Guess What? Cats are NOT people!

So I came across this quiz about "reading" cat expressions.  I came to it through an article by a Ph.D. student who created this "quiz" as a study in human/feline relations.  The study showed participants pictures of cat faces, with the body of the cat excluded, and then asked the subject to determine what emotion that cat was displaying.

If you've ever had a cat, you already realize the problem.

Oddly, the article included line drawings of cat emotions showing what cat's "mean" by particular postures:  everything from laying on their backs to arching their backs to purring and rubbing and cowering and flattening their ears.

The way you read a cat's emotions is through their body language.  You may be able to read human emotions by watching their faces, but then again, humans have different faces than cats.

For one thing, humans have eyebrows, and eyelids, and blink frequently.  Don't get in a staring contest with a cat, you'll lose (unless you're like me and let your eyes dry out to a very uncomfortable degree because, well, I just always have).  Don't look for a cat to raise its eyebrows in amazement or disdain or sarcasm.  And don't look for a cat to purse its lips, or smile, or frown, because....cats don't have lips.

Starting to see, yet?

Cats communicate their emotional state through their body, not just through their puss (somebody had to say it!).  They are not humans.  You can "read" the facial expressions of people (and yes, as the original article pointed out, women are generally better at this than men.  My daughter has a positive genius for reading people, and I'm quite sure most of it is reading faces.  If she ever learned to play poker, she'd clean up.).  Cats express themselves with tails and backs and even paws.  In fact, the most unnerving thing about cats to non-cat people is how indifferent cats seem to be, because their expression is in their posture, not in their face.

I have had cats stare me straight in the eyes.  It seemed to me that cat was more "communicative" than a cat who jumped in my lap whenever it was present, purred, and laid down contentedly.  I've had cats who were paradigms of aloofness, but their affection for me was clear nonetheless.  People look at faces.  If cats don't, are they impersonal?  Or just inhuman?

Cats are not people.  Studying them as if they were people says more about the nature of the study than about the results of the study.  Indeed, the results are almost a foregone conclusion:  people who treat cats like people will misunderstand the cats.  On both ends of the test.

That "man with a hammer" problem continues to bedevil us in matters large and small.