This Is (Maybe) a Cat

A cat drawn for dogs. Which raises an important question: does it still look like a cat if you’re a dog?

This Is (Maybe) a Cat is part of my Art for Dogs series — art made with a canine audience in mind. This piece got me interested in something beyond colour and eyesight: what dogs actually recognise when we turn a real thing into a picture.

Nerd notes

Dogs can make quite a lot of sense of photographs. Studies suggest they can recognise their owner's face and even group wildly different breeds into the category of “dog”.

Cats are trickier. In one experiment, dogs shown videos of cats and dogs paired with meows or barks didn't react as though a mismatched animal and sound was unexpected — even when they lived with cats.

So “that's my human” and “that's a dog” have some experimental support. “That's a cat”? The jury's still out.

Details

Handmade, one-of-a-kind artwork

Unframed

A4 — 21 × 29.7 cm (8.3 × 11.7 in)

Watercolour and colour pencil on mixed media paper