It’s actually kind of interesting - cats have culture. I’m sure there’s a generic competent too, but cats apparently get their social skills crammed into them by their mother in a crash course when they’re weaning. It’s apparently very slow and difficult to change after that period. They’ve studied certain marker behaviors the way they study how language branch out, and they estimate it takes upwards of a dozen generations for a line of cats to fully adapt to the local “dialect”
It’s not just that cats are standoffish and hard to understand, it’s that western cats are in particular. In Japan, they’re far more “extroverted”, they’re far more likely to approach humans and perform “cute” behaviors like big kitty eyes and “cute” juvenile sounding meows for attention
It makes you think - up until like the 70s, people would just kill cats for fun, cheap fur, or because they annoyed them. A lot of older people have stories about watching someone drown kittens
English has a ton of words and idioms relating to killing cats in the context of it once being a relatable behavior
In Japan, they have idioms like “[I’m so busy] I’m in no position to turn down a cats help”. Eastern cultures also generally see their presence as lucky, say they can see and protect against spirits, and Japan has a spirit called a bakeneko which is a two tailed cat who has lived 100 years, and is now a powerful trickster that sometimes will curse someone with fatal levels of bad luck.
It kind of makes sense - they were largely seafaring and have all sorts of annoying critters around, whereas in Europe and America they were brought on the ships to defend the food, but once they got there they became an invasive species inland, where they’re far less valued
It makes sense they’d be more standoffish - they want to be around because they’re adapted human settlements. They’re definitely social animals, but maybe their fickleness is a way to remind people that they can do some damage if their cornered
Anyways, I saw a documentary about the trainability of cats and thought it was interesting… I’m definitely more of a dog person, but it made me think - out of about a dozen cats I’ve spent a significant time around, 4 were assholes and 2 I formed a deep bond with.
It made me want to add a couple cats to the dog and local wildlife I’d adopt if I ever manage to afford a place in the boonies