Does Your Cat Really Love You?

Here is what I know for certain: it is 11:40 on a weekday night, I am on the couch with a laptop balanced on a pillow balanced on my legs and cat hair on my shirt, and there is a cat on the opposite end of the couch who has been staring at me for approximately two minutes with an expression I am choosing to interpret as fondness but which could, with equal plausibility, be interpreted as the blank non-expression of an animal whose brain, at this particular moment, is doing nothing at all. I have no way to determine which interpretation is correct. I have significant emotional investment in one of them. And the fact that I'm aware of my own bias here does not, I want to be clear, make me any less biased; it just makes me biased AND self-conscious about it, which is, if anything, worse, because now I'm doing that thing where you mistake noticing your own irrationality for having transcended it.

This is the problem with the question "does my cat love me." You can't investigate it honestly. Not because the science is insufficient (there is, in fact, a surprising amount of science, and we'll get to it), but because you, us, the investigator, are hopelessly compromised. You need the answer to be yes. Not in a casual, wouldn't-that-be-nice way. In a way that, if you looked at it directly, would tell you something about yourself that you might not be ready to hear.

Because the question "does my cat love me" is not really a question about the cat.¹

Start With What You Can Count

Let's start with the money, because the money is clarifying.

The average American cat owner will spend somewhere between $20,000 and$ 47,000 over the lifetime of their cat. That's according to Synchrony's 2025 Pet Lifetime of Care Study, which surveyed nearly 5,000 pet owners and found that cat care costs have risen almost 20% since 2022. The global cat toy market alone is worth $3.3 billion. The U.S. pet industry will hit$ 157 billion this year.² Seventy-seven percent of pet owners describe their pet as a family member, best friend, or child.

Here is what's interesting about those numbers: cat owners, when asked to estimate what they'd spend over their cat's lifetime, guessed about $5,700. The actual figure is, at minimum, four times that. Which means there is a$ 15,000-to- $40,000 gap between what cat owners think they're spending and what they're actually spending, a gap they are closing in real time, one$ 34 bag of prescription urinary health kibble and one $8 can of wet food (because the cat needs more water in its diet, because the cat has Feline Idiopathic Cystitis, because of course it does) and one$ 19 feathered wand toy (which the cat played with for eleven minutes before returning permanently to the twist-tie it found under the couch) at a time, without quite noticing, because each individual purchase feels reasonable, even necessary, even like a minor expression of love, which it is, which is also what makes the accumulation invisible.³

I bring up the money not to be cynical about it but because financial commitment is, in human relationships, generally accepted as evidence of something. We don't spend $30,000 on things we're indifferent to. Or rather: we don't spend$ 30,000 on things we THINK we're indifferent to. It's possible, I suppose, that the spending is the whole story, that this is a consumer relationship that has accrued its own momentum, that what feels like love is actually just the sunk-cost fallacy wearing a fur coat. But I don't think so. I think the spending is downstream of something real. I just can't prove it, because the thing it's downstream of is precisely the thing I'm trying to investigate, and I keep arriving back at the same evidentiary circle, which is: I love my cat, therefore I interpret my cat's behavior as love, therefore my cat loves me, therefore I was right to love my cat. It is a closed loop. It is also the interior architecture of most relationships, if you're being honest about it.

Okay. Science.

In 2019, a researcher named Kristyn Vitale at Oregon State University published a study in Current Biology that did something nobody had done properly before: she applied the Ainsworth Strange Situation Test, a protocol originally designed for human infants, to 108 cats. The test is simple. Cat and owner spend two minutes together in an unfamiliar room. The owner leaves for two minutes. The owner comes back. And then you watch what happens.

What happened was that 64.3% of the kittens and 65.8% of the adult cats displayed what attachment researchers call "secure attachment." They greeted their owner on return, calmed down, and then went back to exploring the room, using the owner as a kind of emotional home base from which to engage with the world. The remaining third or so were "insecure": some clung, some hid, some pretended the owner hadn't left at all.

