Why don’t dogs like cats? You asked Google – here’s the answer
John Bradshaw
Every day, millions of people ask Google some of life’s most difficult
questions, big and small. In this series, our writers answer some of the
most common queries
‘Enmity is far from inevitable, given the way that dogs and cats alike learn the difference between friend and foe.’
Photograph: Getty Images/Moment Open
Dogs
don’t like cats? Maybe that should be “cats don’t like dogs”, since
it’s usually the cat that ends up running away (not always, there are
some wimpish dogs out there). But both statements are generally true:
most cats
don’t seem to have much time for dogs and dogs are usually happy to
chase anything that is running away, whether that happens to be a cat or
a squirrel. That’s not to say that a cat and dog
can’t make friends, or become part of each other’s extended “family” –
but they would have to work at it. Or rather, we (their owners) would.
The phrase “fight like cat and dog” must have some truth in it. It’s
certainly been in common use for more than a century, and may be much
older than that. Nowadays it’s rare to see an actual cat and an actual
dog engage in anything more than a brief skirmish – so how did the
phrase ever become established?
Like so many aphorisms, it’s something of an anachronism. Even as
recently as the 19th century, dogs and especially cats were not looked
after as well as they are today. Both were allowed to roam the streets,
and in considerable numbers, since there was little check on the rate at
which they reproduced (apart from the grim sack/river tradition).
Competition over scarce scraps of food would have led to frequent
fights. A dispute between two dogs is often resolved without actual
fighting, since dogs have inherited a sophisticated set of signals from
their pack-dwelling ancestor, the wolf, that enables them to signal
their intention to back down if they consider their opponent too
fearsome. Cats,
being descended from solitary predators with little need to communicate
face-to-face, lack such abilities, and are generally much more
circumspect than dogs when they’re deciding whether or not to join an
affray. Evolution has not provided either species with any capacity to
communicate with one another, so close-combat fighting is more or less
inevitable when neither is prepared to run.
Their styles of fighting are also completely different – cats prefer
to use their sharp claws (kept that way by being pulled back into
sheaths when not required), whereas dogs, who continually blunt their
claws by using them for traction when running, persistently try to bring
their teeth and powerful jaws into play. Both like to intimidate their
opponent vocally, by barking (dog), yowling, hissing and spitting (cat)
and growling (both). As a result, once a fight between the two has
started, they are often long drawn-out, noisy affairs that can attract a
lot of attention.
Mummy of a cat circa 1st century AD. Photograph: Alamy
So are cats and dogs natural enemies? Well, they probably were once.
In terms of their relationship with mankind, cats are the interlopers.
Dogs were originally domesticated by our hunter-gatherer ancestors, at
least 15,000 years ago, possibly longer. Whether they were “man’s best friend”
in those early days is anybody’s guess, but by the time cats came along
they were playing a big part in our lives, hunting alongside us,
guarding our houses, herding our flocks, even keeping us warm at night.
Cats first started hanging around our houses about 10,000 years ago,
but that was pure opportunism:
at that point in (pre)history, our habit
of storing food had led to the emergence of the house mouse as a serious
pest. There’s little evidence for humans actually liking cats (apart
from, presumably, appreciating the benefits of a mouse-free granary) for
another 4,000 years, when the ancient Egyptians began to leave tangible
evidence of their affection, for example, by providing elaborate
burials, complete with a symbolic bowl of milk, for favoured pet cats.
Prior to that, dogs would have had the upper hand for thousands of
years, cared for by their owners to an extent that very few cats would have enjoyed.
No level playing field for cats, then, but what would its
consequences have been? First of all, competition for edible trash might
have been rather one-sided, with dogs having the upper hand when there
were people about. Cats would have had to rely on their natural agility
to stay out of trouble, as I witnessed when I was studying feral cats in
a Turkish village. One year, the cats were everywhere, making a good
living from cajoling scraps from gullible tourists (myself included).
The next year, a pack of dogs was roaming the streets, and the cats
seemed to have vanished – or so I thought until I was able to survey the
village from high up, and saw that the cats had simply moved up on to
the mainly flat roofs, and were presumably venturing down to scavenge
for food at night, when the dogs were asleep.
More seriously (and skip this bit if you’re of a sensitive
disposition), dogs would have presented a significant risk to kittens.
Mother cats have to leave their nests to go hunting, and a starving dog
is not fussy about what it eats. Cats would therefore have done their
best not just to hide their kittens as securely as possible, but also to
instil as much fear as possible into the neighbourhood dogs.
Thus cats and dogs carry a grim evolutionary backstory, one that even today they have not entirely shaken off. Dogs still chase cats, and given the right motivation, cats will turn and try to fight them off.
The good news is that such enmity is far from inevitable, given the
way that dogs and cats alike learn the difference between friend and
foe. This is part – and possibly no more than a side-effect – of the way
that domestication has changed the way their brains develop. Puppy and
kitten alike go through what’s called a “socialisation period”, when
they learn not only who their mothers are, and how to behave towards
other members of their own species, but also that humans are not to be
feared. It’s only lack of (gentle) contact with people during the
formative first couple of months of their lives that drives feral cats
(and dogs) to develop a life-long distrust of humans.
It’s quite straightforward to hijack this process so that a dog is
included in a kitten’s list of good company, and vice versa for a puppy.
You’ll need a dog-friendly cat for the latter, or a cat-friendly dog
for the former. Simply being around the other species, with no
unpleasant consequences, during the sensitive period (4-8 weeks for
kittens, 5-12 weeks for puppies) is usually enough. I’ve kept dogs and
cats together all my life without there being any adverse consequences
for either, and some have become best friends – I’ll never forget the
sight of two kittens, brother and sister, jockeying for position to
snuggle up against my labrador.
Unfortunately, once a cat has decided that it hates dogs, or a dog
has come to enjoy chasing every cat it sees (ex-racing greyhounds
especially), these habits are going to take a lot of very patient
training to reverse.
Stele depicting a fight between a dog and a cat in 510BC, from the
Kerameikos necropolis in Athens, Greece. Photograph: G Nimatallah/De
Agostini/Getty Images source
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