Orac at Respectful Insolence has written an open letter to David Kirby and Dan Olmstead, urging them to speak out against the subpoena. I’ve linked to it in my own blog entry on the subject, “In defence of Kathleen Seidel”

Kev Leitch is urging as many people as possible to link to that letter, and spread it around the internet.

The Integral, in defence of Kathleen Seidel

Our cat, Dennis, tolerates being picked up alot and even likes it….he even doesn’t mind kisses….Athena tends to overdo it though….Dennis treats her as if she is his mother…..even pretends to nurse! Ivan won’t tolerate that at all; he says “no” and gently pushes the cat away or puts his hand in front of Dennis’ face. Feline behavior is most fascinating!

The Integral

I have learned to discern the many kinds of sounds she makes, and can usually tell when she wants food or water, or if she wants attention, or if she hears a noise or is lonely or wants to be left alone or just make sounds at us. Sometimes she likes to make sounds to get our attention, probably mostly because of how we’d lavish her with attention when she’d make cute sounds, and so she’s trying to say, “hey, give me attention!”. And who could help but oblige her?

I’ve actually seen three levels of biting and clawing (same pattern both ways). One is the “play bite” — the problem there, is that strength of that bite is set for other cats, and they don’t seem able to change that. Unfortunately, we don’t have fur protecting our skin, so a cat’s play-bites can draw blood from us. The claw equivalent is a “pat”, but again, most cats aren’t too good at keeping their claws sheathed.

The second level is the “anger bite” where the cat is telling you they’re pissed, so knock off whatever you were doing! That will usually draw blood, at least from the fang punctures. The claw version is a shallow scratch, or “spiking” your hand with their claws. My own cat is pretty good about giving audible warning before she goes to an anger bite or claw.

They can also do this if you’re daring enough to “hand-wrestle” them, or to handle their belly while they’re on their back. Some cats will put up with you stroking their belly for a little while, but when they’ve had enough, or if you grasp their belly with your hand, they can “get sharp” with very little warning.

The third level is when the cat’s fighting — either out for blood, panicked, or injured. That’s when they really sink all their teeth in (not just the fangs), and maybe take a piece out of you! The claw version is a deep (full strength) slash. I’ve never been hurt that badly by a cat, mostly because when they’re that freaked out, it’s obvious, so I stay the heck away.

Julian: Well, you’ve taken the first big step, just by recognizing them as separate creatures with their own minds. From there, it’s mostly observation.

…I wish I could read our cat’s body language as well as you do; I could stand to be better at it. We weren’t raised around animals from an early age (except for one rabbit whom our parents kept in a cage out back, and we didn’t have much interaction with him beyond feeding him), and I think that by the time we did get our own pets– certainly when we got our first cat– we’d fallen into the socially-encouraged trap of viewing them as living toys rather than as individual beings with their own preferences and emotions, and got angry when they wouldn’t behave the way we wanted, let us carry them everywhere and pet them whenever we wanted, etc. It took us a pretty long time to unlearn that, to stop thinking that we were entitled to having animals behave in a certain way towards us, and to actually figure out what they were really trying to say. A lot of the time, I admit I’m still really stumped.

I was so in tune with my baby, that once when he was about three months old, I knew he was about to pass gas. He did this little movement and would make a sound just beforehand. Well I announced that he was about to do that and my mother-in-law said, “Oh that is ridiculous how could you possibly know that was going to happen?” and I said, “I know his body language.” She gave me a crazy look and then right on cue he did pass gas. So there.

Babies tell us very clearly, if we only tune in, when they are hungry and what is wrong. I have seen many babies who are not being read by their mothers, end up crying and raging with strong crying, due to being ignored and misunderstood. It kills me and breaks my heart.

I am a cat lover and I understand my cats too.

I am very happy to have found your blog. I was referred to see your YouTube videos by my brother who has one son with Autism–he learned of you on CNN the other day.

Thank you for all that you are doing to help share your world with us. You are an excellent writer.