That 65% number matters, and not just because it's a majority. It matters because it's the same rate found in human infants. Sixty-five percent of human babies, when tested with this same protocol, are securely attached to their caregiver. Cats, in other words, bond with us at statistically the same rate that we bond with our own parents. And the attachment style proved stable; after six weeks of socialization training, the cats' classifications didn't change. Personality, in other words, not performance.

Now, here is where I catch myself feeling vindicated, and where I need to slow down, because the feeling of vindication is exactly the problem. The problem with a study confirming your cat loves you is that the confirmation feels exactly like the bias did. And the 35% of cats that showed insecure attachment, the ones that hid or clung or were avoidant, deserve equal attention, because their existence means that the answer to "does your cat love you" is not "yes" but "probably, and in a way that depends on a lot of things, including what happened to the cat in the first seven weeks of its life, and also possibly on what kind of person you are, and also on factors nobody fully understands."

That's a less satisfying answer. It's also closer to the actual one.

But I want to set the science aside for a moment, because there's a more interesting question underneath it, and it has to do with the fact that cats, unlike almost every other animal that lives in your house, were never supposed to be here at all.

Nobody Invited the Cat

To understand what the cat is doing on your couch, it helps to understand what the dog is doing on your floor, because the two animals arrived by completely different routes.

Dogs were recruited. I'm being diplomatic. Nobody asked the wolves. Over the course of 15,000 years, humans selectively bred wolves for docility, cooperation, obedience, and (eventually) the ability to look at you with enormous wet eyes that trigger your mammalian caregiving instincts. Dogs were shaped, generation by generation, to need us, to read us, to please us. There are over 400 dog breeds because, for 15 millennia, we kept redesigning the same animal to do different jobs: hunt, guard, herd, pull sleds, sit on laps, fit in purses. The dog is, in a very real sense, a technology. I say this a dog owner of labs and huskies. A social technology for human emotional needs and companionship, refined over thousands of years.

Cats showed up.

Around 10,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent, the first agricultural settlements began storing grain. The grain attracted rodents. The rodents attracted wildcats, specifically Felis silvestris lybica, the Near Eastern wildcat, a small, solitary predator nobody invited.⁴ The cats ate the rodents. The humans tolerated the cats. This is the "commensal pathway" of domestication, and what it means, stripped of jargon, is: cats were not our project. They were their own project. They moved in because the arrangement suited them, and they stayed because it kept suiting them, and at no point in the 10,000-year history of this relationship did a human being sit down and try to design a cat that would be more accommodating.⁵

The genome confirms this. Domestic cats have changed remarkably little from their wild ancestor. Geneticists call them "semi-domesticated." Any house cat, released into the wild, could hunt and survive indefinitely. Sixty million feral cats in the United States do this every day. Cats were never bred for a task. Never bred for obedience. Never bred to make us feel loved.⁶

This matters for the love question, and it matters more than most "does your cat love you" articles acknowledge. Because it means the cat is the only animal in your house whose presence is, at the species level, voluntary. The dog was designed to be here. The goldfish has no real opinion. But the cat's ancestor made a choice, thousands of years ago, and the cat's genome has changed so little since then that your cat is, in a meaningful sense, still making that choice. Every day. In a body fully capable of not making it.

Whether that's evidence that their attachment is "real" depends on what you think "real" means, and I'll get to that. But there's something else the evolutionary history does that I think is more interesting, and it has to do with why the question "does my cat love me" produces a very specific kind of anxiety that the question "does my dog love me" does not.

Nobody writes think pieces about whether dogs love their owners. The answer is boringly, conclusively yes. Dogs were engineered for it. The question is settled before it's asked. And because it's settled, it doesn't produce the particular obsessive, recursive, interpretive anxiety that cat owners experience, the lying-on-the-couch-at-11:40-p.m.-trying-to-read-an-expression-that-might-not-be-an-expression thing. The dog's love is available, constant, and apparent. The cat's is not. And the not-knowing, the gap between wanting to know and being unable to, turns out to be the thing that generates the intensity.

