Universal Fascination

A cat is an event—a wild cat is exciting, and even a domestic cat suddenly freezing or walking along the road catches the eye in a way that a dog would not. People cross the road to go, “You’re a kitty!” (even people who already have cats, or who will never have a cat). Consider the raptures of Christopher Smart, or Japanese Emperor Uda on being gifted one of the first cats in Japan, or the responses of islanders seeing a cat for the first time, from Tucker2016, The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World:

Perhaps the most arresting ships’ logs describe the cats’ reception on inhabited islands. Here, native people who had never seen a cat of any sort, nor guessed such creatures existed, encounter them for the first time. Nowhere is their species’ power over ours more apparent. “Our cats…struck them with particular astonishment”, the colonial official John Uniacke wrote, after several Aborigines came aboard the HMS Mermaid, docked off Queensland in 1823_202ya. “They were…continually caressing the cats, and holding them up for the admiration of their companions on shore.” Among the Samoans, “a passion arose for cats”, noted Titian Peale, an American explorer, “and they were obtained by all possible means from the whale ships visiting the islands.” On Ha’apai, natives stole two of Captain Cook’s “Catts”. On Eromanga, natives exchanged cords of fragrant Polynesian sandalwood for the explorers’ felines.

And who can get enough of cat videos, which:

…present minimalist narratives, focused on an instant of spectacle. A typical cat video establishes a state of calm, then suddenly disrupts it. The cat is usually the active agent of change, though chance also frequently plays an important role. The pervasiveness of this structure means that viewers familiar with the form may even anticipate a serendipitous event. The disruption prompts a surprising or comic effect for the viewer, and this is a key part of the video’s pleasure.

For example, in “Cat vs Printer”, the establishing scenario is the cat intently watching the printer, a presumably quotidian scene, which escalates when the cat begins to smack the moving paper. The narrative climaxes in the final two seconds of the video, when the cat strikes the paper so hard that the printer tray bounces, and the surprised cat falls off its stool. The video ends abruptly. This disruption also takes the viewer by surprise (at least it does the first time you watch it). The terse ending, and lack of resolution or denouement, encourages the viewer to replay the video. The minimal narrative effectively builds expectation for a moment of surprise…The most popular cat videos seem to have the most sudden and striking disruptions as well as the most abrupt endings. They seem the most dramatic and spontaneous.

…The conventional formal structure of these videos effectively homogenizes the cat, as if there is a single cat performing in millions of videos. Indeed, YouTube comments often suggest a likeness between the cat represented in the video and the commenter’s own cat. In this sense, the cuteness so readily identified has a homogenizing effect. It also has the effect of distinguishing cats as a species from other animals, as it confounds common conceptions of all (other) animals as fundamentally alike in their essential difference from the human (animal). Cat videos are often appreciated for what they reveal about cats in general, rather than for each cat’s individuality. In this way, cat videos symbolize a generic feline cuteness, rather than identify a particular cat as cute.

This is also true of big cats too: “cats are cats everywhere” (a hint at how undomesticated house-cats are—channeled well in the disturbing Garfield comic, “Primal Self”), and we are struck by how much watching a lion or tiger in their pen looks like watching a very large, bored house-cat. People line up to see them in zoos or even go in and play with them at various big cat preserves.

This fascination with cats is, I think, part of why people find Toxoplasma gondii so interesting: it just feels like there is something there to explain about why people react to cats they way they do, but then not to other animals like dogs or ferrets or squirrels; and the idea that people are being mind-controlled by a mouse parasite which makes them attracted to cats is too perfect to forget.

Dog Contrast

This seems a lot less common with dogs (although of course it does happen, and has happened to me several times dog-walking), despite the fact that on most metrics, dogs are much more popular than cats: there are more of them, we spend more on them, dog charities are better funded, more research happens on dogs, dogs/wolves appear in an incredible amount of written text, historical & contemporary—which may come as a surprise to people who spend a lot of time online, but seems to be true: in every way aside from in-person observation like a zoo or preserve, canids are more popular than felids, not less. For example, in the hugely popular ‘supernatural romance’ mega-genre, there are wolf-oriented niches like the “Omegaverse”, but any feline-oriented ones are much less popular; in the furry subculture, cats are a stereotypical choice, but canines, foxes, and others are also common and perhaps more popular.

