Healthy boundaries lessons to learn from cats

Healthy boundaries lessons to learn from cats

The world today is built to blur important lines – be it the one between work and leisure, noise and information, or society and private life. In such a world, cats offer a model of healthy boundaries for everyone to emulate.

Not only are cats “sensitive”, they’re also “communicative individuals” who respond to their human companions’ affectionate overtures. Sure, it might not be the bowl-you-over kind of love that dogs display, but in the restrained language of cats, even an upright tail or twitching ear speaks volumes when read correctly. Proof of this comes from a recent study by researchers at Paris Nanterre University, who published their findings in the journal Animal Cognition. They found that when cats hear a sentence spoken in the same tone by their human companion and by a stranger, they respond to the former while completely ignoring the latter. The conclusion: Cats do form bonds of affection with specific humans and don’t just use them, as anti-feline propaganda would have it, for food and shelter.

Cats have long suffered under the Garfield stereotype, perceived as self-centred creatures, not especially loyal or demonstrative. They don’t come when whistled to or fetch slippers and newspapers, they might hiss and swat even when a loving hand pets them without consent and they will, when overwhelmed by human attention, hide themselves away. But all that this means is that cats have a greater respect for their physical and emotional boundaries than most humans recognise.

If anything, the lesson to draw from the study’s conclusion is that to have a cat’s self-possession and ability to shut out the irrelevant is not such a bad thing. The world today is built to blur important lines — be it the one between work and leisure, noise and information, or society and private life. In such a world, cats offer a model of healthy boundaries for everyone to emulate.