I want to say this carefully because it sounds like I'm saying dog love is less valuable, and I'm not. I'm saying it's differently shaped. The dog fills a need. The cat creates one.⁷

Your Cat Cannot Leave

Here is an uncomfortable thought that the piece is now obligated to confront, because you're already thinking it and if I skip it you'll trust me less:

Your indoor cat cannot leave.

You control its food, its environment, its access to the outdoors, its reproductive life, its social world. If a human being were in this arrangement and expressed affection toward the person controlling their entire material existence, we would have a name for it, and the name would not be "love."

I want to take this seriously rather than dismiss it, because dismissing it is what most "does your cat love you" articles do, and the dismissal always feels dishonest, like a flinch. So: is it possible that your cat's affection is simply a rational response to total dependency? That what you're interpreting as love is actually the behavioral residue of a creature adapting to captivity?

Here's why the analogy doesn't hold, and I'll try to be precise about it rather than just reassuring:

First, cats chose us before we confined them. The evolutionary history isn't peripheral to the captivity question; it's the answer to it. The relationship began with free-roaming wildcats voluntarily associating with human settlements, and it continued for roughly 9,900 of its 10,000 years with cats coming and going as they pleased.⁸ The indoor cat, the cat that cannot leave, is a phenomenon of the last 75 years. The attachment predates the confinement by millennia.

Second, cats with freedom still come back. A study in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association found that 60% of roaming cats return home on their own. Feral cat colonies, documented extensively by Sharon Crowell-Davis and others, reveal that cats are what researchers call "flexibly social": they form stable preferred-associate pairs, groom each other, co-parent kittens, and rest in physical contact with chosen companions even in extreme heat, which means warmth isn't the explanation; preference is.

Third, and most importantly: cats are selective. If the attachment were mere dependency, cats would bond equally with any provider. They don't. They develop strong preferences for specific individuals, often choosing the person who best respects their autonomy over the person who fills the bowl. In a 2017 study by Kristyn Vitale Shreve, 55 cats (both pets and shelter animals) were given free choice between food, toys, scents, and human social interaction after being deprived of all four for 2.5 hours. The majority chose human companionship. Over food. Even the shelter cats, who had no established relationship with the tester. This isn't the behavior of a hostage optimizing for survival. A hostage optimizing for survival picks the kibble.

Still. I don't want to wave away the discomfort entirely, because I think the discomfort is honest. There IS a power asymmetry. You DO control the doors. And the honest version of the relationship includes acknowledging that asymmetry while also noticing that the cat, within the constraints of the arrangement, exercises more agency than you might expect. It chooses when to approach and when to leave. It chooses whose lap. It chooses whether to look at you and, as we're about to see, whether to blink.

Which Brings Us to the Eyes

I want to talk about what happens when you make eye contact with your cat, because I think this might be the most important thing in the piece, and I want to earn it rather than just assert it, so let me start with the science and then work toward what the science might mean.

In 2020, a team led by Tasmin Humphrey at the University of Sussex published a study in Scientific Reports on what they called "cat eye narrowing movements." What they found was this: when humans slow-blinked at cats (a deliberate, exaggerated narrowing of the eyes), the cats were significantly more likely to slow-blink back. And cats were more likely to approach an unfamiliar human who slow-blinked at them than one who maintained a neutral expression.

This is the study that launched a thousand "how to say I love you to your cat" articles, and most of them get the surface right but miss what's actually interesting about the finding. So let me try to say what's interesting about it.

A slow blink is, mechanically, a reduction of vigilance. You are taking the sensory apparatus you use to detect threats, your eyes, and you are deliberately, voluntarily reducing their function. In the feline behavioral vocabulary, sustained eye contact is a threat. Staring is what predators do. A slow blink is, therefore, the opposite of aggression. It is the performed renunciation of aggression. And when the cat blinks back, it is doing the same thing: saying, with the most economical gesture available to it, I see you and I am not afraid.

