Whoever you think the cat is, he doesn’t share your feelings. In his eyes you are just a very big cat with whom he shares his safe territory.
If you have a cat at home, you might think you’re his mother, who feeds, cares for and entertains him. Oh, and of course, you talk to him like a child, praise him or gently chew for torn curtains or a mouse. These are manifestations of our anthropomorphism, i.e. the tendency to stubbornly endow animals with human qualities.
The cat himself looks at everything much more prosaic. He just sees you as a “huge and not hostile cat,” says John Bradshaw, a biologist and director of the Institute of Anthropology in Bristol who has been studying the behavior of domesticated animals for over 30 years.
He explains the behaviour of cats in human presence. First of all, he notes that cats are still not fully domesticated. They are much closer to their wild ancestors than dogs to their own, and are not as involved in their owners’ lives as dogs.
One of the reasons is that when breeding dogs, it was very important for people to teach them to understand what is required of them (for example, when hunting). The main thing that people expected from cats was that they would hunt hard, protecting the house from rats and mice.
By the way, cats were almost never specially fed, they were “self-sufficient”. There was no need for special understanding with the owner here. They lived next to a man with their parallel lives.
When cats rub against our hands and feet, or put their heads in the air, this is the most obvious way to show their affection for people
And the need for emotional relationships, in “communication” with cats has arisen in the person rather recently.
In addition, according to the statistics provided by the author, 85% of cats mate with street cats and wild cats, which is why the whole species is still relatively wild. Their interaction with the owner is not so much a learned behavior as a manifestation of instinct.
When a cat treads on us or a sofa, it repeats the movements that kittens use to stimulate the production of milk for their mothers. When cats rub against our hands and feet, or turn our heads and invite us to scratch them behind our ears, this is the most obvious way to show their affection for a person – just as they show it to their relatives.
Leaving dead mice in the house, they don’t try to “feed” the owners, but just bring the prey to a safe place to eat. Although, having tried it on the tooth, they understand that the food they are given by people tastes much better, which is not surprising if you look at the city rats.
The presence of cats in the legal territory of a cat is not always a joy to him, and sometimes even can be a source of serious stress
You shouldn’t expect cats to have as much love and affection as we automatically get from dogs. It’s naive to expect cats to be as eager to respond to our fervent feelings for them.
Some do, but most don’t. In any case, we are not the center of their world. “They can think about the neighbor’s cat, watching the birds outside the window without paying attention to the people present. What a disappointment to the owner: “Oh, he doesn’t love me! Don’t be in a hurry: it’s possible that he does, in general. He just lives his life, not your life.
So the next time you call your cat “baby” or you’ll berate him for pranks, for him, you’re just a pretty nice neighbor-kin, only, for some reason, a huge size.
Keep in mind that the presence of real cats on his legal territory cat is not always a joy, and sometimes even can be a source of stress. It can even cause dermatitis or cystitis to develop on the grounds of rejection of the “cohabitant”. “You are likely to find it easy to get along with your neighbor.
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