Wild (and Sometimes Crazy) Wednesday – Is Your Cat Mentally Ill?

It has been said before that cats are little psychopaths. This theory is bantered around for a couple of reasons—because of the house cat’s seeming lack of compassion when she performs a sneak attack on one of the other family pets (or you), but also because believers claim cats have no facial expression. Say what? Yes! They say a cat can’t smile like a dog. Do you know how ridiculous a cat would look with her mouth wide open and her tongue hanging out panting breathlessly? “They” claim that a cat doesn’t show emotion in their little whiskered face—they don’t have the muscles needed to frown, scowl, grin, etc.

Haven’t “they” ever looked into a cat’s eyes, watched her ears, whiskers, tail, body movement. Those of us who know cats can attest to the fact that a cat can be quite expressive. But the articles trying to label cats as psychopaths keep coming. Here’s a recent one from The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/02/cat-psychopaths/583192

If you find this hard to believe, check out this writer’s research results and opinions on the subject. She actually entertains the question as to whether your cat wants to kill you, would kill you and, if he kills you, would he eat you. Lovely. https://www.cuteness.com/13713181/is-my-cat-a-psychopath

As a bonus entertainment piece today, scroll down at this link and read the article featuring the animal stars that helped you make it through some of the scariest movies. See if you remember some of them, like Barney in “Gremlins,” Muffin in “Friday the 13th,” Harry in “Amityville Horror,” Jonesy (the cat) in “Aliens.” I’m pretty sure that most of my readers did not see the cats that hung out in “Hellboy.” (I sure didn’t.)

Out of curiosity, do you sometimes view your cat as a psychopath or a sociopath?

This entry was posted in About Cats. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *