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Before I get into today’s topic, I want to share a bit of information for those living in and around the Los Angeles area. A friend of mine became inundated with feral cats and decided she needed to do something to stop the influx of new kitty families. She contacted FixNation at http://fixnation.org and they loaned her the traps and arranged for the spay/neuter surgeries of eleven feral cats for free. I imagine they would accept donations.
Today, I want to touch on the emotions of a cat and our devotion or lack of for cats. There are cat people and those who can’t stand the beasts. There are animal people who can relate to cats, dogs, lions, horses at a level that can’t easily be explained. And there are others who don’t give animals a second thought except to avoid them or perhaps use them or even abuse them.
Today’s question is, do cats (and other animals) have feelings? According to Rene 
Descartes (17th-century French philosopher), “Animals eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it, they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.” Now he doesn’t sound like someone who ever spent a second in the company of any sort of animal. Is observations are certainly of animals at a distance. He probably never had a cat curl up in his lap or look into his eyes or a dog express excitement at his presence.
In the next century, Voltaire wrote “You discover in an animal all the same organs and feelings as in yourself.” And by 1859, Charles Darwin had advanced this concept, but still many believed and still believe the animal is inferior because they do not have a voice.
Virginia Morell is a science writer and the author of Animal Wise: How We Know Animals Think and Feel. She says “Our language skill is supposedly exceptional. But is it? Or is it just that because we do it so well, we overlook or miss altogether the language-like skills of other creatures?”
Something to think about isn’t it? I remember my children, when they were small, would marvel at how they perceived my understanding of our cat’s chatter. Because I seemed to know when the cat wanted in or out, when she wanted to eat, when she wanted me to dig a ball out from under the couch for her, the girls believed I had some amazing ability to understand the cat’s particular meow—as if it were a language.
The girls know now that, indeed, I was tapping into the cat’s language—her body language. Don’t you do that with your cat? Can’t you tell when she wants to be petted, would rather be left alone, is ill, frightened, hungry, ready to play, ready to cuddle, and so forth? And I notice that each cat develops her own body language or way of communicating her needs or desires. Do our cats learn this from us or do they come to us with their language in place and teach us to understand them?
Do cats have feelings? How can anyone look into the eyes of a cat and deny that they do?
