Science Reveals What Cats Really Think of Us Becca Stanek - News.Mic
go to original February 1, 2015

Your cat poops on the carpet because it thinks you're a loser. (Tumblr)

Cat haters rejoice: Science is on your side.

There's a common stereotype about America's favorite household pets: Dogs will love you unconditionally, and cats couldn't care less if you died as long as they get fed (horrifying aside: For some cats, sometimes that's the same thing). Contrary to the protests of feline fanatics everywhere, the stereotypes are actually on point. While cats may look all fuzzy and adorable on the outside, research shows that they really are the cold, unfeeling monsters the world thinks they are.

Experiments by the University of Lincoln in the U.K. found that cats just don't love their owners back in the way that dogs do. This can likely be explained by the animals' respective evolutionary histories with humans. Mankind's domestication of dogs may have begun as long as 32,000 years ago, explaining our close relationship with canines — both species have evolved together over millennia. Meanwhile, cats have only been cohabiting with humans for 9,000 years, and much of that was spent lurking in doorways and eating the rats that followed our messy forbears — hardly as rapport-building as hunting, eating and sleeping side by side.

Moreover, humans chose dogs to be their companions by selectively breeding positive traits, choosing the most docile and trainable dogs for breeding. Cats, on the other hand, chose themselves. While humans adopted dogs to serve a particular function for human societies — herding animals, protecting cattle and warding off predators — cats selected people as providers of dropped food and vermin that came to clean up the crumbs. While the relationship between man and his best friend could be characterized as mutual necessity, cats simply stick around for the fringe benefits of human society.

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