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I think people often underestimate the animal mind
It's not like they have discrete thoughts in words, but animals form friendships even across species in the wild. It's not abnormal for one animal to partner up with another - with an imbalance in size/strength the smaller one often will scout out prey and the larger one will give them scraps. Sometimes equals will share territory and even raise kittens/cubs together, taking turns babysitting.
With less abundant food, that's certainly got to be more rare now, but we've seen it happen, even captured it at length on video
Cats are going to have all sorts of ideas about our relationship, from a parent to a big predator friend to a giant clueless kitten. Or, maybe just another predator sharing space, or sometimes they totally discard their instincts and live by human rules
It's not so dissimilar from what we'd think if an alien took us as a pet and we didn't try to put a label on it - every relationship is unique
And like with dogs different breeds often have particular behavior. For example the Norwegian Forrest Cat tends to bond with one particular human.
In addition, unlike dogs, cats have not evolved their body language to be easily understandable by humans, so we have problems interpreting them. Does my cat turn her back to me because she doesn't care or because she trusts me, etc.
Their independence can also be off-putting to some humans, but like with humans independence doesn't have to mean they're don't care about us. And then there's the lessons in consent they try to teach us, which some of us don't want to understand.
It's actually kind of interesting - cats have culture. I'm sure there's a generic competent too, but cats apparently get their social skills crammed into them by their mother in a crash course when they're weaning. It's apparently very slow and difficult to change after that period. They've studied certain marker behaviors the way they study how language branch out, and they estimate it takes upwards of a dozen generations for a line of cats to fully adapt to the local "dialect"
It's not just that cats are standoffish and hard to understand, it's that western cats are in particular. In Japan, they're far more "extroverted", they're far more likely to approach humans and perform "cute" behaviors like big kitty eyes and "cute" juvenile sounding meows for attention
It makes you think - up until like the 70s, people would just kill cats for fun, cheap fur, or because they annoyed them. A lot of older people have stories about watching someone drown kittens
English has a ton of words and idioms relating to killing cats in the context of it once being a relatable behavior
In Japan, they have idioms like "[I'm so busy] I'm in no position to turn down a cats help". Eastern cultures also generally see their presence as lucky, say they can see and protect against spirits, and Japan has a spirit called a bakeneko which is a two tailed cat who has lived 100 years, and is now a powerful trickster that sometimes will curse someone with fatal levels of bad luck.
It kind of makes sense - they were largely seafaring and have all sorts of annoying critters around, whereas in Europe and America they were brought on the ships to defend the food, but once they got there they became an invasive species inland, where they're far less valued
It makes sense they'd be more standoffish - they want to be around because they're adapted human settlements. They're definitely social animals, but maybe their fickleness is a way to remind people that they can do some damage if their cornered
Anyways, I saw a documentary about the trainability of cats and thought it was interesting... I'm definitely more of a dog person, but it made me think - out of about a dozen cats I've spent a significant time around, 4 were assholes and 2 I formed a deep bond with.
It made me want to add a couple cats to the dog and local wildlife I'd adopt if I ever manage to afford a place in the boonies