Cats are freakly little creatures. They lurk.
That's a good part of why they are so much fun! My eldest, Nutmeg, likes to play both "tag" and "hide and seek" with me. Her preferred method is to "buzz the tower," just barely brushing past my leg as she tears down a hallway, all the while making this trilling noise like, "Catch me if you can!" Basic predatory/prey type games, but she's really cute about it.
But, re: the "**** off attitude" mentioned earlier, she'd never play those games with anyone else but me and my wife, though she'll condescend to be petted by other people she's come to consider "family." Trust seems to be a lot harder to earn with a cat than with a dog. Perhaps that shouldn't make a cat's affection more intrinsically valuable, but to me it does. How special is the affection of a beast that will "love"
anyone who scratches him behind the ears?
That said, I think there must be some way that cats and dogs both recognize cat-people and dog-people. Anyone else ever noticed that? A lot of the dogs I've met (including the one I grew up with) had an intrinsic distrust of me right from the beginning that they never get over it. Cats, on the other hand... I know most of the cats in my neighborhood. At this point, they recognize me from past encounters and know me to be generally trustworthy, but that initial meeting where they just decide to trust me on a lark is a little more bizarre. Cats do tend to be distrustful of humans (not unwise), but most cats I've met on my walks seem to decide
I'm ok fairly quickly. At first, I thought it was because I know how to make sounds like a momma cat calling her kittens, but cats respond to my wife in the same way, and she doesn't make any cat-talk at all. I'm now thinking it must have to do with body language, but that's just a wild guess. All I can say for sure is that this has happened with cats and dogs way too often for me to think it is mere coincidence. Somehow, they know.
Here's a picture of Nutmeg being possessive of her Mama.
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