It’s Time to Wage Psychological Warfare on your Cat
/For thousands of years, cats have constantly messed with our supposedly more-advanced species. The ancient Egyptians held cats in the highest regard – going so far as to worship them as gods. Today, cats aren’t worshiped any more than are dogs or other pets, but they still have a shitty attitude that screams “I’m better than you”. It’s pretty insulting. We can thank primitive human minds for that one.
The Egyptians pulled a fast one on us and made cat’s self-importance sky rocket, and the effects are still being felt today. Cats all around the world plainly don’t give a shit about their owners. Lots of jokes and comics and drawings exist about how badly cats treat humans and they’re all true; if you were getting beat up then your cat would probably join in. That’s how that works.
Accurate
More common however is just being ignored by your cat. How many times have you come home from work or even a long holiday, and your cat is still lounging on the couch or doing his taxes or whatever it is that cats do all day? Too many to count. A cat doesn’t give a shit about your existence unless they can get something tangible in return; comfort, food, body heat, or scratches. Otherwise, they don’t want to know you’re alive. They ignore us all day long, and you know what happens? We eat it up. We long to be beside them and hug them and touch them, and we feel extra special when they show us the slightest bit of (calculated) affection. After all, if your cat never showed you affection then you’re less likely to give it what it wants, right? It knows how to drip-feed you just enough attention to make you want it, but not so much that you take that attention for granted. It’s sociopathic behavior and psychological torture.
I propose that we flip the script. Let the cat know that you’re the human and you’re in charge, by waging psychological warfare on it, the way it has been on you. Ignore the shit out of our cat. Feed it, by all means, and, like, empty the litter try and stuff, but other than facilitating biological functions, your cat doesn’t exist in your eyes. If it rubs up against you; ignore it. If it sits in your lap and purrs; ignore it. If it slow-blinks at you to show that it trusts you; ignore it. Ignore the shit out of it until it learns that love isn’t a one-way street.
Being the human, you can control your emotions. The cat, being a lower-order life form, however, cannot. I mean, dogs can be trained to do such and they’re lower-order too, but you certainly aren’t training your cat to resist your powers. That would be counterproductive. Control your emotions and you’ll win out over a cat, is what I’m saying.
Related: Pets are more replaceable than their owners would like to believe
If you manipulate your cat by showing affection randomly, like by only reciprocating it some of the time, unpredictably. This will make the cat will want it even more. If it knows that you’ll scratch its ears or otherwise show affection every time it comes near, then the cat will learn the pattern and become complacent. However, if you only show affection some of the time, then it will be much happier when you do show it. See what’s happening here? We’re flipping the script by taking what they do to us and doing it right back to them. Classic. It’s also how slot machines work, so you know it’s effective.
Some might say that it’s cruel to do such things to an animal that’s orders of magnitude less intelligent than we are but have you considered that they started it? Also people unknowingly wage this exact same form of psychological warfare on their dogs every day, yet where’s the uproar about that? Suddenly it becomes a problem then the cat is effected, yet doing it to the dog is fine because he’s a second-class citizen in comparison to the cat (in reality all pets are second-class citizens or worse)? That’s a pretty questionable way to see the world. Where’s the justice? Make your own by psychologically manipulating your cat into loving you.
