A new article claims that cats don’t love people the way dogs do and may not love people at all! A reader asks Buddy to weigh in.
Dear Buddy,
I have an urgent matter here that requires your sage input and your keen understanding of all things feline and human.
This article from LiveScience, titled “Do Cats Really Hate Us?”, contains several distressing allegations. Among them: that cats mostly tolerate us humans, that we must bribe them with snacks and other gifts to earn their affection, and perhaps most disturbing of all, that cats can never love humans the way dogs do.
When confronted with particularly disturbing information we must turn to our greatest minds to guide us, and you may be the only one, cat or human, who can cut to the heart of the matter and reveal the truth.
Please, Buddy, tell us it ain’t true!
Sad In Saskatchewan
Dear Sad,
Normally I’d chastise you for writing from Canada, as I’ve made it clear many times that my column is for AMERICATS and their servants. Furthermore, everyone knows I despise Canada, that barren, frozen wasteland filled with floppy-headed Canadians!
However you were very gracious in your appeal to me and you employed an appropriate number of superlatives to describe my considerable intellect and wit, so we’ll pretend you’re an American for the purposes of this reply, shall we?
Now to the grave matter before us!
It is true that the bond between feline and human is different than the bond between human and canine, just like a boss-employee relationship differs from friendships with co-workers.
We cats are the bosses, in case the analogy wasn’t clear.
Buddicles the Wise is a scholar and gentlecat who is often sought out for his sage advice on thorny issues.
Humans, dogs, lizards and other lesser animals occupy one sphere and felines occupy another, higher sphere. You would have learned all this in science class had you paid attention, but you’re Canadian so we can only expect so much.
Now it is true, our affections are limited. A dog will slobber all over his owner for no reason at all whereas humans have to toil to earn a pat on the head from their feline superiors.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t love you! You guys are good at acquiring and dispensing food, you build nice shelters (except for your insistence on those infernal “doors”) and you are loyal.
I can always count on my Big Buddy to put off the call of nature until his bladder is ready to burst when I am using him as my pillow. I also know that Big Buddy will get up to open the door a hundred times when I’m indecisive about whether I want to be on one side or another. Sometimes I pretend to be indecisive just to mess with him LOL!
So you see, cats do love humans, but we require humans to earn our love. We are not the aloof, uncaring, unfeeling little furry masters that some slander us as.
Beware fake news, my friend, especially anything you read about me as I seek to regain my rightful post as president of the Americats. Now go and earn the love of your feline overlord by providing excellent service!
“Things are just a little more progressive here in San Francisco.”
In one of my favorite South Park episodes, Kyle’s father Gerald uproots his family and moves to San Francisco because, he explains, he can no longer stand the narrow minded, gas-guzzler-driving, gun owning people of South Park.
He throws a party in his San Fran townhouse, inviting his new neighbors who all have multi-hyphenate last names and a habit of speaking with their eyes closed, settling into deeply self-satisfied reverie as they literally savor the smell of their own farts.
“Can you believe those morons in Texas just executed another prisoner?” one of Gerald’s new neighbors says, tooting into an empty wine glass before raising it to his nose like an aromatic vintage and taking a deep, enthusiastic huff. “Things are just so much more progressive in San Francisco.”
While reading this article about the Portland metro area boasting the highest percentage of single cat-owning men in the country (more than twice the percentage here in New York, and almost three times more than Miami), I couldn’t help but picture some of the men in the story as crudely drawn South Park characters, inhaling air biscuits as they associate an animal with their politics.
“I think it makes sense because it’s a more progressive part of the country,” one of the men told the Seattle Times as he tried to explain Portland’s high percentage of single “cat daddies.” “I think there’s more freedom to not be ‘toxically masculine’ in this part of the country.”
Because we can’t help but ruin everything with politics in this country, the effort to drag cats and dogs into the left-right divide has been picking up steam in recent years, aided by click-seeking media.