And the portrayals of cats and dogs could hardly be more different in terms of moral valence: cats are often negatively or ambiguously portrayed, agents of chaos and selfishness (where not outright antagonists). Not to belabor the point, but while cats may have nine lives, it is all the dogs who go to heaven—there is no Dog in the Hat; it is not a ‘Wolf Who Came to Tea’; Mowgli is raised by canids, not Shere Khan; The Aristocats is a somewhat unflattering portrayal of cats compared to dogs in The Lady and the Tramp (who are persecuted by sinister Siamese cats). And we would not need to defend cats by saying “the cat did nothing wrong!”

Not Neoteny

What is going on here? Do we really like cats because they have ‘baby faces’ or because they are ‘neotenous’ or kittens sound a little like human babies?

These are common theories, but make little sense to me. Cats do not look that much like babies; they are not being selected by humans to look like babies (whereas dogs clearly have undergone domestication syndrome long ago); only a few recent cat breeds are starting to look baby-like (eg. Persians and Ragdolls) and those still represent a small minority of pet cats (and many people regard them as rather weird-looking and offputting); we are fascinated by adult cats as much as kittens (perhaps even more fascinated, actually); we are attracted to cats even when we cannot see their faces; cat media like videos do not particularly emphasize faces (eg. the “Cat vs Printer” cat’s face is often obscured); anecdotes from before the neoteny theory, like Emperor Uda, never make a comparison with babies; and it can’t explain cat near-parity with dogs, which are so vastly superior at having human-like faces, facial expressions, neoteny, begging/whining/etc. And how do we reconcile these theories with the constant undercurrent of subversion, danger, and wildness that is part of the peculiar appeal of cats?

When Cats Were Our Predators

But while reading about felid predation rates on primates in Africa & India, I learned something interesting: I knew, of course, that big cats prey on monkeys of every sort, but I learned that it wasn’t just the occasional thing, but that a lot of our ancestors were killed by cats.

And I mean a lot.

Hart2000 surveyed field researchers & compiled reports on predators of primates and the by-species composition of the diet of African big cats, raptors, hyenas, crocodiles etc, and it turns out that primates like chimpanzees or baboons are a major source of food for lions & leopards. A leopard might easily have a diet of 10–25% monkeys, and the total mortality on a colony can be extraordinarily high: “Based on nocturnal observations, an estimated >8% of the baboon population at Moremi, Botswana was killed annually due to predation by lions and leopards (Busse1980).” Worse, they get silently picked off one by one, far from any watching eyes, where no one can hear them scream as they vanish: “Even though an estimated 45% of the vervet population fell victim to leopards during one year at Amboseli, no vervets were killed within sight of researchers (Isbell1990b, Isbell1994b)”. (Hart notes that while primatologists often never saw one of their subjects killed, those studying the leopards or lions knew better: “Only 19 primatologists out of 227 questionnaire respondents had knowledge of more than 2 predations on their study populations. Contrast this with the responses from predator researchers; known or observed kills by the predator they were studying averaged 20 primates, and one researcher had gathered information on 350 primate kills by leopards”!)

It follows. The threat of felid predation was major in part because unlike canid predators like hyenas (who often dined on primates), they could follow the primates up into the trees; trees offered good protection against raptors, canids, crocodiles… but not snakes or leopards, and baboons sleeping in trees carefully position the young as high up as possible on the thinnest branches and the adults guard the bottom. (The leopards will still get some.) And while it’s hard to tell and no primate, not even gorillas, are immune, it seems like the smaller the primate, the more cats can successfully prey on them.

Primate predators. Thus, Hart argues for thinking of big cats, and leopards in particular, as “specialist predators”: they specialize in eating us, and have been hunting us, to some degree, for possibly tens of millions of years. True, humans have long ago gotten physically large and become more challenging prey for big cats, and we have since colonized the world and in many places, humans are far more afraid of animals like wolves or bears or feral dog packs, and it is easier to be traumatized by a dog as a child and develop cynophobia… but lots of humans have been killed by big cats up until quite recently, and that was a long time to be terrified, every night, of cats, and to learn to recognize them in our very genes.