That's it. That's the whole exchange. Two organisms, looking at each other, and then each one briefly, deliberately closing the very organs they'd need to defend themselves. No food is changing hands. No need is being met. No service is being performed. There is nothing transactional about the slow blink. It is pure mutual attention, stripped to its most minimal form.

This is where I want to resist the urge to list the other ways cats show affection, because the lists exist everywhere and reciting them (head bunting, kneading, belly exposure, allogrooming) feels like it would dilute the point.⁹ The point is not that cats have a rich behavioral vocabulary for affection, although they do. The point is what the slow blink specifically reveals about what love might actually be, at its most reduced and honest.

Because what are you doing when you slow-blink at your cat? You are paying attention. You are attending, with your limited and diminishing supply of conscious awareness, to another being. Not to your phone. Not to the show you paused. Not to the eleven tabs open on your laptop. To the cat. And the cat, for its part, is doing the same thing. Of all the stimuli in the room (and a cat's sensory world is vastly richer than ours; they're tracking sounds, movements, and smells we can't perceive¹⁰), it is choosing, in that moment, to attend to you.

I think this might be the closest I can get to saying what love is.

Not the bonding hormones, though those are real and measurable and present in cats and humans alike during mutual interaction.¹¹ Not the evolutionary function, though it's true that attachment behavior probably evolved to keep offspring near caregivers and later got repurposed for other bonds. Not the philosophical abstractions about desire and the gaze and the gap. All of that is true and all of it is useful and none of it is quite the thing.

The thing, I think, is attention. The deliberate allocation of your finite conscious awareness to another being, freely, with nothing in it for you except the attending itself. And the thing about a cat, the thing that makes cat-attention different from dog-attention, is that a cat is usually attending to something else. A cat has its own rich, opaque, inaccessible interior life. It is tracking bugs and dust motes and sounds from three rooms away. It is, most of the time, somewhere you can't follow. And when it turns from all of that and looks at you, and blinks, the looking and the blinking land differently than they would from an animal that's been watching you all day. They land as an event. A small one. Half a second, maybe. But an event.

Scarcity, it turns out, shapes what attention feels like before it shapes markets.

Does Anything Love Anything

There's a question underneath all of this that I've been circling without quite saying, and I think the piece owes it to you to say it, even though I don't have an answer and even though saying it requires risking the kind of earnestness that makes both of us (I'm guessing) slightly uncomfortable.

The question is: does anything really love anything?

If you define love as a subjective experience, an inner feeling of warmth and connection and attachment, then you have a problem that extends well beyond cats. You can't access anyone else's subjective experience. Cats are not unusual in this respect; they're just unusually obvious about it. You infer love from behavior and shared biology. Your partner says "I love you" and you believe them not because you can feel what they feel but because they have similar neural hardware and a shared language in which to report on it. Your cat can't report. But the hardware, the limbic system, the bonding hormones, the attachment circuitry, is, in its essentials, the same.

In 2012, a group of neuroscientists gathered at Cambridge University and signed what they called the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, formally stating that non-human animals, including all mammals and birds and many other creatures including octopuses, possess the neurological substrates for conscious experience. Stephen Hawking was in the room. In 2024, the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, signed by over 500 scientists, went further, extending the realistic possibility of consciousness to all vertebrates and many invertebrates. A 2024 survey of 100 professional animal behavior researchers, led by researchers at Cornell, found that 89% of them thought the bigger risk in their field was anthropodenial, refusing to acknowledge animal emotions, rather than anthropomorphism, projecting human emotions onto animals.

The scientific consensus, in other words, has shifted. The question is no longer whether animals feel. The question is what they feel, and how it compares to what we feel, and whether the comparison even makes sense given that we're talking about nervous systems separated by tens of millions of years of divergent evolution.