Exactly! Stereotypes are a cognitive shortcut, that let people avoid having to individually “get to know” every single person around them. Of course, most folks are pretty lazy that way….

Also, I’ve seen at least one book on cats that said flat-out: “When a cat purrs, that means it’s breathing.” It doesn’t necessarily mean anything else in particular, though individual cats certainly have their own habits.

I suspect the reason most folks think that purring means “happy”, is because they can only hear the purring when they’re up close… petting or cuddling the cat.

PS: When I was a little kid, my (family’s) dog was also named Smokey.

When paid staff started invading (that’s what it felt like) Fey’s and my home on a regular basis, Fey felt ‘like me’ while staff did not. One woman kept saying, “You two keep staring at me,” and a lot found Fey’s and my interaction kind of uncanny, but that’s mostly because they were looking at the species barrier. Fey and I are closer than I’ve ever been to another cat except perhaps Smokey, who was born when I was a kitten too. :-) So we read each other not just in the easy-casual-general sense that I find with most cats that I can tell things about them (same as most people do with most humans to more and less extent depending on who), but in the sense of two people who have barely lived apart at all for eight years or so.

I don’t think my being good at cat body language(s) has so much to do with having to study all body language in a particular way, but that I have spent at least as much time exposed to cats as humans, if not more, and cats are just easier.

There’s an aspect of human body language (in general) that I’m quite capable of reading, as well, but it’s certainly not something that would make me good at reading static images of eyeballs or actors portraying certain emotions and stuff.

There’s a comedian on TV that my friend says is amazing in his ability to not break character, whereas when I look at him I see barely-suppressed laughter all over his body.

But I don’t see the same cues as everyone else.

And with regard to the person I thought was cruel, I guess I thought it was a given that I was talking about something similar to how non-autistic people will think autistic people are cruel because they don’t realize we just don’t get it about something. The incident happened many years ago and I have talked to her about it pretty extensively since then.

I have a friend who used to raise her eyebrows at me, and I loved the wrinkles it made, so I’d grab the wrinkles and then she’d raise them even higher, and it turned into what I thought was a fun game, but I didn’t realize that raised eyebrows was about irritation, and that therefore a lot of these things started with irritation on her part, and that my attempts to get her to raise her eyebrows even more were quite irritating at times. (For reference, when she raises her eyebrows it forms a perfect well-defined pattern of wrinkles going straight across her forehead.)

And I can see how someone might think I was cruel for “trying to irritate her” when I just wanted to watch her eyebrows.

But as I have mentioned many other places on this blog, when I talk about doing something wrong, even if it has really awful consequences and has to be stopped, I’m not generally making people into “good guys” and “bad guys”, that’s just not how I think.

And in response to what you where saying about how they label autistic people as defiecient in producing and understanding “non-verbal cues” and in producing them. That is pretty stupid of them to say. Maybe they should say autistic people find it difficult to understand nt cues. And nt’s find it difficult to understand autistic cues. That would make more sense, because it goes BOTH ways.

Oh and just as a side note or whatever about myself, I’m not autistic, although I don’t know if I would be called NT either, because my brain is not typical, just in other ways.

anyway, naw, when a cat’s purring it doesn’t mean she’s happy (i say she cause my cat’s a she i guess.. i will never call an animal ‘it’ - that’s plain not true). maybe people who think that just haven’t had a cat (or cared for her). me and mom really love our cat and she’s a person in the family as much as i am. we often think other poeple would think we’re stupid or crazy, because we talk to the cat.. and strangely, she understands O.o how you tell her something partly as a joke, and she goes and does that.. and similar examples, i don’t know. animals are smart, people just don’t want to realise (same as they think kids are dumb, but they always know everything that’s going on).

i sometimes like talking to my cat. it’s possible to understand what she’s saying with the way she’s saying, i don’t know. not all of the time, surely, but yeah.

