Summary
According to the BBC's article "Why do we think cats are unfriendly?", cats have a well-aware-behavior that made them look independent and cold, and taming cats could not help humans removing all wild-instinct from them for they still want to hunt and protect their territory from strangers. Also, cats' emotions and companionability are lower than dogs though they are improved in the present. However, companionability is changeable by its experience in the first six or eight weeks. Positive experiences at its early age can help cats getting good relationships with humans and a positive sign to notify us that a bond is being created is when they close their eyes slowly or be relaxing when they are around humans.
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Response
In my opinion, Cats are like a reserved person who will not give any affection or being open-minded to strangers. It takes a bit of time for a reserved person to warm up and create a relationship and be friendly with anyone, and I think cats are like this type of person if you want an example to compare with humans. Therefore, to me, cats are friendly but not to everyone. It is an answer from my experience I got from my cat. My cat was a stray cat before when my dad found her. She was two or three months old when she first came to my house. It took a few hours before she decided to eat foods my mom prepared for her and walked around the house as if she wanted to inspect if my house safe enough before settled down on the spot she liked. It took me a couple of days to be able to play with her, got to hear she purred for the first time and took me almost a month or upper for my cat to play with me and sleep on my legs. She can play with my parents or my nephew but she always goes to hind when my cousin or guest comes to visit.
Anyway, what I could not agree with more is cats' body-language is hard to interpret and very easy to be misunderstood, especially if you do not have some interaction with them enough to be able to guess if they are in a good mood and want to play or if they want to be alone. It took me almost a year to be able to guess my cat's body language and avoid to get wound from her nails or fangs. I often get wound from my cat, because even though her intention is to play with me but after play for awhile her wild-instinct sometimes took control of her as for a toy triggered her desire to hunt and ended up hurt my hand or my leg. But sometimes she is not in a good mood and will really bite hard if I or anyone interrupts her private time. Even nowadays I still guess wrong sometimes and got a bit from this ten years old cat. So I think experience is really needed to understand cats' body language, and in order to not get hurt from a poker face cat. So if you want to befriend with cats, you might need to give more an afford than when you want to befriend with dogs.
I've never kept a cat; my family always had dogs, and still do, so perhaps I grew up with a prejudice against cats. However, some of my friends have had cats, and they did seem to me less affectionate than dogs. One of my friends got a cat earlier this year for his son, and when we meet, his arms usually bear a few scratches from playing with Thung Nguen (ถุงเงิน). But I'm assured that it's all good fun!
ReplyDeleteI was also interested in the points Aom makes about the rule the evolution plays in behaviour. That reminded me of an article in The New York Times earlier this year, "Those Puppy Dog Eyes You Can’t Resist? Thank Evolution," which reports on research about how dogs have had enough time living with us to have evolved physically to make themselves more appealing by mimicking the appearance of a baby; cats have not gotten around to this yet. Finally, since I had already read Aom's blog post, another article a couple of days ago caught my eye, "How good are you at reading your cat’s facial expressions?" in Science.