Thomas Nagel wrote the definitive paper on this problem in 1974. It's called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" and its central argument is that even if you knew everything about a bat's neurology, you could never know the subjective experience of echolocation, because experience is irreducibly first-person.¹² The same applies to your cat. You can measure its bonding hormones. You can classify its attachment style. You can observe its slow blinks and its kneading and its head-butts. But you cannot know what any of that feels like from the inside. The gap between your consciousness and the cat's is permanent and unbridgeable and no amount of data will close it.

And here's where I want to say something that I think is true and that I also think is the emotional core of why you're still reading this:

That gap exists in every relationship you have.

You have never known what it's like to be inside another person's experience of loving you. Not your partner. Not your parents. Not your closest friend. You infer. You interpret. You look for signs. You trust. The cat just makes the gap visible because the cat can't say "yes, I love you too" and make you stop asking.

Maybe the asking is the thing. Maybe love, at the operational level, is not a state that you verify but a decision that you keep making: the decision to attend to another being, to interpret generously, to show up with food and the attention and the slow blink, again, tomorrow, without proof that it's received in the way you intend. Maybe "choosing to interpret the head-butt as affection" is not a failure of epistemology but a description of what love actually looks like in practice, for anyone, with anything.

The Cat Is Still Here

It's midnight now. The cat has migrated from the far end of the couch to approximately one cushion away, which in feline spatial grammar could mean anything from "I have chosen you" to "this cushion is three degrees warmer." I have been writing about whether it loves me for the better part of three hours, and it has been asleep for the better part of two, and if there's a metaphor in that I'd prefer not to examine it.

Here's the thing, though. I had an answer at the end of the first paragraph. Before the studies, before the evolutionary history, before the slow-blink research and the Neolithic graves and the $47,000. I knew what I believed when I sat down. You knew what you believed when you clicked. We came here to feel a certain way and to have the feeling sanctioned by evidence, and the evidence cooperated (65% secure attachment! bonding hormones! they choose us over food!), and the feeling is sanctioned, and I could stop here and we'd both leave satisfied.

But that would be dishonest about what actually happened over the course of writing this, which is that I became less interested in the answer and more interested in the question. Because the answer, whether I can prove it or not, was never really in doubt. Of course the cat loves me. Or something. In its way. With whatever apparatus it has. The studies confirm what every person who has ever been slow-blinked at already knew.

What the studies can't do, what nothing can do, is show you what that love feels like from the other side. The insufficiency isn't in the research. The insufficiency is in being a separate consciousness, which is permanent. I am asking a first-person question and receiving third-person answers, and no accumulation of third-person answers will convert into whether your animal loves you. And that's as true of your partner and your parents and your closest friend as it is of your cat. Your cat just isn't equipped to tell you in words. And you, for that matter, aren't equipped to tell it in purrs.

Sixty million years of divergent evolution. That's the distance between your brain and the one sitting a cushion away from you. You share more recent ancestry with a capybara. What you have in common with this animal, when you subtract the mammalian basics, is a couch, and a shared preference for sitting down.

And the cat is still here 10,000 years later. On your couch. Now on your lap. Looking at you with an expression you can't read. Blinking, slowly, in a gesture that either means "I trust you with my life" or "I am sleepy" or both at once, and you will never, ever know for sure, and you will show up tomorrow, and fill the bowl, and sit down, and look across the room, and blink back. Choosing to attend to each other, briefly, across an evolutionary gap neither of you can close, and then doing it again the next day, and the next.

I think that might be all that love has ever been.

