One day during finals last fall, I got a text from my mother. It said “Look who I brought in from the cold.” Attached was a photo of a black cat. According to my mother, the cat was feral, and had been poking around the house for couple of months. It was one of the coldest days of the year, so she had brought him inside, worried he would freeze to death.
My initial reaction was something along the lines of “ha ha ha, you really think you’re keeping that?” Little did I know, because a little over a year later, the cat who came to be known as Midnight is still happily sleeping on the back of our couch.
Our relationship with cats is weird. Dogs were bred to herd livestock or pull sleds; we brought them into our lives for a purpose. But what do we get out of owning cats? I can tell you that it’s not pest control; if you’re cats are anything like mine, they love nothing more than to bring dazed mice into the kitchen, drop them on the floor, and stare confusedly while they dash to safety under the oven (why is the thing I’m trying to murder running away from me?) If you really think about it, the only thing we get out of the human-cat relationship is cat video worthy moments of humor.
Our relationship with cats brings out the best and the worst in us. On the one hand, a lot of people, my family included, really love their cats. On the other, as cat videos bear out, we also seem to really love torturing them. What are cat videos, really? A lot of them are humans purposefully annoying cats, or scaring them. We love our cats, but it doesn’t seem to bother us to do things to them that they cannot possible enjoy (see attached photos of Midnight in outfits). What we have with cats is not so much a symbiosis as a truce.
And yet, if the relationship between humans and cats is a conflict, we clearly have a massive strategic advantage. We put down millions of cats every year, and millions more are in shelters. I argue that, if a cat’s choices are living in a metal cage for most of its life, or living with a human who’s cool for the most part, but sometimes provokes a war with the CD tray to film it and put in on the internet, the choice is pretty clear. If cat videos help cats find loving homes, more power to them
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I find it interesting your mom described the cat she found as “feral.” I stayed with an adorable kitten this past summer for three weeks and she was nothing but lovable, sweet, and playful. I found it strange that she was somewhat nocturnal and that she seemed to see as well in the dark as in daylight. After a quick google search, I learned that domesticated cats have almost identical DNA as their wildcat counterparts! This is unlike domesticated dogs, who have evolved far from their wild predecessors.
I do not like cat, especially the grown one, so I still do not understand how some people can stay for hours in front of a cat film. However, it was interesting to read how you feel about cat videos, and one thing I agree on it is that cat should not being tortured even if I do not appreciate them and some of those film are funny.