It’s because they are hypersensitive introverts, and humans are mostly social extroverts.
Hypersensitive, introverted humans are often mistaken for antisocial, and as a species, we are myopic and anthropomorphize EVERYTHING.
Semi-social animals are not naturally intuitive to humans.
Dog packs very closely mirror a nuclear human family, made up of a mother and father and their pups, who leave to find their own mates and start their own packs as they mature beyond young adult hood.
Pigeon flocks are like a villiage comprized of one big, extended family, where children mostly stay close and new birds marry in.
Cats don’t work that way. There is no firmly set social structure for more social domestic cats to fall back on. None of the species they are thought to come from are naturally social. They mate, have kittens, and those families disperse to the four winds as soon as the young become self sufficient.
We have selected for higher tolerance to crowding and confinement, but that does not a social structure make.
A group of cats is more like random collage dorm or house mates. Whether or not they get along and how many the group can support long term depends on how well their individual personalities mesh, regardless of blood relation.
Kittens are more out going and have more energy than adult cats, but as they age, being playful and taking the risk of being friendly takes more energy than they have, so they go from being willing to play with every one to prefering the company of favorite familiar entities that have taken the time to learn about that individuals needs and preferences.
Humans, who naturally form close knit pack bonds, are generally out going, and do their very damnedest to form life long bonds of friendship see a cat’s intense curiosity and wary shyness of approach as stalkerish, and its need for quiet solitude when overstimulated (coupled with just *how* fast they become overstimulated) as fickleness, and are completely heartbroken when a friendly, out going kitten grows into a relatively shy, reserved cat.
With no effort to understand, what the average human sees is a sly, untrustwothy animal that is friendly one second, and warninglessly aggressive the next, not because there actually was no warning, but because feline body language is very subtle.
Once again, due to a cat’s sensitivity.
To a cat, humans are VERY loud, over the top dramatic, and socially dense as a fucking brick.
They have to scream EVERYTHING to get across to most of us, and that shit is exhausting.
The fact that they do make that stressful and exhausting effort proves that the ones who like us actually love us VERY much!
Just not in a way that big, loud, oblivious drama queens easily pick up on.
janainaart
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