I want to flag, right at the outset, that I'm writing a blog post about whether cats love their owners, and you're reading it, and we both know the emotional function of this transaction. We are, in a sense, collaborating on a feeling. I will try to honor that collaboration by being as honest as possible about when I'm doing it, which (I recognize) is itself a move in the collaboration. There is no clean way out of this. Let's proceed. ↩
The breakdown, if you're curious, is roughly what you'd expect and also not. Dogs account for about 60% of total spending, because dog owners are, per capita, significantly more committed to the bit: $1,248 per year on average, versus$ 836 for cat owners, a gap that makes intuitive sense when you consider that dogs require grooming ( $99/year versus$ 18 for cats, who groom themselves, thank you), training, boarding, and the periodic replacement of whatever they've eaten that wasn't food. Cat spending, meanwhile, has its own quiet escalation paths, most of them medical. Feline Idiopathic Cystitis (FIC), for instance, is a stress-related bladder condition that is both common and, per the "idiopathic" in the name, not fully understood, and which converts your cat from an animal that eats kibble into an animal that requires prescription wet food, multiple water fountains, environmental enrichment protocols, and periodic veterinary visits at which the vet will tell you, sympathetically, that the primary treatment is "reducing stress." But here's the thing. Over a full lifetime, the numbers converge. Rover's 2025 data puts the lifetime cost of a dog at around $34,550 over 10 years; a cat costs$ 32,170 over 16. The cat achieves near-parity not by costing more per year but by simply continuing to exist, quietly, for a very long time, generating a cumulative expense that sneaks up on you the way the cat itself sneaks up on you, which is to say: slowly, silently, and without your explicit consent. Meanwhile, cat ownership is accelerating. APPA data shows cat-owning households jumped from 40 million in 2023 to 49 million in 2025, a growth rate that looks less like a trend and more like something broke. Gen Z is driving most of it. Whether this reflects a generational preference for independence and low-maintenance companionship, or the fact that most Gen Z apartments are too small for a golden retriever, or some combination of the two that nobody wants to examine too closely, is left as an exercise for the reader. ↩
The cat toy thing deserves its own aside. You are participating in a $3.3 billion global market built on the premise that your cat requires purchased entertainment. Your cat, who is a descendant of a solitary desert predator capable of surviving on lizards and rainwater. Your cat, who has ignored every motorized, feathered, laser-equipped device you've brought home and instead spent forty minutes batting a hair elastic across the kitchen floor. The hair elastic cost zero dollars. The motorized fish cost$ 24.99 and is currently under the couch, accumulating dust, serving as a monument to the gap between what the market tells you your cat needs and what your cat actually wants, which is, as far as you can tell, a hair elastic and the ability to sit in the exact center of whatever surface you're trying to use. ↩
Except that somebody did. In 2004, Jean-Denis Vigne published a finding in Science from Shillourokambos, a Neolithic village on Cyprus: a 9,500-year-old grave containing a human, about 30 years old, buried in a semi-sitting position with arms crossed against the chest, surrounded by ten ceremonial offerings (a marine shell, a stone pendant, two small polished axes, a pumice stone, a fragment of ochre, a rare discoid flint scraper, a large flint piercing tool, and several flint blades). Forty centimeters away, in its own small grave, facing the same direction: an eight-month-old cat. No butchering marks. Cats are not native to Cyprus. Someone brought that cat across open water from the Levantine coast, and when the human died, someone buried them together. This predates Egyptian cat worship by roughly 4,000 years. It is the oldest known evidence of a deliberate, individual bond between a human and a cat. Somebody didn't just tolerate a cat. Somebody loved one enough to put it on a boat and, later, in the ground beside them. ↩
In 1963, a California breeder named Ann Baker did exactly this, selecting kittens for docility and producing the Ragdoll, a cat that goes limp when you pick it up, follows you from room to room, and is frequently described as "dog-like," which, if you've been paying attention to the argument of this essay, you'll recognize as the most devastating insult you can level at a cat. ↩
There is a corollary here worth noting. The roughly 40 to 73 recognized cat breeds (depending on which registry you ask) were almost all developed in the last 150 years, and they were selected for appearance, not behavior. Nobody bred a cat to herd sheep. Nobody bred a cat to assist the visually impaired. When humans finally got around to engineering cats, the engineering was entirely aesthetic, which tells you something about what we actually want from cats, which is apparently: the same cat, but fluffier, or with shorter legs, or with no hair at all. The personality came pre-installed. We just kept changing the case. ↩
