this is cute but there's a lot of anthropomorphizing going on in the above captions- cats are extremely smart social little guys, they know when their owner doesn't want them to do a thing, but this is a learned behavior, not an intuition the cat has about the reasons why their humans do not want them to do the thing. they don't have a concept of any action being "wrong."
when a cat chews on a plant out of curiosity, or pushes something off a desk out of boredom, they discover that this behavior gets them attention. the cat will then purposefully repeat this behavior whenever it wants attention from their owner and isn't getting it via less aggressive methods. this is very smart already!
these cats are also not lying, nor trying to pass off their actions as something else. deception requires a level of cognitive skill that cats, simply, have no reason to bother with.
what is most likely happening when it seems like the cat is trying to pass the behavior as something else is that, having gathered the attention they wanted or having been caught doing something that they know their human dislikes (which they have learned via previous negative attention or scolding, which has more to do with tone of voice than the cat having an understanding of their behavior as something they "shouldn't" do - proven by the fact that cats will continue to hop on the counter or chew on plants when there's no human around to discourage the behavior) they now find themselves in a physical position that they no longer want to go through with executing (no longer chewing on or pawing at something) and default to the muscle memory of grooming their paw (that was in the air already), yawning (have you ever opened your mouth really wide and yawned accidentally?), or rubbing their cheeks on an object, which is a much gentler attention-requesting behavior. the book decoding your cat by the american college of veterinary behaviorists describes this as similar to a human anxiously playing with their hair.
i love animals, i read a lot about animal cognition, i think every single thing that is alive has a level of sentience and feeling and i am aware that zoology is rife with claims of anthropomorphism used to justify human exceptionalism. but claims that cats have an understanding of deception leads to assumptions that cats are willfully disobedient, which leads to their mistreatment by humans who are attributing far more ill will to their pets than they are capable of.
tangentwithtanner
2087
jacobvanloon
baratheonpilled
theartofmadeline
stormborns
