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What is it thinking?
When Becky Evans started studying cat-human relationships, she kept hearing, over and over again, about how cats are psychopaths.
On one hand, anyone who has looked into the curiously blank face of a
catloaf knows exactly what that means.
But also, exactly what does it mean to apply a human mental diagnosis to felines? We let these clawed creatures into our homes and our beds, but we still have trouble understanding them on anything but our own human terms.
Evans, a psychology graduate student at the University of Liverpool, recently devised a
survey for owners who think that their cats are psychopaths. The survey asks owners to describe the allegedly psychopathic behaviors, and so far they have included bullying other pets, taking over the dog's bed, and waiting on the kitchen counter to pounce on unsuspecting family members.
In short, pretty typical cat behavior.
These answers get at the tricky semantics of calling a cat a "psychopath" when it is just ... a cat. There's always an implicit comparison when we talk about cats as aloof little jerks, says
Mikel Maria Delgado, a postdoctoral researcher on cat behavior at the University of California at Davis. And that comparison is with dogs, which humans have spent thousands more years domesticating and molding in our image.
We like things that remind us of us," Delgado told me. "We like smiling. We like dogs doing what we tell them. We like that they attend to us very quickly. They make a lot of eye contact.
Cats, she pointed out, simply don't have the facial muscles to make the variety of expressions a dog (or human) can.
So when we look at a cat staring at us impassively, it looks like a psychopath who cannot feel or show emotion. But that's just its face. Cats communicate not with facial expressions but through the positions of their ears and tails. Their emotional lives can seem inscrutable-and even nonexistent-until you spend a lot of time getting to know one.