There's a psychoanalytic framework for what's happening here, and I debated whether mentioning it, and I concluded that the answer is "yes." But: Jacques Lacan argued that human desire is fundamentally organized around the desire of the Other, meaning we don't just want things; we want to be wanted, and specifically wanted by someone whose wanting is not guaranteed. The cat is, whether it knows it or not, a near-perfect Lacanian object. It withholds. It is opaque. Its desire (if it has desire in any sense we'd recognize) is permanently unclear. And that opacity is what produces the particular quality of longing that cat owners, if they're honest, will recognize as the engine of the whole relationship. The dog says "I love you" in a language you can't misunderstand. The cat says nothing, and you spend ten years leaning in, trying to hear it. ↩
The exclusively indoor cat became possible on a specific date: January 1947, when a 27-year-old Michigan veteran named Edward Lowe gave his neighbor a bag of absorbent clay instead of sand for her cat's box. He started selling it as "Kitty Litter." The product created a $4 billion industry and made it hygienic, for the first time in history, to keep a cat permanently indoors. Which means the entire premise of the question "is my indoor cat's love real or just a captive response" rests on a product innovation younger than the microwave oven. ↩
Okay, a brief taxonomy, because some of it is too good to skip. Head bunting: the cat is depositing pheromones from glands in its cheeks onto you, chemically incorporating you into its social colony. You are being claimed. Kneading: a persistence of the nursing reflex from kittenhood; the cat is re-experiencing, on your lap, the neurochemical comfort of its mother. Belly exposure: a trust display, NOT an invitation to touch the belly; the cat is showing you its most vulnerable anatomy while keeping all four sets of claws ready, which is, if you think about it, a fairly sophisticated simultaneous expression of trust and self-preservation. And then there's meowing, which deserves its own footnote, because adult cats almost never meow at each other. Meowing is a language cats developed specifically for humans, because we can't read scent marks or ear positions or the seventeen different things a tail can mean. Your cat invented a way to talk to you because you were bad at its actual language. Whether this is flattering (it cared enough to meet you where you are) or damning (it learned which noise makes the food come) depends on how generous you're feeling, and possibly on what time of morning the meowing starts. ↩
Watch your cat's ears sometime. Each one has 32 muscles (you have six, most of which you can't consciously control; this is why you can't do the thing where you wiggle your ears and some people can, except they're only wiggling both at once, which, to a cat, would be like bragging about being able to blink both eyes simultaneously). Those 32 muscles allow each ear to rotate independently, up to 180 degrees, tracking separate sound sources at the same time, with a reflexive snap-to-source latency of about 25 milliseconds, which is faster than conscious thought. Your cat's ears are, at any given moment, conducting two parallel surveillance operations across a hearing range that extends to 64 kHz (yours tops out around 20 kHz, and that number is being generous to you). The cat can hear its owner opening a bag of treats three rooms away. It can hear a mouse heartbeat under six inches of snow. It can probably hear you breathing right now, and it has been tracking the rhythm of your breath for the last ten minutes, and it has not found this information interesting enough to look up from the spot on the wall it's been staring at. ↩
I'm putting the chemistry here rather than in the main text because I find it distracting up there, but: researchers have measured the same bonding hormones in cats during owner interaction that appear in human mothers holding their infants. A 2025 study out of South China Agricultural University found that securely attached cats showed significant hormonal surges during voluntary contact with their owners (key word: voluntary; forced interaction produced nothing, and in anxious cats it actually made things worse). The molecules are real. I just think naming them gives a false sense of explanation, as if identifying the mechanism tells you what the experience is like, which it doesn't, any more than knowing that visible light is electromagnetic radiation between 380 and 700 nanometers tells you what it's like to see the color blue. ↩
Nagel used a bat rather than a cat, which I maintain was a missed opportunity for making philosophy accessible to a general audience. "What Is It Like to Be a Cat?" would have been the most-read paper in the history of The Philosophical Review. ↩