Autism in other species

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I've read your blog about your cat saps... Her behaviour seems rather interesting... I have a feeling my dog is kinda the same.

When people come in the house, my dog barks randomly and then used to ran all the way upstairs by herself wanted to be alone. And she used to bite if people didn't leave her alone. I thought she was abit unusual for a dog.

Now she doesn't do that as such, still barks but yet she gets completely hyper over things, but however she doesn't listen to commands in the park...

It makes me wonder? Is there a diagnosis for animals too?

I think so.
As scientists are doing research on autism, they always use a mouse model to mimic the human autism to study the origin of autism and try to find ways to better understand autism.
As for autism are related different neural activities, the different neural activity on cats or dogs may also cause behavior that are like autism.

I think that if autism can occur in animals, wild animals with it would probably not survive. Eg: an animal that usually lives in groups that had difficulty understanding the group's social language and repeatedly got things wrong would end up being driven from the group or perhaps even attacked and killed by another member. An animal that became unusually obsessed with certain activities might miss out on food or miss signs of danger.

Cats! It's gotta be cats!

I don't remember the specifics, but I remember seeing a documentary on PBS (US Public Broadcasting System) about a group (troop?) of chimpanzees which included one certain chimpanzee who was extremely attached to his mother, even after growing up. When she died, he did too from not eating. Very sad, but interesting. I don't remember if he showed any other AS traits, but he was not social at all. Chimpanzees, of course, usually are.

I don't mean cats have a disorder... I don't think you guys do, just different brain wiring than the standard model.

We're the less popular options package, not broken, just not the usual.


My cat Reggie doesn't appear autistic for a cat, but if you saw a human behaving like he did, fully functional, socially limited, the weird issues with expressing what is going on in his head, yet like me, he longs for companionship.

He doesn't hop up to get a pet, he hops up to sit with me, the solid contact of a hug sets him purring and dozing off... he wakes up and stares at me, will gaze at my face but shies away from eye contact. When he notices something wrong, he doesn't hesitate to say it, but his communication is limited. So he sits and yowls and mrrrs and tries to lead the way to the problem, be it an empty water bowl, or Alfie peeing behind the table.


One of my favorite sensation treats is Lady Gaga through headphones lately, the other day I got up and found him sitting by them on the chair, so I hit play and held them far enough to not hurt his ears, but where he could get into that focus spot of the music.

He started to pick his head up to see what I was doing, just as his head hit that spot he froze, sat like that, eyes wide open through one of the most intensely stimulating parts of the song for me. After a little longer he picked his head up out of them to investigate, but he was definitely amazed at the music, and bunked his head into the headphone cushion lovingly.

It would make the most sense to look in more humanlike species like chimpanzees other than that other animals have different brain structures with different disorders.

(Slightly off topic, but relevant to other posts) Among the great apes, the orangutan in the most aspie like. It is the most solitary. After leaving the mother, the males (if I remember correctly) only break their solitude to mate. I don't remember how social the females are, but I believe they are less socially oriented than the other great apes.

This wouldn't surprise me at all. In fact I've wondered about my female cat. She's unlike any cat I've ever owned, has lots of kitten-like behavior even now that she's grown, and gets obsessed with certain kinds of play. There are other things that are just different about her. She also has a foul temper sometimes or is moody.

As an example of one odd behavior, she likes to stick her head inside a small box or paper bag and walk around with it on her head, basically blind-folded, and feel around for toys or people. She does this deliberately, repeatedly, and has done it since she was small. When she does this my other cat will watch her as if she's nuts. I have to be careful not to leave anything lying around similar to that, because she's gotten her head stuck inside things. I make sure the bags and boxes I give her are a safe size and material.

She also loves music, and most of our pets haven't, in the past. I've played my guitar to relax her when she was upset sometimes, and she loves my husband to play the piano, sometimes tries to play it herself. She sits right beside him or on top of the piano when he plays. Except when he's practicing little bits. She likes music, not just notes!

