In a new series, expert behaviourist Peter Neville shares vital learnings from our feline companions.
Russell Jones.
Dogs have been deliberately bred over centuries to perform jobs for us and so there are many behavioural types and enormous variations in temperament, character, and personality (as well as size, shape, colour, and hair type) within modern breeds and in the millions of crossbreeds and mongrels as a result. Cats, however, have not been deliberately selected for any particular behavioural traits and so their enormous individual variation in personality arises from other influences.
They originally evolved as solitary hunters and were therefore designed to be antisocial because all other cats that enter a territory are potential competitors, except for very brief encounters at mating time and when mothers raise kittens.
In order to gather successfully around man’s villages and settlements, and exploit the increased availability of their natural rodent prey, cats had to become far more socially tolerant of each other. Only then can groups or colonies form, usually initially of related breeding females with their meeker non-breeding sons staying with them into adulthood. The more competitive tough guy toms emigrate as they approach maturity and then live mainly solitary lives, approaching groups of females only briefly during the breeding season. All cats, however, remain individual hunters and never gather into a herd or pack which might otherwise enable them to attempt to take down and share much larger prey.
Adaptation
As a legacy of the adaptation to share space, some pet cats are now highly sociable and can live with and enjoy the company of many other even unrelated cats. Others, however, remain ‘true to design’ and are highly territorial, aggressively chasing all other cats out of their home range. They never form social bonds with other cats and so the prospect of them living with others is impossible, even though they are usually very sociable with their humans and their friends.
The search for food (and ultimately the chance to reproduce) exposes all wild cats to the risk of injury or death resulting from environmental challenges, predators, and other cats. So, they all must learn how to face challenges when trying to survive and compete, and to endure the anxiety and frustration invoked in just trying to stay alive and seek out the things they need and like. Some are born warriors and some are worriers and reactive ‘scaredy cats.’
It’s all on a scale of inherent (heritable) confidence or boldness, subsequently
