Cat personification

[Musiaka]

...and human emotions aren't primitive? From my perspective, they may just be the most primitive of all. Looking around and seeing the state of society in the USA and many other places, "lizard brain" is a term I use to describe too many. Cats, on the other hand, fulfill our universal basic needs of eating and sleeping, and if not spayed/neutered, procreating as well; they also exhibit higher emotions/feelings/attributes like love, loyalty, and altruism. So who's the more primitive? I know what my answer would be...

My answer was lighthearted and I don't want to get involded in such discussions.

 

[minish]

Juniper_Junebug minish does the same things in those contexts as the examples in your original post and I read them the same. Like others said, when I hear the word antrophomorphise, I feel humans are overestimated. We don't have complicated emotions, we just complicate them by overthinking and projecting them into far future and past. That's a disadvantage cats or other mammals/vertebrates don't have.

I also believe that cats have not so simple thought processes and belief systems. For instance, minish is a firm believer in justice. You can't eat in peace unless you at least offer her a smell or taste, even if she is full with her favorite cat food, she expects the courtesy. You also have to justify any rules before she follows them. For example, she resisted the ban on balcony, until I mimicked fear for her life

They also have personalities, for instance my neighbor's overpampered cat is an asshole.she got everything but steals food from neighbors and bullies every other cat. Minish is a millennial, a total show off and keen on looking good all the time (no fur out of place)

In short, a cat is a person and has a lot in common with humans. So why not personify? Besides, it's fun

The problem, if any, maybe reading their cues wrongly. Like wagging tail is not a sign of joy in a cat. This problem has been solved by minish, by continuing to make the point so I get it

 

[tarasgirl06]

Cats and teddy bears are similar because we project our thoughts onto them then imagine that they are thinking what we want them to.

They are different because cats are alive and teddies are not. However, it is the same phenomenon of psychological projection happening with both.

It gets funky when you consider that cats are intelligent while bears are inanimate. Cats can move, make sounds and change their body posture to give us clues about their state of mind but the problem is that nobody truly knows whether a cat's actions and postures actually mean what we think they mean. We can make inferences about cats but, in the end it is up to the human's interpretation. Different people could see the same cat, performing the same gestures and get different meanings from them. There is a lot of common understanding but, in the end, we can only guess what's on a cat's mind.

It doesn't matter whether we know. We keep cats as pets because we can project our thoughts, feelings and beliefs onto them.

That's a big part of the fun of having a cat.

I guess I'm probably unusual in that I was born and raised "with cat" and in my family, cats were never, and are not, "pets" but beloved family members. So I don't project much, if at all.

 

[Caspers Human]

I grew up around animals, too.
My father bred dogs for hunting and he was the keeper at an animal farm before I was born.

When I was very young, I remember my father having a python in a cage. It's name was "Sylvester" and I remember hissing at it in its cage. He kept a red tailed hawk that flew into a window and hurt its wing. He kept it until it get better then let it go. We had dogs, a goat and a horse. There is even a picture of me, in the family photo album, wrestling with a margay. (A small wildcat, a little bigger than a house cat.)

The thing is... we don't know what animals think and probably never will. Heck! We hardly know what some PEOPLE think!

All we really have to go on is intuition but it doesn't mean I love my pets any less.

 

[tarasgirl06]

I grew up around animals, too.
My father bred dogs for hunting and he was the keeper at an animal farm before I was born.

When I was very young, I remember my father having a python in a cage. It's name was "Sylvester" and I remember hissing at it in its cage. He kept a red tailed hawk that flew into a window and hurt its wing. He kept it until it get better then let it go. We had dogs, a goat and a horse. There is even a picture of me, in the family photo album, wrestling with a margay. (A small wildcat, a little bigger than a house cat.)

The thing is... we don't know what animals think and probably never will. Heck! We hardly know what some PEOPLE think!

All we really have to go on is intuition but it doesn't mean I love my pets any less.

Interesting! Up in the Mojave there was a little hawk who used to sit on the tree outside my bathroom window and stare at me for 20 min. or more. I mentioned this to a neighbor and she said she thought this hawk might be the same one who flew into her slider once and injured a wing. This hawk would also fly into the very narrow space between our barn door and roof and catch rats and mice in there! There were also a lot of snakes including Slither, below. She (not sure of gender) was very large -- a Pine-Gopher snake according to my wildlife search -- and she'd also enter the barn, crawl straight up the walls to the light bar, and catch mice and rats up there!
I'm not at all sure what our cats in the barn compound thought about all of this activity, but I do know they caught more than one small rodent up there and I'm pretty sure they enjoyed them. No personification there -- 100% feline predatory instincts satisfied!

Slither, on her way "upstairs" to catch a meal