Archive for the ‘Pet’ Category

Cats are still the most popular and levered among people

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Cats are still the most popular and levered among people. For cats, life in close proximity with humans (and other animals kept by humans as pets) amounts to a “symbiotic social adaptation” which has developed over thousands of years. The sort of social relationship cats have with their human keepers is hard to map onto more generalized wild cat (Felis spp.) behaviour, but it is certain that the cat thinks of humans differently than it does of cats (i.e., it does not think of itself as human, nor that humans are cats). This can be seen in the difference in body and vocal language it uses with humans, when compared to how it communicates with other cats in the household, for example. Some have suggested that, psychologically, the human keeper of a cat is a sort of surrogate for the cat’s mother, and that adult domestic cats live their lives in a kind of extended kitten hood.