4 Harmful Myths That Hurt Cats
Debunking common misunderstandings with actual scientific explanations for feline behavior
Cats are mystical animals. Pop culture would have you believe they’re capricious, confusing, clever, and conniving. Cat people (or the people who belong to cats, in more accurate terms) have struggled for millennia to understand cats and their mysterious appeal to humans.
The problem with mysticism, of course, is that it gives rise to conspiracy theories that somehow end up being treated as fact — or even policy, in certain cases. People operate under the misguided belief that cats are evil, that cats can’t love, that cats need to be declawed, and that cats destroy stuff just for the hell of it.
Let’s debunk four common cat misconceptions that are actively harming cats:
1. The ‘empty’ food bowl myth
One of the funniest cat memes on the internet is that cats think they’re “starving” when their bowl has plenty of food in it, just pushed to the sides.
Nobody talks about the true reason. Cats aren’t being capricious, lazy, or stupid. They’re being sensitive.
Cat whiskers are finely-tuned instruments of detection, effectively giving them a whole new sense and tons of extra information according to Live Science. Unfortunately for them, this means they also get what Pet MD calls whisker fatigue. When your cat is eating out of a bowl and his whiskers are repeatedly hitting the sides, this can actually be too sensitive or even painful for his delicate senses.
So they eat what they can — the middle — and leave what is literally too painful for them to eat.
This myth has fueled many a meme, but can cause harm to cats because it makes you believe your cat is being intentionally duplicitous or lazy. They’re not — they just have delicate whiskers. Consider a wider bowl that lets them eat in peace.
