I Wonder About My Cats

January 5, 2026

I wonder whether my cats contemplate, or whether they just look at things. I know that my cats think; this much is obvious. I see them plan actions and devise means of achieving goals. However, these means rarely seem to have been logically thought through, but instead resemble random guesses. For example, when Mars wants to open a door or a bin, he just paws at it over and over with increasing intensity. The way he sometimes looks at me when he does it makes me think that he’s just trying to get me to open it for him, but I’ve seen him do the same thing with those puzzle toys with treats hidden beneath little hatches, and in that case he was so absorbed that he didn’t even know I existed.

Mars took fairly well to training. He knows his name, can jump up and down from surfaces on command, can do a little spin (sometimes), and can even perform something approximating a high-five. In the parlance humans use for animals, we might say he’s “smart.” But at the same time, his understanding of physical consequences for actions seems pretty limited. He’s confused by how furniture moves, for example, even when I’m clearly right there moving it.

So when either one of my cats are just sitting around staring at something, I wonder what is going on. Just now, Mars was atop his cat tree, watching the peppers hung up in the kitchen wave in the air blown from the heating vent. He was watching them with the kind of intensity he always uses for colourful, moving objects. They were a bit too far away for him to make a leap, but is that the only thing holding him back? Is he just thinking about how he wants to leap at those red, dangling peppers — or perhaps not “thinking” at all but instinctually longing? Or is there something else going on?

I wonder whether my cats feel a sense of justice. Mars is a troublemaker, which is why we spend so much time training him. Maya doesn’t get into trouble; she just doesn’t have the passion for it. Thus, we reward Mars for certain behaviours that align with our desires. For example, when he scratches the post next to the TV, we often give him a treat. This is because his favoured alternative is the couch. Maya will scratch the post on her own initiative, and she’ll go totally crazy on it, too. Scratching the post is its own reward, as far as she’s concerned.

When I get up to give Mars a treat for scratching the post, I usually give Maya a treat too, just because she’s there. There’s a pragmatic reason for this; if I don’t, I have to hold her back from stealing Mars’ treat from right under his nose. However, there’s also a sense of fairness at work here. It feels bad to only reward Mars, when Maya is sitting right there, looking up at me with her wide, seal-pup eyes. Of course, if we look at this from Mars’ perspective, giving Maya a treat is unfair too, since she didn’t actually do anything.

I wonder, then, if I took out the treats for no reason and gave one to Mars or Maya only, what the other would feel? Would they consider it an injustice? Or would they just think about how they want a treat? What I mean is this: when, as humans, we see someone else receive something that we didn’t receive, there is the initial feeling of “Man, I wanted that!” and then there is the supplementary feeling, “This is unfair!” It’s doubly upsetting, because not only did we not get something we want, but abstractly we understand the situation to be unjust. Obviously, as adults, we are able to regulate this emotion to the point where we hardly feel it, but children can not. From a young age, they develop this understanding of things being “unfair,” even if they tend to only employ this understanding in self-serving ways.

When I think about justice, I really wonder why we feel it so strongly, considering there is almost no empirical basis for it. If we define justice (ignoring Socrates yelling at us from across the street) as people getting what they deserve, or even people being treated fairly, it’s quite clear to see that this just doesn’t happen. So why do we think it should?

Well, I would answer that, but this is an essay about Cat and not Kant, so it’s probably not the time.

I wonder why my cats sit in the places they sit. I think this is one of the primary wonderings of cat owners. Some places my cats sit are perfectly reasonable. Mars likes to sit in high places, preferably near a window, so he can look down on everything. Maya likes to sit on cushions and blanketed laps. These tendencies make perfect sense, but they don’t cover all the places my cats sit.

