I've always thought that with dogs being domesticated is like a job. Sometimes it's a good job and you get to hang out with good people doing fun stuff. Other times it's a crap job and the boss will either forgot to pay you or beat you with a stick.

With cats on the other hand domestication is like a room you rent out at a house when you're college. The people there might be cool - the rent is so low it might as well be free and most of the time they don't care if you steal their food. In the back of the cat's head (and I think this is true for the most pampered domesticated cat in the world) is the knowledge that it's a place to crash and if things get too weird they can always bail out.

From that point of view I tend to give cats a lot more leeway. I mean a cat doesn't really have to pop over onto my lap and let me scratch it's head. It's the one putting itself out there in a reasonably genuine way.

Dogs though I'm always a bit suspicious of because popping over to have their had scratched? That's their job. Maybe they like me but it's like when you go to McDonald's and the person behind the counter smiles and asks you if you want fries with that as if you're the best person in the world.

Exactly, and despite not being the most mentally capable cats exhibit very intelligent tendencies. They can have endless curiosity and playfulness, but also somehow still very lazy.

We had to cat sit a few times over the last six months, and Cat World isn't an easy place to understand.

Cats don't appear to have a good serial memory, so they can remember places and times up to a point, but not quite well enough to integrate them into a conceptual whole.

One cat was cute and sweet tempered, but also timid and really rather slow. We eventually worked out that she couldn't make the connection between the corridor that led to the kitchen in daylight, and the same corridor after dark.

She acted as if they were two completely different and unrelated spaces. So she had to timidly re-explore both every day, which caused non-trivial confusion because some of the things in the corridor already had her scent on them.

Every cat is different. Some can be downright neurotic, just like us. They also get senile in old age. I had the pleasure of growing into adulthood alongside a cat. He died 2 months shy of 20. He taught me a lot.