In ancient times cats were worshiped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
- Terry Pratchett
Cats have been misjudged for the past 2,000 years. They have the reputation for being uptight and unloving, ungrateful, and snobby. On the other hand, dogs are seen as the human’s best friend, a loving, deeply attached, and loyal companion. Well, turns out the joke is on you dog-exclusive people: cats are incredibly loving and develop deep emotional attachment to their human, just like dogs. They are only behaving like jerks because that is what people have been expecting of them since the beginning.
Before going any further, let me be clear: I love dogs. For many years, I thought I was a dog-only person, but it turned out that I love cats. More precisely, turned out I behave like a cat: I love my personal space, cuddles are nice (when I fancy cuddles), I can be left alone for extended period of time but I might make you pay your lack of contact at some point, napping is the best thing, and I love to sleep in a ball/foetal position. I made my peace with being a cat. And yet, I still love dogs.
Something to understand about cats is that we never expected anything from them, apart from not eating us up or attacking us in our sleep. Dogs have been domesticated for a reason: the first purpose of a dog was to be a guardian. Dogs were selected based on specific characteristics: being obedient to humans, being able to protect a household, watching over a herd of cattle, defending a territory. Then, they were selected to look cute, to have puppy eyes even as adults (moving they eyebrows in a way that would melt your heart), and to respond to commands.
Cats… well they were never selected FOR anything. Because of their smaller stature, nobody ever expected to have a watch-cat or alert you if an intruder enters your home. Cats were selected to be able to live in houses. Period. And we haven’t even fully managed that as they are many stray/wild cats living in cities with who many domesticated cats interact… and even reproduce sometimes. If anything, domesticated cats were selected to not sound as unpleasant as their ancestors, the African wild cat. Knowing how irritating some cats can sound, that is saying a lot.
As a result, many (many, many, many) studies have looked at the cognitive abilities of dogs and overlooked cats. For instance, as much as they pretend not to hear you, cats can differentiate their names from similarly sounding words and nouns. Even if they ignore you when you call them out, cats tend to move their ears and heads in response to their names. It is not as rewarding as dogs’ reactions, which tend to involve moving their tails, looking towards you, or even barking. Cats do not tend to vocalise in response to their names. Fine.
Another thing people tend to hold against cats is their antisocial nature. Well, turns out cats are social creature that love their owner/servant/human. Yup. A couple of recent studies actually demonstrated that if given the choice between interacting with their human, food, a feathered toy, or a scent, cats mostly choose to spend time with humans!... humans that demonstrate interest in them, that is. Indeed, a team of researchers have shown that pet cats and shelter cats alike will spend time with people who are paying attention to them and avoid people who are ignoring them. And shelter cats spent more time seeking human attention than the pet cats, even when the human was not paying them any attention. Another research team also showed that, like babies, dogs, and primates, cats develop emotional attachments to their human(s). You might have come across the terms “secure attachment” and “insecure attachment”: when an infant has developed a secure bond with their caregiver, a separation is a distress but a reunion lead to the infant returning to exploring their surroundings. Insecure infants are less distressed by the separation but either display excessive clinging behaviours or avoid their caregiver altogether. Based on that study, cats bonded in a way that is very similar to infants, with about 65% of cats securely bonded to their humans… which is the same number for human infant. So, as it turned out, cats are not antisocial; they just don’t waste time with people that do not want to interact with them. Seems we have lots to learn from cats…
Finally, many people think that dogs are way more expressive than cats because they are doing so much with their eyebrows and all. Wrong again – cats have a lot of facial expressions. We’re just not good at detecting them. Only 13% of over 6,000 people were able to accurately identify the valence (positive or negative) of a cat’s expression. Women, younger people (under the age of 45), and people with professional experience with cats seemed to be better at identifying cats’ emotional states (feelings and emotions). Being a cat lover or a cat owner did not make participants better at this. Good news though, people can get better at tuning in with their cats: we’re not born with a super-ability to “read cats’ minds”, that’s something we can learn. We can be trained to understand cats. We’ve selected dogs to understand us, but we need to train ourselves to understand cats… which could be hugely beneficial to cat’s welfare.
Overall, It is thus possible that cats are as cognitively developed, as attached to humans, and as loving as dogs, but we are yet to find the appropriate ways to test for those. After all, Einstein said that if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. The problem could then not be with cats or what they can do, but with the humans so focused on dogs they do not adapt to their cats.
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