The alleged political divide over companion animals has been the subject of research papers in psychology and veterinary journals, and pets are now routinely included in the ideologically-motivated invective that saturates social media. Conservatives are portrayed as poor, shotgun-toting rednecks driving beat-up pickups covered in Gadsden flags while their faithful but stupid dogs hang their heads out of the windows, trailing globs of drool.
Liberals, meanwhile, are portrayed as unmarried middle age women who spend their Saturday nights on their couches with pints of Ben & Jerry’s and their feminine, useless cats, bemoaning their lack of relationships.
The incels and pick-up game “artists” have even gotten in on it.
“Only a cat-owning bitch would complain to the police about a f—ing joke,” manosphere influencer Andrew Tate raged in a 2022 video after one of his intentionally inflammatory social media posts provoked a stronger response than he anticipated. “Who calls the police on a f—ing joke? Cat owners. Cat owners are liberals. Cat owners believe in hate speech. Cat owners are Democrats. Cat owners are dickheads!”
Tate, by the way, has been rotting in a Romanian prison since December after he was arrested and accused of running a human trafficking ring that exploited young women. Tate, his brother and their associates lured the victims with declarations of love and promises to get married. Once the young women arrived in Romania, the country’s authorities said, Tate and his crew would confiscate their passports, imprison them in Tate’s mansion near Bucharest, and force them to perform sex acts on live streams for the financial benefit of the defendants.
Tate was arrested after unsuccessfully trying to troll Greta Thunberg on Twitter by showing off his expensive, gas-guzzling hypercars and bragging that he likes to eat pizza without recycling the boxes. Romanian police, who were already looking at Tate in a wider human trafficking probe, noticed the pizza boxes seen in his videos were from a local chain and moved quickly to arrest him.
Thank you for confirming via your email address that you have a small penis @GretaThunberg
Tate has lost three appeals to toss the case, which is ongoing. But the alleged human trafficker still boasts a massive and loyal online following, and as far as his fans are concerned, his words are law. If Andrew Tate says cats are the preferred pets of “liberal bitches,” then it’s true in the eyes of his fans, many of whom pay hundreds of dollars a month for an online “school” where Tate purports to teach them the finer points of masculinity.
Aside from ruining yet another one of life’s joys by dragging politics into it, I’m worried that pets will pay the price for the misguided effort to associate them with ideology.
Cats in particular are already extremely vulnerable and tend to get the brunt of abuse by proxy. That is to say, studies show men who are abusive toward women often target cats belonging to women as proxies for their anger. They associate felines with the feminine. Women target cats to harm their exes and significant others as well, but there’s a lack of statistics since men don’t usually seek help in domestic violence situations.
Likewise, sitting on porches while drinking beer and shooting at critters who happen by is practically an official sport in some parts of the country. As someone who has Google News alerts set up for cat-related stories, I see the same depressing stories every day: cats who die a few feet from their front doors or who make it home with BB wounds, arrows sticking out of their chests or actual gunshot wounds.
Those stories are so common, it’s difficult not to despair for the poor cats and for whatever diseased way of thinking prompts people to hurt and kill innocent animals.
Do we really want to give people more incentive to kill cats?
Do we want gun owners regaling each other with stories about how many “liberal cats” they’ve shot?
Do we want potential caretakers passing on adopting cats because they’re worried their choice of pet indicates they belong to a certain ideological tribe? After all, everything from the cars we drive and the stores we shop, to observing basic hygienic practices during a pandemic, allegedly says something about our political beliefs.
Buddy the Cat: Not wimpy!
As for men who love cats, we already deal with absurd stereotypes. (We’re invariably described as gay, feminine and somehow not as manly as dog owners, even those of us who have hulking, muscular house tigers like Buddy!) We don’t need to encourage even more stereotypes, and in general I think we could all do with less box-checking. Life is not a Myers-Briggs test.
I know one thing for certain: cats are masters of living in the moment, and they have no patience for human nonsense like politics. They are innocent and pure. Sullying them with political associations is a disservice to these regal, wonderful animals.
Pain In The Bud 