Mars makes a point of sitting over objects that jut out from the ground. For example, if he lies on the couch, he will lie over the remote. If I allowed him, he would lie down on my desk with his upper body stretched over my keyboard; in fact, if he sits down near the keyboard, sometimes he’ll stretch his arm (yes, I know they’re all legs, but in this case it’s clearly an arm) out onto the keyboard. On the floor, he will lie over the bump that separates the tile from the hardwood, or with one part of his body elevated on the little platform beneath the scratch post. I don’t know; to me it seems like sleeping with a piece of plywood randomly thrown onto your mattress. I sometimes wonder if he’s an ascetic deliberately chasing bodily discomfort. It’s the only explanation that makes sense to me. This aligns with my belief that he’s a romantic poet, an assertion for which I have even less proof.

While Maya’s choice of seat is generally pretty self-explanatory, she has her quirks too. When I’m at my computer for a while, she will sit directly behind my chair, such that when I turn around and get up it sets her scurrying away in fright. Lately, she’s moved a little further back: if the door is open, she will hang out behind it, in the closet; if it’s most of the way closed, she will lie across the opening. Another favourite spot of hers is on a chair tucked beneath the dining table, so that only her tail peeks out between the bars. (I just checked; this is where she is sitting right now.)

Now, I don’t wonder about this one too much, because even a man with the capacity for explaining his actions probably wouldn’t be able to tell you why he sits in the places he sits, other than to say that there’s a chair there. I couldn’t make a cat understand why I’m on my computer chair, when the chair in the living room is much comfier, so I have to accept that if there is anything going on, it’s beyond my capacity for knowing.

I wonder how my cats get along. My cats are quite different. Even I can see that. And they didn’t choose to live together; it just happened. So how do they feel about each other? Are they friends?

When Maya is excited about being pet, or excited about someone preparing food, sometimes she’ll wander over to Mars and rub up against him. She does this in such a way that it’s clear she does not value his individuality; he is merely an object in her eyes. When she does this, Mars will look at her like she’s crazy and back away. Conversely, if Mars is in a cuddly mood, he will sometimes go over and lick Maya’s face, but he will only do this for 15 seconds max before he starts biting her ear and she has to punch him. If he doesn’t do that, he abruptly makes his stupid brrr sound (see below) and then runs off.

The two play together quite often. Usually, Mars is the instigator, by which I mean he sneaks up behind and suckerpunches Maya, causing her to scream and tackle him back. Then they’ll engage in a stand-off; Mars with one paw raised in defence like a younger sibling, and Maya with her head lowered serpent-like toward the ground. This is essentially tachi-ai in sumo, where the two wrestlers align their breath and prepare for a near-simultaneous charge. They’ll spar for a few bouts, often interrupted by unexplained periods in which both cats look away for a bit, as if bored.

All this seems to be fairly normal behaviour for cats, but I still wonder about it. How do they feel about each other, truly? Are they growing fond of each other, or is their connection only indirect, mediated by sharing our house and following our whims?

I wonder about the sounds my cats make. Maya sounds like an alien transmission. That’s the only way I can really explain it. She beeps and grumbles. When food is incoming, she squeaks like a dog toy. When she’s playing by herself, she lets out intermittent squeals that sound like a distress signal.

Mars mostly sounds like a cat, although when he comes running toward the front door sometimes he’ll make a stupid brrrrrr sound, and when he jumps from a high place he’ll make an abbreviated version of that same sound, like a half-inflated ball hitting the ground. This sound also comes out if he randomly becomes annoyed by something, and is followed by taking three paces in a random direction and furiously licking the left side of his torso.

The two sound completely different, and make noises in entirely different circumstances and for different reasons. I can’t explain it! It’s just the way they are.

I wonder why I like my cats so much. I don’t understand the way I feel about my cats. Sometimes I feel stupid for liking them as much as I do. Even when I get mad at them, I still like them. They’re just cats, after all, and they don’t know what they’re doing. They live by different rules, essentially observing and occupying a different world than the one I observe and occupy.

