Like… what do cats think of their humans?
“Lol this stupid human feeds me for no reason”
or
“This human feels like my mother”
“This human is a great friend”
or something else?
I’m pretty sure they think of the person taking care of them as some analogous of a mother. We should be careful not to anthropomorphism their emotions as they are probably not quite as complex as we would like. They certainly have some degree of emotions though.
But they have no concept of “human” or “mother” so I would guess it is more like “thing stops hunger, thing warm, thing safe”. Thus they bother you when they are hungry, sit on you when they are cold and come to you when they are afraid.
To support your theory: Wild cats don’t meow when they’re grown up. They usually only do this as kittens. When they grow up around humans they keep this trait to communicate with humans. So yeah, we’re like moms or something to them.
In addition to this they also learned to meow in the frequency of a crying baby to get our attention much easier IIRC
Love this. I’ve also read they can learn and adjust how much they meow based on some of the feedback they get from the owner, ie if you actually respond to each meow with your own voice or similar. Really neat stuff
Long ago, I adopted a cat from a deaf girl. Weirdest thing, going to her house to pick one out, she had several, and none of them meowed. It was months before the one I picked out started meowing.
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my cat came from a hoarder and the shelter said she might not be very well socialized because there were so many cats that they wouldn’t have gotten much human attention, but she literally never stops meowing
My cat guards me while I’m on the toilet, ready to take on any predators while I’m in a vulnerable state. You can’t convince me they have less than complex emotions.
They are inexorably drawn to the comfort of the pants-cavern you create around your ankles
Likewise, one of my cats wants me to guard him while he’s on the shitter.
How did you realize that, exactly?
The cat was meowing at me leading me around the house, how he does. One day he led me out to the litter box and dropped a big old fat turd. Then he stopped meowing. Apparently that’s what he wanted to show me? Well this has become a habit and I haven’t been able to break it. He’s really proud of them too.
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We have so many litter boxes we’ve tried. He’s just a proud little pooper
You feed them, if you die while pooping, they don’t get fed.
Eh, my cats would be gnawing on my carcass before I was cold…
Probably all mammals have a concept of “mother” even if it’s just a nonverbal instinct
True cats don’t have family bonds way humans do. We took in a cat from my ex who is the sister of one of ours and the mother to other and both my cats hate her even though related.
Had they every met before? If cats grow up together of course they’ll be nicer/more familiar.
Kittens typically aren’t given away before they are a couple months old, so they most probably met each other.
Either way: I’ve seen this in action. We had a cat that had kittens, and we were unable to give away one of them. When the kitten started growing up the mother started harassing it, eventually to the point of chasing it off. Luckily we found out that it moved in with some people a couple streets over that were very happy to have it. The point is: Cats aren’t pack animals, and typically don’t like sharing their territory with other cats, even if they are related.
I think it varies from cat to cat. There’s a mother-daughter team here who hang around and even gang up on other cats. Also, siblings almost always get along.
Could also be that the similar genetics but long separation have them thinking of her as not part of the household yet somehow “smells” too similar and it bugs your cats out. Cats, dogs and even fish have Major Histocompatibility Complex genes just like we do.
You never met anyone who hated part of their family?
I know some Thanksgiving dinners you could go to…
I don’t necessarily disagree that cats don’t have as much emotional depth as humans, but I also think you’re selling them a bit short on their ability to think abstractly or emotionally. And it of course varies from cat to cat. They can express fear, affection, curiosity, frustration, satisfaction, anxiety, depression, caution, anger, overstimulation, desire, boredom, jealousy and plenty of other emotions. If you pay attention to body language and their vocalizations/ lack of vocalization, you can interpret much of what’s going on in their heads. They’re very expressive creatures much of the time. I’m not really anthropomorphizing either. I do that, cause they’re cute little goofballs, but it’s a voluntary effort I put in when I want to fawn over them a little. It’s easy to notice when I’m anthropomorphizing them and when I’m observing their emotional state, as they’re usually separate from one another
They have no concept of “human” or “mother”
Actually, they do. Maybe not in the words we use for it, but a cat can recognize their mother and can determine humans apart from other species. It may not be an complex psychological process of ranking them, but they recognize.
also humans apart from each other. Our cat chose us (my husband and I) to be her humans, so she’s super affectionate with us. Other humans? She does not give a crap about anyone else. She will never come snuggle with a guest for example, but she will snuggle with me all day.
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I think people often underestimate the animal mind
It’s not like they have discrete thoughts in words, but animals form friendships even across species in the wild. It’s not abnormal for one animal to partner up with another - with an imbalance in size/strength the smaller one often will scout out prey and the larger one will give them scraps. Sometimes equals will share territory and even raise kittens/cubs together, taking turns babysitting.
With less abundant food, that’s certainly got to be more rare now, but we’ve seen it happen, even captured it at length on video
Cats are going to have all sorts of ideas about our relationship, from a parent to a big predator friend to a giant clueless kitten. Or, maybe just another predator sharing space, or sometimes they totally discard their instincts and live by human rules
It’s not so dissimilar from what we’d think if an alien took us as a pet and we didn’t try to put a label on it - every relationship is unique
And like with dogs different breeds often have particular behavior. For example the Norwegian Forrest Cat tends to bond with one particular human.
In addition, unlike dogs, cats have not evolved their body language to be easily understandable by humans, so we have problems interpreting them. Does my cat turn her back to me because she doesn’t care or because she trusts me, etc.
Their independence can also be off-putting to some humans, but like with humans independence doesn’t have to mean they’re don’t care about us. And then there’s the lessons in consent they try to teach us, which some of us don’t want to understand.
It’s actually kind of interesting - cats have culture. I’m sure there’s a generic competent too, but cats apparently get their social skills crammed into them by their mother in a crash course when they’re weaning. It’s apparently very slow and difficult to change after that period. They’ve studied certain marker behaviors the way they study how language branch out, and they estimate it takes upwards of a dozen generations for a line of cats to fully adapt to the local “dialect”
It’s not just that cats are standoffish and hard to understand, it’s that western cats are in particular. In Japan, they’re far more “extroverted”, they’re far more likely to approach humans and perform “cute” behaviors like big kitty eyes and “cute” juvenile sounding meows for attention
It makes you think - up until like the 70s, people would just kill cats for fun, cheap fur, or because they annoyed them. A lot of older people have stories about watching someone drown kittens
English has a ton of words and idioms relating to killing cats in the context of it once being a relatable behavior
In Japan, they have idioms like “[I’m so busy] I’m in no position to turn down a cats help”. Eastern cultures also generally see their presence as lucky, say they can see and protect against spirits, and Japan has a spirit called a bakeneko which is a two tailed cat who has lived 100 years, and is now a powerful trickster that sometimes will curse someone with fatal levels of bad luck.
It kind of makes sense - they were largely seafaring and have all sorts of annoying critters around, whereas in Europe and America they were brought on the ships to defend the food, but once they got there they became an invasive species inland, where they’re far less valued
It makes sense they’d be more standoffish - they want to be around because they’re adapted human settlements. They’re definitely social animals, but maybe their fickleness is a way to remind people that they can do some damage if their cornered
Anyways, I saw a documentary about the trainability of cats and thought it was interesting… I’m definitely more of a dog person, but it made me think - out of about a dozen cats I’ve spent a significant time around, 4 were assholes and 2 I formed a deep bond with.
It made me want to add a couple cats to the dog and local wildlife I’d adopt if I ever manage to afford a place in the boonies
“I deserve this”
“Once again, the ransom payment is on time.”