i think purring is more of an action than a sound.. my kitty always purrs when she is falling asleep.. it soothes me, i love that (easier to go to sleep when she’s purring on my foot). i think she purrs to calm down or something. as an interlude into sleep maybe. i hear other cats purr when they’re afraid, but my cat hasn’t done that it seems. she shouts real crazy loud when she’s afraid. like, so loud, it’s crazy that something like that can come out of that little mouth O.o

i guess i’m very lucky my cat never scratches. one time was crazy about hissing though, proof that cats DO understand everything.. one time me and my boyfriend kind of fought.. i got mad at him.. took the cat and passed him by.. and the cat SO hissed at him, although he wasn’t doing anything to her.. i think she was saying that she thinks my point is true xD i guess she understood her master was mad at that person.. it was crazy. it never happened again near him, only that time.

i don’t think of my cat as another species, i guess that’s the thing. i didn’t get to know her body language as a species or neurotype. she’s a personality, i got to know her quirks as a personality’s characteristics.. that’s why i take them like they are, and i can understand her. and she certainly has a body language and a very awesome character :) she’s more colorful than a lot of people i know (you should see the way she talks back when you tell her to NOT do something xDD)..

That last paragraph reminded me of a time when I was ten and had to explain in almost painful detail why I was able to “read the minds” of a group of autistic children who were distressed by a ventilation fan that was making a high pitched whirring sound and thumping discordantly at the same time. It seemed fairly obvious to me that if a group of otherwise mellow people are starting to “freak out” and ALL of them are flicking their eyes to the same place on the wall and half of them are covering/rubbing/tugging their ears then it likely has something to with something at that spot on the wall doing something it shouldn’t have been doing. So when I walked into the room with Mr Petersen and saw my friends in pain it just seemed “normal” to me to walk up, smack the fan into silence, and tell Mr Petersen that it needed to be either fixed or replaced. He truly thought I was able to “read” their minds when all I did was to pay attention to what they were telling us and help them do something about it.
It felt very strange to need to explain all this to their parents’ respite care worker when if he had simply paid even a little attention to what everyone was doing then the most probable reason why they were doing it would have been plain to see.
After that night though I would make a bee-line for the back room whenever my parents took me with them on pinochle night. I couldn’t trust Mr Petersen to listen and NOT punish a bunch of kids who were doing NOTHING wrong.

Looking back I still cringe inside and hang my head for not reporting him to Someone but I wouldn’t have known who and besides that I didn’t know it was wrong because he worked for the state and was a “professional.”

I was in fact just thinking about these sorts of nuances when trying to explain some of my bird’s habits — how it’s hard to say outright that he “likes X” or “doesn’t like Y”; it’s more like he has a tendency toward X when he’s in a particular situation and an aversion to Y when he’s in another particular situation.

It’s funny . . . this brings to mind attempts to teach autistic people — or anybody, really — what, say, certain facial expressions mean, using photographs or illustrations as examples. It occurs to me that relying solely on the prototype “shape” of the given examples makes it so any deviance from that shape renders the examples useless.

I’m still trying to figure out what her latest anxiety-objects are, as she’s lately been calling me from across the room a lot. (That is, aside from my emerging from depression and actually leaving the house regularly.)

Incidentally, she gripes at me if I stay up too late, and tries to lead me upstairs to bed. That, I understand… she’s used to being petted and brushed then, not to mention settling on my chest. (Quilt mandatory, she’s got serious claws.)

A semi-irrelevant question: do you have, or use, a “body pressure” machine like those Dr. Grandin described in Animals In Translation? I’ve only got NLD myself, but I’ve noticed some dramatic effects from even partial-body pressure, like one of those floppy knee-braces — or the above-mentioned cat-on-chest, which is what brought it to mind. (Yeah, she’s pretty heavy.)

I left you a LJ comment this week, having forgotten that I could comment on here.

Those people who are different in their ability to do this automatic processing of facial cues have to learn it the hard way, by observation and consious decision-making by the person. “What does this mean, when their face is turned like this?”

This leads to the ability to apply skills easily to other types of life.