Cats & Dogs

One suggestion I got recently was to talk about the differences between cats and dogs as far as how they interact with each other, and how we as the humans in their lives interact with them.  Now, I think this individual wanted more me to discuss why cats rule and dogs drool, but I am going to take a different approach and examine the different ways in which each species is intelligent, and what those forms of intelligence mean to us.

I’ll start with dogs, then, because dogs are the species that we are most familiar with.  We, as humanity, have been befriending, working with, and selectively breeding dogs (from the grey wolf) for potentially as long as 30,000 years.  They are the first animal we domesticated, and the closest from day one.  Many scientists believe that humans actually nursed wolf cubs in the early years of domestication (from Grandin, T. 2005. Animals In Translation, an excellent book regarding comparative psychology and sociology).  It’s really little wonder, then, that today we feel much more at home with dog emotions, whether they have become more like us or we have become more like them.

The first and most obvious similarity is that we are both highly social animals, and rely very heavily on each other and social hierarchies.  Contrary to popular belief, dogs do not view their owners as “the alpha” – the pack mentality was bred out of them long ago, and we can see this today in the looseness and disorganization of feral dogs descended from domestic breeds.  They do, however, tend to put a great deal of stock in our happiness as individuals that they cherish, and retain a great deal of the social intelligence of their lupine ancestors.

Some of this intelligence is in their willingness to display how they are feeling in terms that we understand.  Dogs use facial expression well, including using their eyes.  Perhaps ironically, though, while they have little qualms about being embarrassed or making mistakes that impact them personally, they are more likely to inhibit themselves if they feel it necessary for the happiness or agreement of their enigmatic human companions.  I want to write a significantly creepier article on this later, but for now, this means simply that we as human beings must not fall into the hole created by the dog’s usual openness, and learn to read the more subdued cues they give, especially when they are uncomfortable.

I want to talk about cats more, because cats are far more mysterious – and they seem to like it this way, so I apologize to any cats whose veils I am preparing now to lift.  This desire to not show certain aspects of themselves, particularly anything that may make them appear weak, is pervasive across all breeds and species.  Perhaps the most famous and distressful example of this is that cats will seek complete solitude when they are dying.  Many cat owners, even those who have not lost a pet, are aware of this solace-seeking behaviour when kitty is ill; she will hide beneath or behind a piece of furniture and not come out for anything, even if she has had no prior experience with the veterinarian.  The etiology of this behaviour is pure instinct: a cat that is ill does not want to bare herself in the open as an easy target, and it is instinctive behaviour like this that often separates them from dogs.

Cats have been domesticated for a long time, but not nearly as long as dogs – only at most 9,500 years ago.  More importantly, we have never become partnered with cats – apart from, on occasion, using them as hunting partners, and even in combat, we have mostly just kept them around the grain bins and barns to keep away rodents.  We give them a place to stay and a nice source of bait for their food, and they keep that bait from being eaten by their food.  Only relatively recently, mostly since the late Bronze Age according to region, have we done much for keeping them as vanity pets and companions.  It’s therefore little wonder that they have much more for instinct, and we understand them far less than we do dogs.

However, one can learn cat.  While cats are still so well tied to their feral nature that they can even be expected to survive in the wild if abandoned, they do have some surprising social skills.  Although they are not nearly as tightly-knit as wolf packs, cats do form small social groups that are mainly for collective hunting and protection of queens and kittens.  Cats also have a huge range of communicative abilities, but there are two difficulties that we have in interpreting them.  Firstly, their base level is the way that dogs are when they are concerned with your reaction.  They keep their emotions tight to the belt in order to not appear weak, until they are needed.  In short, they are the opposite of dogs in their expressiveness.  Secondly, their ways of expressing themselves are much more foreign to humans: rather than using the direction of their gaze or ecstatic activity that are very easy for us to interpret, they use their ears, whiskers, tails, eyelids, and very minute tactile methods of communication that we simply are not very well-acquainted with.  Someday, perhaps, I will talk about these as well in more detail, but the simple fact is that unlike both dogs and humans, they put a great deal more stock in hearing, smell, and tactile information (ie whiskers) than they do sight, which leads to differing forms of communication.

Due to both the historical nature of our relationship, then, and our varying methods of communication that neither side has a great deal of ease in understanding, we tend to assume that cats are less amiable or even less intelligent than are dogs, which is not true and is merely a gross oversimplification of the differences in their respective psychologies.  The last number of posts I have made, I have left the reader with an overarching message to chew on until next week, and I believe this is a fine time for that: each animal genus and even species has its own idiosyncrasies, intelligences, and methods of communication, and all are deserving of respect and striving towards understanding, even (especially) if we need to leave behind our human mindset.