Talking about emotions may seem frivolous and imprecise, especially when it comes to animals, but understanding and responding to our cat’s emotions may be the most important things we can do as cat guardians.
There is little debate now that animals experience emotions even if we may never understand completely how they experience them. It is clear that they can experience positive and negative emotional states, just like us. Why should we care about our cat’s emotions? Here are four good reasons:
1. Emotions Affect Welfare
Most pet owners are careful to provide for their physical needs like food, water, and shelter. But a cat’s emotions also influence their quality of life. The more time a cat spends in positive emotional states, the higher the welfare.
Imagine a cat who regularly plays with another cat in the home, sprawls out on the living room floor on sunny afternoons, and eagerly greets her guardians when they come home from work. This cat seems quite comfortable, relaxed, and happy in the home, likely having good welfare.
Now think of a cat who spends all day in hiding, slinking out twice a day to use the litter box and snatch food, and hissing at any hand that approaches. With most of his time spent in fear and anxiety, welfare is lower even if he has access to the bare necessities like food and a litter box. When too much time is spent on the negative side of the emotional spectrum, quality of life may be a concern.
2. Emotions Affect Physiology
Emotional health impacts physical health. While short-term stress helps animals survive (a burst of adrenaline helps escape a predator, for instance), chronic stress causes long-term issues inside the body. Animals under stress for long periods of time often have digestive issues, stunted growth, a suppressed immune system, or cardiovascular disease.
3. Emotions Affect Behavior
If emotions are like weather, capable of changing from minute to minute, moods are like climate, averaged trends over time. A cat with mostly positive emotions will have a mostly positive mood. They might experience negative events like being startled by a loud noise or visiting the vet, but they spend most of their time on the positive side. These animals are more resilient, quickly able to recover from bad experiences.
Their mood also affects how they perceive the world. You might say that a cat with a positive mood is an optimist that sees the world through rose-colored glasses. A potentially scary thing, like a stranger reaching out a hand, might not scare this cat too much. She is more likely to be curious about the hand and want to explore. She might decide to lean into the hand, or just calmly walk away.
A cat with a negative mood might be a pessimist. He is more likely to perceive the stranger’s hand as a threat, responding by hissing and swatting defensively or running away. Afterward, he is more likely to stay in that fearful state for longer, hiding or staying agitated and lashing out at anyone that comes near.
A very simple, but key point here is that emotions cause behavior. The pessimistic cat isn’t swatting because a hand came near. He is swatting because he is fearful. If we want to change this behavior, we need change the emotion underlying it, too.
4. Emotions Affect Others
Have you ever noticed your mood changing to match those around you? If your coworkers are stressed about a project that you’re not involved in, maybe you feel some of their anxiety anyway. When you come home after a bad day, does your child’s joy rub off on you? The same goes for our animals. They can be incredibly perceptive and pick up on our emotions. Or it can work in the opposite direction: you or other pets in the home may pick up on your cat’s emotion. If one cat is constantly stressed, that may cause other cats to sense that something is wrong and become stressed themselves.
How can we increase our cats’ positive emotions?
One of the best ways we can push our cat’s mood toward the positive side of the emotional spectrum is giving them control over their environment. That starts with providing multiple, separate resources throughout your home so they always have a choice of where to eat or rest. Having plenty of each resource is especially important for homes with multiple cats because tension can build if they feel they need to defend limited resources.
We can also give them the power to choose when and how they interact with family members. A consent test for petting is the perfect place to start. Your cat will have more trust in you if you listen to what they want and respect it.
A powerful positive emotion that is often overlooked is called “seeking,” when an animal is engaged in searching for a reward. Literally the “thrill of the hunt” is more exciting than actually eating the meal. Dopamine, one of the feel-good chemicals in the brain, peaks during this searching phase. If we plop our cat’s food in the same bowl every day, we are denying them the fun opportunity to seek. Instead, we should aim to make mealtimes more challenging by feeding in different locations or using puzzle feeders.
Another way to engage the seeking system is a little more obvious: play! When a cat is engaged in the play emotion, fear is inhibited; it’s impossible to feel both at the same time. Most cats need two sessions of interactive play per day, about 10-15 minutes each. It makes them happier, gets out their energy, and helps them bond with you as their caretaker.