IS MY CAT CRAZY?

By: Lore I. Haug, DVM, MS, Diplomate American College of Veterinary Behaviorists, Texas Veterinary Behavior Services, TexasVetBehavior.com

If you have owned a cat, you know their special and unique qualities and characteristics. For those unlucky individuals that have not lived with, or had a friendship with, a cat, cats may seem mysterious, majestic, frightening, or repulsive.

As a veterinary behaviorist, our clinic routinely treats cats that have objectionable and/ or pathologic behavior. The primary complaint to most behaviorists today is aggression, directed either toward other cats in the home or to humans – often the cat’s own human family. Why would our sweet love bugs engage in such behavior? There are a variety of factors that impact this, including their health, options for exercise and enrichment (e.g. hunting and exploration), personality and temperament. Additionally, cats of different breeds have different motivations or needs for exercise and stimulation. There also is a genetic influence in cats on friendliness to humans.

So why are we seeing so many cat homes where cats are fighting, attacking humans, and/ or urinating or defecating outside the litterbox? Well, in short, it's partly because we are driving our cats crazy. Sometimes our love for our cats and our desire to have them fit a role we have consciously or subconsciously defined for them makes it easy to forget that they are cats and they have their own wants, needs and desires that do not always match ours. When we take cats under our care and into our homes, it becomes our responsibility to provide them with what they need to be healthy and happy –even when it is inconvenient for us.

Cats became part of human society as long as 12,000 years ago based on archeological evidence found on the island of Cyprus. Our relationship with cats began mostly based on their utility for reducing rodent populations in communities, ships, and farms. As with our other domesticated companion species, the cat’s role in our lives is changing. Just a mere 20 years ago, cats were primarily indoor/ outdoor or outdoor animals. Most pet owners had one or two cats. Their role as actual companions was marginal to their predatory function and a person’s desire or need for a seemingly low maintenance pet. Today many cats live strictly indoors (they live longer) and their primary role is companionship. We treat them as true members of our human families. We also have a lot more cats. Our current cat clients house an average of 3-4 cats, some homes up to 15!

But what does this mean for our cats? Although we treat them differently now, cats are still cats. Cats are perfect little killing machines. Everything about their form and physiology makes them penultimate hunters. They are lithe, powerful, and athletic. Their sight and hearing evolved to make it easy for them to identify rodent sounds and movement. Their retractable claws allow for speed during chase, yet efficient capture of swift prey. Cats have well developed sensory receptors along the base of their canine teeth and their whiskers to allow for efficient killing bites to prey animals.

Thus, despite turning them into our little fur-babies, cats are still predatory machines. Cats spend a LOT of time hunting in the wild. The average cat requires approximately 300 kcalories per day just to survive. The average mouse is about 30 calories. This translates into 10 mice per day and explains why, given the choice, cats prefer to eat 11-16 times per day. Each successful hunting foray takes a cat an average of 2.5 pounces and 40 minutes to obtain the prey. Multiply this by at least 10 times a day and you can see that cats are biologically wired to hunt a large portion of their waking time. While hunting behavior is influenced by hunger, it also occurs independent of hunger. So even well-fed cats will have a natural drive to hunt. This is one reason your chubby house pet still may deposit lizard presents on your doorstep or kitchen floor if given the opportunity.

During the course of their day exploring and hunting, cats will also range over large areas. Feral female cats cover an average of about 50 acres. Male cats have home ranges about three times this size. One male cat was documented to have a home range of over 1000 acres. That’s a lot of Fitbit steps! Neutered housepets allowed outdoors have smaller areas but they still routinely traverse areas much larger than the average home square footage.

As with their wild cat ancestor, cats also evolved to live and hunt primarily solitary from other cats. The cat’s social behavior is adapt- able enough to allow them to live in colonies, but this only occurs when there are artificial food sources (e.g. humans feeding them). These colonies are also matrilineal kin related. Cats are generally not accepting of unfamiliar cats. Introducing new cats to a home overall is more difficult and time consuming than introducing a new dog to an existing group of dogs because dogs evolved to live in groups, but cats did not. Nowadays, responsible cat owners tend to keep their cats indoors and they have a lot more cats than was the norm 20 years ago. Today’s cat does not get the choice regarding who they get to live with. This makes many cat homes like watching the reality show Big Brother. The entertainment there is the conflict not the potential to watch the house guests sit around and sing Kumbaya together. We see many fighting cat cases because of this forced cohabitation. Even if the cats are not overtly attacking each other, there is often low-level conflict, bullying and urine marking due to the social strife in the home. This poses a serious welfare situation for the cats as they do not have the choice to escape the situation.

Indoor cats do suffer more behavior problems than those allowed outside. Indoor cats lack choice regarding what they eat, some- times when they eat, where they go, and who comes and goes in the house (both humans and other animals). They are sorely restricted in space to explore, and many cats have almost no hunting opportunities (e.g. even active play with owners). Indoor cats essentially are living on Covid lock down their entire lives. Many cats lay around the house and sleep all day. Owners may think this indicates the cat is content, but it is actually a sign of poor welfare. If one of your friends lay around and slept all day, got up to eat, and then just went back to bed and did this day after day, you would acknowledge there is a serious concern regarding their psychological health. Healthy and happy cats do rest a lot, but they also explore, play or try to hunt, move from place to place in the house, and groom regularly and appropriately.

Just as with humans, chronic stress in cats can lead to irritability and “depression”. Chronic stress and a feeling of lack of control over your environment actually changes the neuronal pathways in the brain related to the stress response system and makes the brain and body more sensitive to additional stressors – it makes the cat less and less able to handle even small or benign changes or challenges in the environment. So this is the point where the owner sneezes and the cat runs across the room and attacks the person. The cat is on edge all the time and “overreacts” to behaviors in other cats or humans in the household.

Medical conditions are commonly a factor in cat behavior problems as well. Cats in pain are more asocial, fearful, irritable or aggressive. As both a predatory and prey species, cats are masters at hiding illness and pain. Middle aged to senior cats often have arthritis or dental pain. Cats under chronic stress are also at risk for Feline Interstitial Cystitis (FIC) which is a highly painful condition of the bladder that can sometimes even trigger self-induced injury or the cat may bite or scratch people that attempt to pet it or pick it up.

While there are cats that are inherently anxious or fearful, many cat behavior problems are related to health issues or misunderstanding what cats actually need to be fit and happy. Remember that they are not toys or house decorations but complex individuals that rely on us to do our part in making the cat-human relationship bidirectional rather than unidirectional.