I Love My Cats. Do They Love Me?

Chili, the angel.

Our cat Chili is an angel. All she requires is regular food and water, a little daily string chasing, a warm lap to curl up in every time she gets a chance, and a hefty amount of independence.

Lemmon, on the other hand, is a whiny pest. She follows us around, mewling and trilling and stretching up to try to turn the doorknobs of doors she wants us to open. When I open the pantry for any reason, she runs across the house hoping to be fed. She stations herself in the path where she knows I will walk next, desperate even for the attention of being kicked accidentally. I can never feed her enough food or play with her for a long enough period of time to satisfy her insatiable desires.

Lemmon, in a calm moment.

Or so it used to be. Although I love her desperately even at her whiniest, I was concerned that she wasn’t behaving in a healthy way. I did quite a bit of reading online about needy and demanding cats and finally happened upon an article stating that focused attention for a few minutes a day could turn these behaviors around. The author wrote of the importance of holding and petting a needy/whiny cat like Lemmon, looking in her eyes, and telling her how much I love her, repeating her name over and over again. Believe it or not, it works! At first it was hard for her to get used to being held like a baby, and she seemed to feel a bit strange about all the eye contact (as cats do). But now she settles right in and blinks at me happily as I repeat her name and coo at her. Sometimes she reaches her paws up towards my face, and a couple of times she has even bitten or licked me softly on my nose and cheeks. Five or ten minutes of this special time calms her down for a long time; a couple of sessions usually last the whole day.

Recently my husband and I watched The Lion in Your Living Room, a Netflix documentary about cats and how, even after millennia of domestication, they retain their wild behaviors. It was fascinating. But the documentary didn’t cover the emotional lives of cats, didn’t seek to explain moments like my special times with Lemmon. Is her growing calmness in my arms simply a reliving of her days as a kitten, turning instinctively to her mother for food and warmth and security? Or do we share an emotional relationship that exists beyond instinct?

Scholars in Animal Studies are currently studying this question: do animals experience emotions and, if so, what is the nature of those emotions? The field bifurcates: domesticated animals whose lives are wrapped up with those of humans may or may not have an emotional life different from that of free-ranging animals. The problem is that scientists cannot ask animals to explain their emotions, so they must infer them from their behaviors. (Of course, just because humans can explain their emotions doesn’t mean we fully understand those either!) Moments of play, courtship, and sharing of food suggest that animals are experiencing such emotion as joy, love, and care, respectively. The behaviors of hanging onto a dead relative or mate with a dejected air - which has been documented in many species of mammals and birds - suggest grief. The next question is how long these “emotions” last. Can animals be said to have real emotions if they are fleeting, unlike humans, who can remember and dwell on emotions such as grief for years?

There are also promising directions in research involving brain imaging, showing what areas of the brain light up when animals see other animals or humans or food or toys. And physical measurements can be taken: heart rate, eye movements, and so on. But then there is the problem of interpretation, as in studies of the human brain: explaining what is happening is much easier than figuring out why.

I think about these questions as I hold my little Lemmon. I’m glad we’re trying to answer them even though I’m not convinced we’ll ever really know the nature of animal emotions. Some scholars argue quite convincingly that humans are simply projecting our own emotions onto those animal behaviors. But it’s amazing enough to me to me that two such very different creatures as Lemmon and I can snuggle, let everything else go, look each other in the eye, and simply feel good in each other’s company. Isn’t that already pretty remarkable? And it sure feels like love to me.

Valentine's Day Animals

Google “Valentine’s Day and animals” and you will find a wealth of links to sweet photos and stories about how animals love each other; kiss, hug, and otherwise embrace; and form lifelong bonds. It’s true: there is a lot of love out there in the animal world. A friend was just telling us of his dog’s despondency and death after her elderly dog companion was put down. The same behavior has been documented among songbirds, who mostly mate for life, and may sit by the body of a dead mate for hours or days. Mammals love to snuggle against other warm mammal bodies, as seen in the above photo of two very cuddly pet rabbits I used to have.

Really, the animal world is a mixed bag, and we get into dangerous territory when we start anthropomorphizing, or giving human characteristics to, animals. Songbirds may mate for life and mourn the death of a mate, but male mallards gang rape lone females in a terribly violent way during the mating and nesting season. Guinea pigs, horses, and parrots should never be kept alone as pets because they need the companionship of others of their kind to remain healthy psychologically, but golden hamsters will fight and kill each other if kept in the same cage as adults. Even those sweet bunnies in the photo above only reached that bonded state after several weeks apart as I slowly and carefully introduced them to each other amid a great deal of aggression. Plenty of animals spend their lives in solitude and some are aggressive toward each other when together. You won’t see those photos in an online article on Valentine’s Day!

So why do we need to show animals in love? What are we trying to say about ourselves and them? Perhaps we are acknowledging our own animal nature and hoping that, if bunnies and kitties and squirrels and piglets can love each other, then we can love each other, too. This is why animal examples are so risky; some evolutionary psychologists and biological anthropologists have used the mallard and other examples to suggest that rape is a “natural” behavior among human men. Another possibility: perhaps we want to believe that the animals around us are able to enjoy love and other emotions at the levels we do, that they lead highly satisfying emotional lives, especially as our pets. This is risky as well and leads to a lot of hand wringing when we feel we are causing animals harm or not doing our utmost to care for them. I really don’t have answers to this question, but what I do know is that this view of animals and love is a construction that is highly specific to certain societies in certain places.

Take as a contrasting example what anthropologist James Suzman writes in this New York Times article about his experience with the Ju/’hoansi, hunter-gatherers who live in southern Africa and are more commonly known in the U.S. by the old-fashioned and inapt term “the Bushmen of the Kalahari”. These are people who live very close to animals and know them well because they must know them well to hunt them successfully and survive in their world. Suzman argues that they empathize, rather than sympathize, with animals:

For them animal empathy was not a question of focusing on an animal’s human-like characteristics, but of assuming the whole perspective of the animal. Their animal empathy defied verbalization. To empathize with an animal you couldn’t think like a human and project your mind-set into it; you had to “be” the animal.

But this kind of empathy did not persuade Ju/’hoansi and other hunter-gatherers to feel sympathy for animals or assume a duty of care for them. Rather it made people focus more on the non-human behaviors of animals rather than what they had in common. Among people who considered themselves to be just one of many different kinds of animal-people in a wild environment, hunting, death and pain were parts of everyday life. Human compassion did not extend to other species.

Suzman goes on to suggest that people like those of us reading this blog post or his article are different because we live in a world in which animals have evolved and been bred to please us. Our animal world consists of pets, animals trained to delight us at zoos and aquariums, round-eyed cartoon animals who make us cry and laugh, and even wildlife displayed as entertainment in nature documentaries. We think of animals in terms of what they do for us and then conclude that, doing so much for us, they must love us, and that, loving us, they deserve our love. And there we have a whole bunch of human emotions all wrapped up in our relationships with animals.

Suzman is not saying that the Ju/’hoansi way is better, and neither am I. He describes their behaviors towards the dogs who live among them in ways that, from our perspective, seem abusive or neglectful. At the same time, I’m not sure it’s entirely healthy - or good for animals - that we anthropomorphize them to the extent that we do. What I want to consider is that we interface with animals through a construction that we have formed of them and our relationship to them, a construction that has not been and is not the same in all times and places. We also construct ourselves and our view of our humanity through them, which makes me think that all of those Valentine’s Day articles on the internet may tell us a lot more about ourselves than they tell us about the animals they feature.