Hypothesis: Echoes of the Hunt

Cats are behaviorally almost exactly like one of our major historical predators. And since ‘cats are cats everywhere’, that means when we see leopards as large house-cats, that is another way of saying that we see house-cats as small leopards—-the terror of our ancestors for mega-years.

This is a little unusual among popular pets, if you think about it: nothing like a ferret or a bunny or a parrot or a goldfish (or a hamster, gerbil, rabbit, guinea pig, parrot…) has ever been a major predator of large primates like us. Canids have been, but we do fear wolves greatly in the wild and dogs are highly genetically altered by domestication to make them into acceptable dogs.

The Allure of Safe Danger

But there is one explanation which sums this all up neatly: Why do we watch horror movies or play survival horror games or go on roller coasters or talk to Bing Sydney? Why do women listen to true-crime podcasts about serial killers & rapists? Because it is rewarding to safely experience harmful stimuli, paradoxical as it may seem: learning is rewarding.

Cats are compelling to watch in the way that a villain is compelling to watch. (Villains act; heroes react. And doesn’t building a relationship with a villain feel so much more earned than from a hero? Which would you remember more, earning a compliment from Superman—or Lex Luthor?) Cats are like the serial killer in a horror movie; we are fascinated and aroused whenever they are nearby, and we can’t help but watch them, even when they do nothing and present no immediate threat. This is true even when the horror movie is ostensibly about reptiles: you can take [Jurassic Park](!W “Jurassic Park (film))”, and slot in a cat for the T-Rex or the velociraptors, and the scenes work purrfectly.

You wouldn’t turn your back on Hannibal Lecter, any more than a herd of gazelle would turn their backs on a lion snoozing in the grass a few hundred meters away. You have to watch them.¹ They’re just intrinsically interesting because they are dangerous. You can watch them endlessly for the slightest hint which might save your life; after all, how often does a gazelle get to watch a lion or leopard up close? Not often!

It doesn’t matter that your pet cat is (relatively) little threat to you: “a cat is a cat everywhere”, and somewhere in your monkey-brain, your pet cat looks just like a big cat to you. We watch them roughhouse and play and learn to hunt, and (unlike puppies playing) we know that we are one of the targets; we watch them knock things off the table, and perhaps somewhere we think about a big cat prodding us to see if we’re alive and good to eat, or better left to the scavengers; we watch them watch us, and we note uneasily how that is the same stare they might use to watch the birds outside the window; they flex their hidden claws, and remind us of what those would do if they were 6-inches long and razor-sharp—and the hiss or yowl pierce the ear where a dog bark is merely annoying yapping.

Admiring from Afar

Similarly, for cat videos, it is obvious why we might be fascinated to get to watch “a state of calm” which is “suddenly disrupted” by an “active agent of change” which is a ‘homogenized’ universal ‘Cat’, as opposed to, say, a squirrel. (Why do cat owners take a perverse pride in noting the similarity of their cats to the cat in a video or to a big cat, instead of trying to emphasize their uniqueness?) Nothing against squirrels, who can be most amusing, but deep down, my brain is not taking notes on this rare opportunity to witness a felid attack one of my fellow prey-animals, and just doesn’t care as much.

This is a mechanism which doesn’t work well for fictional mediums. Writing about a cat doesn’t do it; painting a cat doesn’t do it. Only real cats work. (In the same way that a drawing of a snake doesn’t trigger our terror of a snake the way a high-quality video or a real snake does.) You can enjoy media about fictional cats, whether Garfield or Puss in Boots, but it doesn’t necessarily trigger any “Kitty!” response.

Our Beloved Monsters

This, then, is the essence of a cat: they are, like dogs, invited into our homes and beds… but unlike the dopily-worshipful dog, the cat conceals a core of the untamable wild.

We invite these tiny predators into our homes, and are hypnotized: deep down, the cat ‘knows’ they can hunt us, and we ‘know’ it too. The ‘horror movie villain’ lives on our couch, offering a constant slight frisson as they elegantly steal their way through the living room or they stalk us.

A serial killer, but our serial killer.