Cat Haters 101

by Malcolm Riordan 

It has always been of interest to me that some fellow humans seem possessed by dislike, fear, phobia, or outright hatred of cats. Looking around it seemed that the ideas and explanations – to me - clustered around four basic areas. The first three are familiar turf, but the last, reptilian brain-stem reaction was an interesting, valid sounding fresh idea.

For the record, we do not reference dogs as being cat haters here.  Dogs do not hate cats. Still, many a dog has learned to absolutely love the cat as a moving target.

Common Recitations

Cats are independent, self sufficient, self centered, and do not care about pleasing you.  Everything is on their terms; they are lazy and insubordinate to where obedience does not even occur to the feline mind.

Cats ignore you.  People resent competing for the affection of a cat lover.  Even if a cat likes you there is no deep loyalty in it:  for food and a lap, humans are a generic source for their needs.

Cats shed, cats cause allergies.  Cats hunt, scratch, and bite. Cats freak around in the night and sleep all day. Cats do not observe civilization's boundaries, fences, or property lines.

Culture and Society

In our society we are not accustomed to seeing cats being supreme hunters who leave a trail of violent death and eating of any critter smaller than them. Such sights can leave us horrified and disgusted with cats.

America is heavily influenced by Old World European customs, literature and oral traditions. Cats still elicit subconscious links with infidelity and witchcraft. The cat's independent streak, rowdy mating habits, associations with witches and sorcerers led to beliefs that cats are a bad influence on people.

Superstitions surrounding cats run deep in our culture: all that bad luck in crossing the path of a black cat, the widely held myth of cats sucking the breath out of helpless sleeping babies in the night.

Some peoples have been infused with hate for cats via religion – black cats in particular were targeted by Christians - hundreds were killed during the Salem Witch trials.

With cats associated with so many nefarious doings, their reputation has been steeped in evil for centuries. It is not hard to see that residual fears still persist, right alongside the information highway.

To this day black cats are regarded superstitiously even by educated people. Surely some hatred of cats goes back to our collective earlier times, passed generation to generation whether overtly or subconsciously.

Psychology

The psychology of dislike, fear, phobias, or hate of cats involves the simple idea that the hater reveals more about themselves than merely a disrespect of kitties. This resembles the psychological/emotional concept of projection. Perhaps at times it is also similar to the Rorschach Ink Blot Test where humans project, seeing their inner emotional conflict in things ambiguous.  People who hate cats tend to hate them because in some way cats elicit active elements from within the person's own emotional scenery.

Just as we conclude certain things about a person by looking at the kind of pets they really like, a person's strong negative reactions to domestic species can also be revealing.

This could be as simple as husbands or boyfriends too macho to even pay attention to the cat, much less being fascinated by or affectionate with a cat.  Jealousy and contempt are easy to come by when others have to compete with a cat for the attentions of the cat owner.

People who themselves feel controlled or restricted respond resentfully towards cats' appearance as freedom personified. People who work hard at menial jobs may have anger that cats live well without apparent stress or toil.

Cats effortlessly stare down humans in a way that can be unnerving, as if an alien species, mysterious and inscrutable, lives among us. With that, skeptics may suffer a creepy vibe.

The apparent sublime harmony cats seem to have within themselves and the universe mesmerizes many of us, yet it freaks out others. Feline moves – the smooth flow of agility, poise, balance, all in silence, especially as a cat stalks its prey - can be visually eerie to non-enchanted watchers.

Reptilian Brain-stem Reaction

Given that cats are hard-wired as extremely successful predators, that by nature cats hunt alone, live alone, raise their young alone, and come together only rarely for breeding purposes – given all this, there is something that seems just plain wrong about a cat's affection for people.

How such an independent, private hunter, only a second away from going feral, is supposedly domesticated is odd in and of itself. Something in the picture is distinctly, alarmingly wrong! Shouldn't this unnatural, anomalous behavior exhibited by cats elicit a distrustful suspicious alarm in humans at the presence of a solitary arch-predator serenely occupying the security and safety of our homes?

It may be that gut level hatred of cats begins within a human individual's "reptilian brain," the hypothalamus, which tells the person that something about the situation is dreadfully wrong, potentially dangerous, and not to be trusted – putting them in alarm and on edge in the presence of a cat.

Instead of the phobic or hate reaction being seen as a mean spirited and unreasonable response to felines, perhaps it could be seen as a residual remnant of our trusty survival instinct to be wary of aberrations that do not fit the natural order of life as we know it.

Or perhaps cat haters are merely peevish, superstitious, emotionally conflicted individuals who go with their brain stem?

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Woods Rafter Cat Image on Banner by Malcolm Riordan.