qualities and cognitive functions that actually cause those outward appearances. Though a cat may sometimes appear autistic, the things on the inside causing that are UTTERLY different.

Cats may be said to exhibit some aspie characteristics; however one major factor that comes down solidly on the negative side is this: Cats will absolutely look you in the eye. In fact, I find it rather interesting that I, who cannot look humans in the eye (except when drunk) am quite comfortable looking cats in the eye. It seems that you can become a cat's friend if you look into her eyes for long enough. This is as opposed to humans or dogs, where if you look in their eyes, then one of you must die. So, no, I don't believe that a creature so comfortable with eye contact can be an aspie.

There is no "the natural state of a homo sapiens". There are about 6.5 billion different such natural states. Any state that exists is natural, else it couldn't exist. The view you describe is a NT perspective; NT's are social, this is the only way they know how to live, so logically if they see their children being unreceptive to their manner of living they get survival angst and their children's mental states are labeled a "disorder".

Another issue in this regard is a mistake that all brains tend to make (mine, yours, NT, autistic, feline or otherwise situated): when we have an expectation of something, and it doesn't do what we expected it to do, we tend to think there's something wrong with it, while obviously there was something wrong with our expectation. Reality is cardinal, a thing is what it is and does what it does. There's nothing it "should" be or do.

Of course all our brains will forever continue to form expectations anyway (including many mistaken ones), because otherwise we can't function. So it is unfortunate that autism doesn't come with some external feature, green skin or pointy ears or something... We would then not be mistaken for NT's just because we look like them, and aforementioned conflict between expectation and reality would occur much less frequently. That is, by NT's as well as ourselves it would have been known and understood for a long time what to expect and what not to expect from us "green-skinned / pointy-eared people". This would make life easier, thus less complex, which is probably why it doesn't happen.



That is not so. Cats and us (including you) are practically identical from the perspective of, say, a sponge. Brains and eyes evolved hand in hand from light-sensitive cells, seeing and thinking were the same thing for our ancestors for hundreds of millions of years, until very recently when language became dominant in most human brains, probably as part of fine-tuning their social skills. In most human autistic brains, however, this dominance of socially induced language is lacking, and it appears to me then that the direct connection between seeing and thinking has regained its original position in us, giving us something very important in common with the vast majority of our vertebrate ancestors (including the last common ancestor of cats and humans) that we do not have in common with the "in-betweens" (NT humans).

So, you're one of those people who doesn't believe in human nature. Do you also not believe in gorilla nature, or dolphin nature, or bat nature? Haven't you ever stopped to wonder how human body language can possibly work without us having written out a body language dictionary?

You have NO idea what you're talking about. Psychology and biology are not your forte.

That would be unfortunate for me, because I'm in the process of becoming a biologist (4.0 GPA so far, after 2 years) and very enthusiastic about the subject. Science is not about "believing" things, rather it is about identifying what is real and how it came to be. We use categories as mental tools, ways to organize information in a manner such that it creates oversight in our minds. These categories have no reality outside of the definitions we choose to give them. The mammalian species you're mentioning are all defined on the basis of reproductive compatibility. That is, you are defined as human because you were born from a pool of successfully interbreeding individuals, and, at least in principle, you can successfully interbreed with other members of that pool, which is defined as the "human species". As a result of this genetic exclusivity, there are certain traits that can be said to be typical for humans for the simple reason that they're common among humans and uncommon or absent among non-humans. There is, however, not a single gene, and not a single trait, that is present in all humans but not in any other species.

Note that the species idea creates an illusion of separateness by looking only at the situation now, a snapshot. Right now there is a real separation between humans and other species, though only in the sense that those labeled as "human" and those not labeled as "human" cannot produce viable & fertile offpsring with each other, sharing their individual traits. But looking at reality over time, there are no boundaries that separate the human species from preceding and possibly successive species.

An individual trait needs not be unique to a specific species nor does it have to present in absolutely every single member of said species in order to be part of said species natural instinct. Humans aren't the only animal that sneeze to expel irritants from the nasal area, but it's still part of human nature. We're also not the only animal preprogrammed with a fight or flight response.

The fact that a species nature isn't found in absolutely every member of the species is part of my point: Asperger's Syndrome defines certain things that are different about humans afflicted, compared to their neurotypical counterparts.

Do cats have a brain? Yes. So is it possible they can have Aspergers? Well, yeah.

Though, I think my cat has low functioning autism.