Bibliography

Humans construct, configure, and continuously negotiate the meaning of animals around them (Kalof and Montgomery 2011). Perhaps no other animal has attracted as much attention as the domestic cat (Felis catus). Ancient Egyptians worshipped cats (Málek 1997), in Viking society cats were considered exotic and prestigious companions, among other things, (Toplak 2019), they were used to catch vermin and also kept as pets in Anglo-Saxon England (Poole 2015), and seen as valued as pets in the Middle Ages (Walker-Meikle 2012, 2015).

Today, cats feature everywhere from French poetry (Shapiro and Pastuchiv 2015) and world cinema (Miyao 2019) to Japanese cat cafés (Plourde 2014), YouTube cat videos (Shafer 2016), and numerous cat memes (Thibault et al. 2018; Sewell and Keralis 2019). This might be due to their cuteness, enigmatic beauty, and grace, as well as the comic relief they provide. We take part in performative conversations with cats in our every-day lives (Keckler 2014), and an online cat pidgin (lolspeak) has developed to accompany cat-themed memes. These have their own syntax and vocabulary, e.g. If it fits, I sits; I can has cheezburger (Thibault et al. 2018). We change the spelling of words on social media (e.g., purrfect, meowmy) to approximate cat vocalisations and flag our identity as cat lovers. Several cats have gained internet fame, such as Grumpy Cat or Lil Bub. Similarly, past politicians, writers, artists, and designers have openly declared their love for cats, such as Abraham Lincoln, Freddie Mercury, and T.S. Eliot (Willmott 2010).

Many people consider cats to be family members and attribute well developed socio-cognitive skills to them (Pongrácz and Szapu 2018). Human-cat interaction involves slow blinks (Humphrey et al. 2020), manipulative meowing by cats (McComb et al. 2009), and attempts to understand and interpret vocalisations and tail positions by humans (e.g., Brown 2020; Schötz 2020). We are learning more about the interaction of cats with humans (Vitale et al. 2019) and about their social networks, cognition, and behaviour (e.g., Vitale and Udell 2015; Vitale 2022).

In some cases, cats can be a preferable option to having children given the extent that we experience “peternal” feelings towards them (Laurent-Simpson 2017; Owens and Grauerholz 2019; cf. Peterson and Engwall 2019), and they are mourned with the same intensity as other family members (Woolledge 2013). Cat ladies challenge heteronormative family structures by loving cats more than their husbands (McKeithen 2017).

Cats provide us healing not only at home but also in popular but contested cat cafés (Robinson 2019; Plourde 2014) and on university campus as emotional support animals alongside dogs and ponies (Taylor 2016). Cats entertain and distract us, help us to regulate emotions, and procrastinate both online and offline (Myrick 2015).  They have been found to be beneficial for children with autism (Hart et al. 2018). It is not certain whether cats are able to recognise their name from other words (e.g., Saito et al. 2019) but we certainly enjoy choosing names that carry cultural significance (Abel and Kruger 2007; Chen 2017; also, Robbins 2013).

People try to limit free-roaming domestic cat populations to the benefit of wildlife (e.g., Wald and Peterson 2020) while fostering and adopting them (Neumann 2010) and rescuing not only cats but also their larger feline cousins (McCubbin and Van Patter 2020). There is also a darker side to this as people hoard (Johnson 2008), torture and kill (Atwood 2003) cats. Others might fear cats either because of previous injury or because of the evil that they sometimes represent (Milosevic 2015).

References

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