Do Cats Feel Love?

Evidence That Felines Care for Their Owners and Other Animals

Apr 10, 2009
Jennifer Copley

Cats Show Love in Many Ways - Debora Lima e Silva, Wikimedia Commons

Does your cat love you? Does she love other people or pets in the household? Is there evidence for a cat's ability to experience love?

Physiological evidence and behavioural observation indicate that cats experience many of the same emotions humans do, though perhaps not the complex social permutations of those emotions.

Cats appear to show love through a variety of behaviours, including affectionate body contact, seeking or attempting to provide comfort, bringing presents, and grieving the loss of someone close.

Affectionate Body Contact

Unlike dogs, cats usually don’t attempt to appease their owners, and thus can seem indifferent or aloof. Cats do make a number of affectionate gestures, however, including head butting, sitting on a lap, purring, touching noses, and rubbing against people and other cats.

When cats rub against other cats, it’s called allorubbing, and it serves to reinforce a group bond and identity by transferring scents. Allorubbing can be likened to a hug or a handshake among humans, and when cats engage in this behaviour with people, they are indicating that they view those people as part of their clan.

Giving and Receiving

Modern domestic cats tend to place owners in the role of surrogate parents and themselves as permanent kittens that are fed, groomed, and comforted when upset. But many cats attempt to care for their owners as well. This may take the form of bringing “presents,” which tend to be either dead rodents and birds or live prey animals. In the latter case, it has been speculated that the cats are attempting to provide their inept human companions with some much-needed hunting practice, much as a mother cat would do for her kittens.

There is also widespread anecdotal evidence for the fact that many cats will attempt to provide comfort to unhappy people by rubbing against them, purring, sitting on their laps, winding around their legs, and engaging in other behaviours targeted specifically to the unhappy individual. Of course, there are some cats that don’t seem particularly inclined to comfort anyone, but the same can be said of certain people.

Love of Other Animals

Female cats are among the best mothers in the animal kingdom, and even tomcats have been known to show their mates and their own kittens affection and care, though this is quite variable from one tomcat to the next. Groups of feral female cats, often blood relatives, usually raise their young collectively.

Feral female cats not only nest communally, but they also nurse, groom, and guard one another’s young, and act as midwives through the birth process for other females, cleaning the mother and the newborn kittens. Many cats have also adopted and nursed baby animals of other species, including dogs, mice, squirrels, and pandas.

Grieving

Cats display many signs of grief when they have lost a loved one. When a mother cat’s young kittens are taken away from her, she will search frantically and call for them.

Many cats whose owners have died have showed signs of profound grief, in some cases becoming severely withdrawn and even refusing food. This indicates that cats are capable of experiencing something more than “cupboard love” for their owners. Owners have also reported cats grieving after the loss of other household pets.

Of course, not all cats will grieve deeply; some get over things more quickly than others. Like people, individual cats experience grief in different ways and at different intensities.

Other Emotions

Evidence suggests that cats can experience many of the same feelings that people can, though they can’t analyze them or seek meaning from them in the way that humans do, because this requires the capacity for abstraction. See Do Cats Have Emotions? for more information on the feline emotional range and the dangers of anthropomorphizing.