She's also one of those cats that is attracted to strong smells rather than repelled by them. No catnip for her. She likes dirty socks, the smellier the better (which I of course can rarely provide, since I smell like a princess ), valerian root, shampoo, toothpaste, and this unscented natural hand lotion with which I think it's the safflower oil she wants -- she follows me around licking it off me after I use it. Menthol doesn't deter her. She wants to eat it.

She's very intelligent. She's just very unusual -- and prefers our company to that of the other cat. They play together sometimes, but there's a sort of social disconnect between them a lot of the time. It could just be that he's a partly outdoors cat who hunts, and she's indoor-only. They have different lives, in many ways. He's not nearly as kitten-like although he's younger.

Since we learned about AS, my husband and I have taken to sometimes calling her our Aspie cat.

I used to keep budgies, which seemed very NT to me. Very chatty, into mutual preening, and if I put an untamed budgie into my very tame flock, it would become tame very quickly, as if trying to fit in. Then I added another breeding male to the aviary, and while there was nothing unusual about him, he had lots of babies and some of them had rather unusual behavioral characteristics. Some of them were hatched and raised by other parents, so it wasn't just him as a parent - I can only assume it was some sort of recessive gene. First I had one that was practically a psychopath - I had to give her away because she kept killing other budgies, and she took on a parrot...and won! Then there was a budgie who kept jumping off things and crash landing (she could fly absolutely fine) - she broke her leg doing that, but kept doing it! Then there was one who I would say HAD to be low-functioning autistic! Seemed completely unaware of the other budgies, ignored alarm calls and the like, but he wasn't blind or deaf or anything, and he never developed normal vocalisations, just kept making baby begging noises into adulthood. Last one I had was more than a little Aspie, so much so that even my Aspie boyfriend noticed him! Personal space issues (hated mutual preening, kind of tensed up and got stressed when another bird tried to touch him), got overheated easily, seemed to not get on too well talking to other budgies (he would go up to them and kind of hesitantly chatter, but without all the body language they communicate with, and the other bird would just ignore him. When he became an adult, he kept mostly to himself, but had just one friend, an old female who he kind of glued himself to), and not to mention, VERY intelligent!

I'm doing a veterinary science degree now, and I hope to someday study that for a phD or something. So you'll be pleased to know, if you're interested in this issue, you may have answers in a few years. SO dibs on that for a thesis - 'autism and PDDs in the domestic parakeet'.

It's interesting that, whereas it used to be thought that chimpanzees were our nearest living relatives, some now think that that original research may have been flawed, and we are in fact closest to orang utans.

Can't wait to read it. Fascinating subject. Good luck!

That is interesting! Thanks for sharing. I can better relate to the orangutans, myself.

An ex-neighbour of mine once had a turtle that was afraid of lights, like lightning or fireworks. If the turtle saw them it’d go nuts in its aquarium, but as soon as curtains were drawn so it didn’t see the lights, it calmed down. Another turtle he used to have was hard to get to eat. Some traits go beyond mammals.

My first dog had autistic traits. She had no interest in other dogs at all, and ignored them completely. She was obsessed with some of my toys, and was extremely sensitive to sounds. She was only interested in my mother, who was her alpha and she tolerated but wasn’t very attached to the rest of us. She never cared much for walks, and she flat refused to go out with others than my mother. We had a hell of a time getting her out when my mother couldn’t walk her.

My last dog was very good with reading other dogs. But he had sound sensitivity. It was hard to get him to eat, even meat was no big delight for him. Occasionally he enjoyed a meal but that was the exception. The only thing he always liked was a doggy treat called dried throats (made of cow, I think). He never liked being patted. Occasionally he’d come to us for attention but he had a liking for being touched that lasted about 3 seconds. He was very particular with where he wanted to go for a walk. Sometimes he’d refuse to go a certain route, other times he’d only go certain routes and never tired of sniffing the same spot over and over. He was never very playful, and had short patience with playing, yet at age 10 we observed him chasing his own tail!