Are the cats' tail movements voluntary or not?
I have asked another question, concerning the cats' tails, where people answered me that cats show their emotions through their tails.
Generally, I have seen the cats move their tails a lot. Are these movements (not only limited to the expression movements) voluntary or not?
For instance, a friend of mine has a cat, and when she calls her name, she wiggles her tail. Is that voluntary?
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When her name is called and her tail wiggles before she gets up, it's involuntary. She is torn between being lazy and Pavlovian desire to see what ya got.
I'm going from memory here, so don't take this as absolute gospel. In Desmond Morris's Catwatching, he explains that cats don't lash their tails when they hunt with as much cover as they'd like. The tail-lashing is a sign of a conflicted cat--in this case, the conflict is between their desire to sneak up a little more closely on the target and their desire to pounce in order to minimize the time that they can be seen.
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As far as I can tell, the answer is somewhere between "both" and "depends the cat."
Some cats seem to have to pin their tails down with a paw when washing. Others don't seem to have that problem.
One of mine used to sit down next to a board game, sweep her tail across it, and then give us a hurt look when we complained: "don't blame me for what the tail does."
Tails are certainly used for signaling, for balancing, as nose- and paw-warmers, and as a way to fidget while holding the rest of the body perfectly still... but I don't know how to ask a cat how much of that is deliberate and how much is reflex.
(Edit: We don't like to admit how much of our own behavior is involuntary -- or at best something we've trained our ape-selves to do -- and justified afterward with "of course I meant to do that.")
Think of it like a child's face "lighting up" when they see something they like. A cat's tail movements, like human facial expressions, can be voluntarily controlled to some extent, but in this particular case it's likely more of an automatic reaction.
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