Douchey Cats

I hate cats.

Well, that’s not fair. I love wild cats like tigers and lions and pumas and even bobcats.

It’s the common house cat that I hate. And I have good reason.

When I was a child, Father Dearest, in his never-ending quest to bring delight to his Crazy-Ass Wife, brought home a big furball and gifted it to Mother Dearest and Sister Dearest, both of whom had, I gather, been pining for a feline to add to our one-dog, many-fish pet lineup. They named her Princess, and she fit very well into the female lineage of my family, by which I mean that she was prissy and obnoxious.

I hated that cat. I never wanted that cat. I never wanted any cat. My dog was my bud, and he let me use his sleeping form as a hill on which I could place my toy soldiers for amazing imaginary battles. Never give up the high ground, yo.

Princess, on the other hand, did two things, per my observations.

Shed
Shit

And for some reason, I was put in charge of dealing with the No. 2.

There are many beautiful and wonderful things about dogs. One of them is that they go outside to do their business. I gather some cats do too. Not Princess. She was an inside cat, too fragile and snobby for the wild environs of suburban New York. So it was my job to scoop her feces from the litterbox where she deposited them into plastic bags and take them to the outside garbage can. It was also my job to give the litterbox a weekly litter change so it was fresh and inviting for the stupid cat.

I hated both jobs.

My reasoning was clear: This wasn’t my cat. I never wanted any cat. And I certainly wouldn’t have chosen this cat.

Logic rarely went far in my birth family. I was told that because I was part of the family, I had to do things for the family that didn’t involve things that were mine. I struggled to find another example in our family life in which that was true. Self-interest was pretty much the governing force in my birth family. Again, the role of logic was not appreciated.

Of course, I found ways to shirk this doody, err, duty. The litterbox was in the study. There were ways to get anywhere I wanted to go in the house while avoiding the study. In taking those routes, I could claim ignorance of fecal developments. So I never went into the study.

This worked until my family bought a computer and put it in the study. If I wanted to play Buck Rogers, Microleague Baseball, or All-Star Football, I not only had to go into the study, but if I didn’t clean the litterbox, my gaming was marred by shitstank.

I say all that to say this: Cats suck. And science agrees.

Our culture holds that if you should ever find yourself trapped at the bottom of a well, it is much better to have a dog stumble upon your predicament than a cat. Lassie will go find Timmy, and Timmy will call the authorities to Baby-Jessica you out of the well. If Garfield shows up instead of Lassie, well, you’re fucked.

Some Science Hippies decided to see if this belief held true. So they compared 19 children between the ages of 16 and 24 months with 38 untrained pet dogs and 22 cats, asking a simple question: Who will spontaneously respond when a human appears to need help?

Their experiment used a familiar caregiver — either the child’s parent or the pet’s owner. That caregiver interacted with a sponge (Why a sponge? Don’t ask me. I’m not a Science Hippy) before turning away. At that point, a researcher hid the sponge in full view of the study subject. Which, of course, makes the researcher pretty shitty at hide-and-seek and raises the question of if Science Hippies know the definition of the word “hide.”

But I digress.

Across three trials of decreasing difficulty, the caregiver searched for the beloved sponge, repeating the phrase, “I can’t find it. What should I do?” while never directly addressing the study subject (the child, dog, or cat).

Now, Science Hippies often do Science Hippy things for decidedly stupid reasons — or no reason at all, justified by the bold declaration of “Science!” But these Science Hippies said the study grew out of a broader social question of why some species help others and some don’t. That seems like it could be a good thing to know, I guess.

Not surprisingly (to me, anyway), cats were the biggest douchebags in this study.

All three groups paid similar levels of attention as the experiment went down. But children and dogs were more likely to show helping-related behaviors such as approaching, indicating, or retrieving the object for the caregiver. By the final trial, more than half the dogs and nearly all the toddlers pointed out the sponge’s locations, and some also brought it directly to them.

Not the cats.

The cats never approached the sponge and rarely indicated its locations.

This is enough for me to advocate for the elimination of cats as pets (and crazy catladies, while we’re at it). But the Science Hippies didn’t stop with their initial findings. They asked a further question: Were the cats failing to help because they didn’t understand the situation or because they were, in fact, douchebags.

OK fine. They didn’t say “or because they were douchebags.” They said “or because they lacked motivation.” But we all know what they really meant, right?

So they came up with a new test. Instead of a sponge — again, why they started with a sponge is beyond me — they used food or a favorite toy.

Again unsurprisingly, the douchebag cats then approached and indicated the object as often as the dogs and children did.

Of course, the cat-loving sect of the Science Hippy kingdom tried to spin this favorably for the felines. This study, they said, shows that dogs and children are evolutionarily hardwired to treat another’s problems as their own. Cats, these Science Hippies said, “aren’t mean but operate on a different evolutionary system.”

Yeah, whatever. It means they operate on the douchebag evolutionary system, and they are, in fact, mean.

Bottom line: A cat ain’t gonna help you in any way, shape, or form unless there is something in it for them. That makes house cats the narcissists of the animal kingdom.

And that, my friends, explains why Princess was so beloved by my birth family.

Douchey Cats

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