My entire life I have been trying to get others to appreciate cats, and now there is finally evidence to back up my argument.
My cats are my world. I have three of them, and each one has a different personality that I adore. Starting with CJ, he is the oldest and biggest. My mom likes to say he is a giant; he consists mostly of fur and stomps loud enough to be heard anywhere he goes. He will do his best to fit in any size box, and while he can sometimes be a grump, he has the loudest purr.
Secondly, Kitty is my middle child and definitely the most interesting one of the three. She is gray, naive and quite talkative. She likes to make random sounds out of nowhere, and sometimes holds her head tilted. Kitty is a miracle cat; my family lost her during the summer of 2019 and she was returned to us in late 2020. Having lost her for a year, it was quite an adjustment when she returned home, mostly because of Pumpkin.
Pumpkin is my third and final cat; a small chai-colored tabby cat. She is smart, mischievous and a bread-making maniac. She also hates Kitty. The two of them have never seen eye to eye with each other and their interactions usually end with Kitty being cornered.
While all my lovely cats are different, the one trait they all have in common is their affection towards their owner, me. Anyone who does not have a good relationship with a cat will never understand their true affection. While they can come off as mean and selfish, they really do care for the humans around them, and I have evidence to prove it.
The New York Times article, “Your Cat Might Not Be Ignoring You When You Speak”, describes a study revealing that cats actually do pay attention to their human’s voice, specifically their tone. Everyone has their own pet or baby voice, and your cat takes note of that. In the study, French researchers did an experiment where they focused on a cat’s reaction every time their owner called their name. It stated that whether it is just an ear twitch or a pause in what they are doing, the cat had some type of reaction. The study also revealed that cats would not respond to any random person’s voice, only the ones they recognized.
Having said that, a person’s relationship with their cat might be much stronger than they think. After reading the article, I started to do the same experiment on my own cats, and noticed the same results.
People may think that cats do not really care about their humans at all, but a cat actually depends on human affection for happiness, as revealed in the article. Even though it does not always seem like it, our cats actually like us.
What I have learned is that people who do not like cats set the wrong expectations for them. They expect cats to act like dogs, for example, to come when they call their name. But cats are too intelligent to disrupt their sleep or whatever it is they are doing right in the moment. Just because cats do not show their affection when you expect them to, does not make them any less friendly. Instead, they express it in different and more subtle ways. Before accusing a cat of being unfriendly or uncaring, people should be questioning their own abilities for affection and love. If you are incapable of finding any sort of appreciation for a small creature, who is really the problem, you or the cat?