Neurological make-up
So, what makes a cat a cat? What does a cat need to be happy and content (two rather different things!) and how often? And most crucial of all, how good are we at providing the type of lifestyle that our cats would choose for themselves if we weren’t there?
Of course, every pet parent will have their own opinions about what would be ideal for their cat, and how well they fit the bill of being a good carer. And so it helps to detach ourselves slightly from our cats and look at the emotional make-up of a cat. It’s relatively easy to make a cat happy in the moment with food, treats, petting etc, but contentment is more a description of general mood state, an on-ongoing psychological balance of well-being.This is much harder to establish and maintain in any cat, but especially with an indoor cat.
Cats, like all mammals and probably most birds and many reptiles, and we humans too, have at least seven emotional systems of neurological circuitry wired through different parts of the brain.Three emotional systems are ‘negative’ in terms of how you feel when they are activated:‘Fear’,‘Grief’ and ‘Rage’ and, of course, it is crucial to the well-being of any man or beast to avoid situations and events that evoke these unpleasant feelings, as vital as the emotion of fear is to learning survival strategies.
One system,‘Lust’, is naturally often seasonal, and prompts positive feelings but this doesn’t really impact the behaviour of most pet cats because they are sterilised, which leaves us with three positive emotional systems that engender good feelings: The ‘Seeking’ system, which is all about finding the things in life that you like, especially the location and capture of food; the ‘Care’ system, which in mammals, and especially in cats, arises from the maternal attachment process that bonds mothers to kittens but extends to form the basis of all social attachments; and the ‘Play’ system, which is a vital system in its own right, being the one that is activated when cats practise their hunting. In fact, play is strictly more about physical contact in social interactions than the practising of hunting behaviours, which actually activate the ‘Seeking’ system but in a less focussed manner than when the cat is trying to catch a mouse. It’s just that the cat can sometimes ‘look playful’ in both systems and engage the same behaviours.