Unsupported Speculation

I was woolgathering about someone asking me if I was a cat or a dog person. People seemed to ask this question more in the past than they do now. In fact, the whole cat-dog dichotomy seems to have been more of an 80’s and 90’s idea than one that is popular today. I actually have both a dog and a cat, and love them both, but I started wondering at what the difference was between them, and I think I arrived at an answer.

Imagine playing with a dog. The dog has a bone. You pretend you are going to take the bone, and the dog slaps its paw over it and gets its muzzle really close to it to guard it, and warns you with a growl and a bark. You make scary fingers at the dog, and the dog gets even more growlier and barkier. Then you relax, and the dog instantly relaxes too and starts chewing the bone happily, and you give the dog a pat, and the mini-game is over, perhaps to be re-assumed in only a few seconds.

But try this with a cat, and the cat is just going to take your hand off.

And so the difference with dogs is that both human beings and dogs have ‘Social Play’, which is my term for this idea of play-fights and conflicts and competition. Both humans and dogs understand this instinctively, which is that these are mock brawls, and no one is supposed to actually get hurt; ie It’s just for fun.

Cats have play too, but it is really only two things: Chasing and capturing small animals, and ambushes of any creature not large enough to intimidate the cat too much. Cats that are social with other cats will play with each other too, but once again it is just the non-committal ambushes of the type when the cat doesn’t actually intend to seriously hurt or kill what it’s ambushing, leading immediately to a chase.

It’s sort of hard to play with your house cat this way as a human being, because if the lumbering primate starts to get too aggressive, the cat won’t understand the rules, and probably take the lumbering primate’s face off.

I believe I know the reason. Aside from my own cat, there are many other cats around my house that belong to the neighbors, and watching their habits over the years, what I’ve begun to understand is that cats are wired to assume that virtually every encounter with anything, cat, dog, otherwise, is always potentially hostile. For them, it is literally either 5%, or 125%, and nothing in-between.

Knowing a little cat science, I learned several years ago that they also don’t have any form of evolved deescalation of a confrontation with any other cat. All cats are made to brawl with every single other cat they locate within the territories they establish and never respect of each 0thers. This is why their only play amounts to the prerequisite steps leading up to a real world, biting, scratching, fur tornado in a REAL fight with another cat.

And so this is why humans and dogs seem to click more than we do with cats. We aren’t really allowed into a cat’s play and games, probably because we are just too slow and big, and because cats play strictly to train to capture and eat food, and to fight other cats. Dogs on the other hand understand us very well, probably because we share a very similar form of play within our respective brains which is alien to the domesticated house cat.