But people who ask me this are not discussing cat cognitive states, or neurophysiology, or non-human philosophy. What they are really asking is:
Why do cats seem to get in trouble on purpose?
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This question usually comes up in the context of their cat doing something, and the person has tried over and over and over, in many various ways, to make them stop doing that. Only the cat has not stopped doing that. These people want to know why the cat will keep doing that when they know they will get punished, or yelled at, or otherwise reap some unwanted side effect from doing that.
They aren’t thinking about the bad consequences at the time. When a cat is chasing after a bug which has gotten into the house, the bug inevitably goes to a light bulb and circles it. It is not inevitable for the cat to go for the bug through the lampshade; but that is often how it seems.
My cats have learned not to do that because when they are kittens, and not certain what will happen when they stick their heads in the lampshades, I’m right there to tell them this is a Bad Thing. So when the impulse to go after the bug appears, they have a readily available counter-impulse that helps them remember.
But if we think the kitten is cute when they are too small to knock over the lamp, by the time they are big enough to knock over the lamp, it’s not just an impulse; it’s a reflex. They aren’t pausing now.
They don’t understand what we are saying. We think walking in and seeing them playing with our feather portrait of Aunt Helen and yelling and chasing them away should keep them away from that thing. Why doesn’t it?
Well, why should it?
There’s times when they are playing with our feather portrait of Aunt Helen and it’s great! What we might get out of such a strategy is them running away when they hear us coming. But that’s not a very good outcome, either.
They can’t help it. If their litter box isn’t clean or is in a treacherous place, all the yelling in the world can’t over-ride their instincts which tell them, To stay alive, put your byproducts in a new place, or You can’t relax here, someone might get you.
We might have poor communication with our cat, but they shouldn’t be in fear of their life. And their instincts use a fear for their life to motivate them to do what they do. It’s simply no contest.
So what looks like cat defiance or indifference is usually poor training on the part of the human, and puzzlement on the part of the cat. Because when we have both good communication, and a good relationship, the only times our cats do something is when it is on purpose.
There are times when our cats deliberately push the envelope of what is acceptable. We have a foldable bed table for Mr WayofCats when he’s really tired and needs to eat in bed. When placed on a nearby shelf, it’s a tempting lookout point that we’ve taught the cats to stay away from.
But the other night, we had left a pizza box on it when we put it on that shelf; and we came back to find Olwyn sprawled on the box. And what could we do? She doesn’t get on the bed table; and, in fact, she wasn’t on the bed table. She was on the pizza box.
And she knew it.
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Our oldest (and, by far, smartest) cat, Pixie is sometimes a little TOO smart for her own good. When we first rescued her, she tweaked pretty quickly to things that I told her were BAD, and that, when she stopped doing the BAD thing, I would tell her she was GOOD, and pet her.
This led to her catching my attention, and then slowly, and deliberately doing the BAD thing, stopping the second I scolded her, and, even before I had the chance to tell her she was a good girl for stopping, trotting over for pettin’s. We worked that one out by 1) me making sure to give her more attention in the first place, and 2) me not giving her pettin’s for ceasing to do a BAD thing.
The other two I still do the same “sharp tone for bad, and praise for ceasing bad behavior” thing, because they’re just not as manipulative. Pixie, on the other hand, I can ask to stop doing something in a conversational tone, and she’ll respond.
All kittens love to follow their Person around. Baby Kill Kill quickly earned the nickname “Underfootnik” that way. Sometimes I’d be carrying groceries or whatnot, and wouldn’t be able to see her, and step on her. She’d scream. No fun for anyone!
Soon she was making a much smaller scream, even though I didn’t feel me stepping on her, and she didn’t run away. Eventually she was right between my feet while I was looking at her, and she went from purring to the little scream right back to purring. I realized that she wasn’t saying “Hey, you stepped on me!” but “Look out, you’re close enough to me that you could step on me!” She understood cause and effect! Action A can lead to Consequence B!
Byron, on the other paw, took forever to figure out when his actions would lead to negative outcomes. Killsy I could stop from doing something bad simply by saying “Hon-ey” a certain way. The only way one can discipline a cat is verbally, and as for Byron–well, it’s not hard to see how that’d be a problem with a deaf cat. It took him a long time to not do certain bad things. But he did, because he’s deaf, not stupid.
Young DJ is right between the 2 of them. He hears just fine, it’s just that–let’s say that at 2 months, Killsy was being called the Einstein Cat, whereas DJ’s nick has always been Surfer Dude. My observation is that the smarter they are and the better they hear, the better they are at understanding that negative behaviors lead to negative outcomes.
lol, Jen that sounds like mine. I’ll come home tired and mine will want attention and he wants it NOW. If I don’t well let’s just say he’ll walk over to the furtinure and start scratching it while he’s looking at me.
It’s become a game and one that has been hard to break him of
I once had a beloved cat and she was the epitome of deliberate. My son had friends over for a sleepover in the living room. Because of the full house, she was not getting the attention she felt she deserved. All of the boys were in the room but ignoring her as they horsed around. She jumped onto a side table (she had never been on that table before) looked at the vase of fresh flowers, turned her head and looked deliberately (and might I say with a bit of the evil eye), turned back around and took her paw and absolutely wiped that vase and flowers off of the face of the earth! As everything crashed to the floor, one of the boys said “OMG-that was like SO on purpose” and it was and all of us got it.