I generally like animals, but I seem to have a soft spot for cats. Whenever I see people’s babies, they just remind me of my cats. Even birds and gophers remind me of my cats. I feel like half of everything I think or talk about is related to my cats. I even feel like this website is slowly becoming a fansite devoted to my cats. Why is this? Are there not more interesting things in this world?

Well, as Kermit the Frog says, “Why wonder? Why wonder?”

APPENDIX: I AM A CAT

I am a cat. As yet, I have no name. There is a sound that my masters make, which, if I run up to them after they make it, will result in my being rewarded a small, savoury pellet. But I can’t quite consider that a name. I’ve never heard of any other person receiving food just for responding to their own name; it would be considered undignified. The other cat I live with, she refuses to participate in this whole sham-name business whatsoever. Whether this is out of principle, or because she simply hasn’t made the connection between name-calling and treat-giving, I can’t say for sure.

She’s a true mystery to me, in many ways. It seems we are rarely aligned. Whenever I feel like grabbing her by the neck and rolling around, she brushes me off with a yelp and a bat on the head. You have to find her in just the right mood to get anything even resembling a good wrestle out of her. Sometimes I’ll tackle her by surprise and then run off, turning around only to find that she isn’t chasing me at all, but just looking around with bulging, confused eyes. It drives me to such a state that I have no choice but to sprint from one end of the house to the other while screaming. I’d be embarrassed by such behaviour if it wasn’t such a natural reaction to the trials I’m put through in this world.

When I do find myself sparring, I tend to employ the “high and low” technique passed down through my family for generations. The two tenets are “If you’re high, stay high,” and, “If you’re low, get as low as possible.” If I have the upper hand, I rise on my back legs, holding one paw out to block any incoming jabs. But if I ever find myself on the lower end of things, I lie flat on my back, all paws raised, twisting my head as the opponent circles around, looking for an opening. Of course, there rarely is an opening, as such a fourfold defence is nigh-impervious.

There’s no rhyme nor reason to this world I live in. I try to apply my instinctual understanding of things, and it gets me nowhere. I can scratch the pole beside the TV, but not the large couch my masters sit on, despite the fact that this couch provides the most satisfying and luxurious scratch I’ve ever experienced. If I try to plead my case as I approach, saying, as far as I can approximate, “Please! Just once in a little while!” I am met with a mist of water in my face. At some point, they started directing the spray at the couch instead, and now it smells terrible. Any time I approach it, my senses and my intellect are in a state of discord, which, naturally enough, makes me grumpy.

The male master is always walking around with rectangular objects in his hand. He spends nearly half the day staring at them. Some are different colours, and they open up to reveal various faces, which he stares at in succession. But there are a few he comes back to again and again, with just one face. He’ll stare at them as with any other rectangular object he finds himself in contact with, but instead of opening it up, he jabs at it with his finger, almost as if playing with a stick, or trying to ascertain the purpose of a cable. He’ll do this for hours, as if it’s the most fascinating thing in the world.

I’ve never once seen him sleep during the day. He’s developed this bizarre habit of saving up all his sleep for the middle of the night. The girl master, she’s a bit more normal in this regard. She’ll curl up on the comfy couch and take her mid-day doze somewhat regularly. Sometimes, I’ll settle down a few feet from her head, and join her, although I have to be careful not to make my bed too close, or else she’ll grab me in her arms and jostle me around. It’s almost as if she think she’s caught me, and is playing with her food. She has no idea I let her do it.

The boy master picks me up, too, although he’s a bit more gentle. Again, I have no explanation for why he does so; usually he just carries me to the next room, only to put me down again, forcing me to walk back to where I had situated myself before. He has no sense of why I would want to be in a particular place at a particular moment. As far as he’s concerned, there’s no purpose to anything I do. But I’m not sure how much he’d appreciate being picked up off his seat while engaged with one of his rectangles, and then plopped down willy-nilly in some random part of the house.

I’m not sure how long a cat is supposed to tolerate life in such a topsy-turvy world. Sometime’s I’d like to just retire to a little box and be done with it all.