Cat lovers stroke the wrong way, according to ethologist Frans van der Helm in Tuesday NRC. Of course I immediately felt addressed, “because the cat people experienced in their own eyes turn out to be the worst when dealing with the cat itself.”
Embarrassed, I wondered what all I’d been doing wrong as a cat lover all my life. Had I more or less mistreated all my cats by petting them in a barbaric way? Was there perhaps even retroactively extremely transgressive behavior with traumatic consequences for the victims? I had never noticed anything, or was it because the victims did not dare to complain because of the unequal balance of power with the owner?
Trembling, I looked up some more data from the research of the University of Nottingham on which Van der Helm relied. I was immediately struck by the curious design of this research. No fewer than 120 experienced cat owners were given five minutes (per cat) to deal with three cats they did not know in a studio. So five minutes in artificial conditions with a cat that was not used to those people. Was it strange that just about everything that could go wrong went wrong?
“They were too pushy,” writes Van der Helm, “walking after cat or tomcat, touching places that the cat feels uncomfortable with – and even the really taboo areas, such as the vulnerable belly.”
That was to be expected, I think. The owners applied to the test cats the routines they had developed with their own cats. Van der Helm does not mention that the owners were even explicitly asked to treat the test cats as they would treat their own cats at home. Damn you creeps, those three cats must have rightly thought, keep your paws off me.
Because the cat owners treated the three test cats incorrectly, they apparently also treat their own cat incorrectly, according to the researchers. That’s what I call an absurd accusation. The owners did what the researchers asked them to do, but those researchers overlooked the fact that a much more intimate relationship is built with the domestic cat than with a test cat in five minutes.
What came out of that research was not so much nonsense as knowledge that every cat lover already has, for example that cats like to be petted around the face and jaws, under the ears and under the chin (I would still like to get the throat to add). Van der Helm calls the “vulnerable belly” one of “the real taboo areas” of a cat, but the cat lover’s experience is that they are happy to let you there once you have won their trust. In that respect, cats are very similar to humans: without pleasure life would become very dull, unlivable perhaps.
The same applies to other so-called taboo areas, such as the tail and back of the cat. The taboo is for the stranger, not for the friend.
The wisest sentence from the British research report, in my view, is this: “This study has several limitations that could hinder the broader generalization of its results.”
They could also have stated in simpler language: “You must not believe everything that is written here.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of November 2, 2022