The cat featured here looks a wee bit like Potter did when she was just a kitten.

Respect Your Cat (Not That It Cares)

By ABIGAIL TUCKERMARCH 28, 2017

It seems as if there’s always some kind of feline holiday crouched around the corner, wriggling its bottom, ready to pounce. National Cat Day, National Feral Cat Day, National Hairball Awareness Day, Happy Mew Year — even the dog days of August are filled with feline jubilees.

A celebration on Tuesday stands out from the pride, however, because it promises to deliver our cats what they most deserve, which is not a Meowjito. It’s Respect Your Cat Day, an opportunity to pay homage to that mysterious silken life form beside you, which can hear the height of sounds and has beaten the evolutionary odds to occupy your lap.

Sadly, as cat lovers we don’t always fully grasp the formidable feline qualities we should be honoring. Respect Your Cat Day’s literature (mostly a news release put out by the folks at a website called National Today, who claim the source of the holiday dates back to an 1384 edict by Richard II of England forbidding the consumption of cats) highlights some impressive statistics about our “feline besties,” including the revelation from a survey that “64 percent of Americans” allegedly prefer their cat’s company to their significant other’s. (No comment, dear.)

But when it comes to how, exactly, people go about respecting their cats, the survey’s findings seem a little misguided, if not downright disrespectful: Give your cat verbal compliments? Please. Cats emphatically do not understand English and studiously disregard their owner’s calls. With their supersensitive hearing, some may dislike the volume of the human voice, especially in confined quarters. When speaking in the feline presence, you might even consider consulting a decibel meter to ensure your jibber-jabber does not irritate their ears. If you flatter your cat, do so in a reverent whisper.

Snuggle or hug your cat? Actually, cats may abhor the smell of our favorite perfumes and citrus-scented soaps, and some are allergic to human dandruff. Furthermore, while most pet cats appreciate caresses, their territoriality means they sometimes prefer solitude to squeezes, and a few even have a condition called “petting intolerance” — a prime cause of cat-on-human violence. Constantly invading a cat’s personal space can also inflict something like psychological trauma, leading to chronic litter box accidents.

Feed your cat treats? Thanks to precisely this sort of “respect,” veterinarians have devised feline obesity charts going all the way up to 70 percent body fat. Our cats’ jiggling physiques insult their arch-predator status.

Real respect requires something much more than babying; it requires overhauling our whole perspective on cat kind. It’s time to open our eyes — like really, really wide, the way my sister’s cat does when it spies the vacuum cleaner — and see this animal for what it really is: not a helpless furball to be patronized and mollycoddled, but an entity both fearsome and sublime, commanding respect in the manner of a mafia don, or the ocean.

For in truth, the humble house cat is one of the most stunning organisms on the planet. No creature is more exquisitely sensitive, and yet none is hardier. None beguiles us more but needs us less. There are more than 600 million domestic cats on the planet today, and we are hard-pressed to explain why. Humans apparently never tried to cultivate them (their abilities as ratters are overhyped). Rather, cats took the reins in our relationship, undergoing a novel process of self-domestication, tweaking their brain structures to better withstand the terrible stresses of human company and thereafter radiating out from the Middle East in determined furry battalions. In an era when lions, tigers and other types of felines flirt with extinction, house cats are themselves an intensifying menace to endangered species.

Our living rooms are among their final conquests, as indoor-only cats are a phenomenon of mostly the last 70 years or so. It hasn’t been an easy takeover. In fact, chaotic human homes, with their noises, stenches and overbearing occupants, may be the most radical and challenging environment that these little hunters, which flourish on deserted sub-Antarctic islands and the slopes of active volcanoes, have yet faced.

So on Tuesday — and I know, it’s hard — resist the urge to simply cuddle your cat with reckless abandon. Instead, consider this creature at arm’s length, study it. Skip the kitty co-nap and wake up to your cat’s magnificent natural history. Respect the fact that no animal has come further under its own power to meet us where we are.

Meanwhile, there are also a few simple tributes that your cat might actually appreciate. For starters, as Ohio State University’s Indoor Pet Initiative suggests, figure out your cat’s personal “prey preference” and buy anatomically appropriate toys. Create a cat-only household zone called a “refuge,” which is a bit like a panic room with extra-soft blankets. Avoid crowding too many cats into too few square feet (solitary by nature, cats don’t always relish one another’s companionship). And it never hurts to add an extra litter box, or three.

Some feline preferences are harder to honor: Cats loathe thunderstorms, for instance, house guests and disruptive human holidays not dedicated to them. Fully respecting cats’ aversion to human strangers could make it hard to, say, date or marry.

But then again, why would you bother, since you’ll just end up pining for your cat?

Abigail Tucker is the author of “The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World.”

Abigail Tucker is the author of “The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World.”