Cat behavior and misbehavior
Jim Ha, PhD, CAAB
Cats are a mystery to many of their owners, perhaps more so than dogs. Dogs are social, like we primates, and so we can often understand their need for attention, the reward of social contact and praise, and even, at a deeper evolutionary level, perhaps a lot of their signals and communication. But cats – symbols of the unknown, the dark worlds, the places where humans feared to tread – why do cats mystify us so?
One answer is probably their lack of sociality. Modern domestic cats are descended from relatively solitary species of wild cat (all cats but the lion are considered far to the solitary extreme of the sociality continuum). So cats do not respond to social signals or rewards in the same way that we do, or our oh-so-social dogs (more…)
