Cats know squat

WARNING: This post is about people and animals urinating. I'm sure you need no more enticement to keep reading, so here it is:

THINGS MY CAT DOES NOT UNDERSTAND #1: Urinating

I don’t think cats understand urinating. At least not the way dogs do. Or I should say, male dogs. When a dog lifts his leg, he’s not just urinating, he’s aiming at something. He’s got an innate sense of fluid dynamics – pressure, volume, trajectory – that your average cat just doesn’t have. What happens for a cat is, he’s walking along and suddenly, “Hey, I feel like I have to squat!” He feels something happening, so when he’s done he turns around to look. He finds a smelly wet patch and thinks, “Whoa! I almost sat in that! I better cover it up before someone else steps in it.”

Now, it has often been observed that cats don’t see humans as companions so much as food processors and scratching machines. I believe this based on the fact that a cat will come up to you and start sharpening his claws on your leg, as if you were no more than a mobile tree. I think it’s the challenge that excites them. But you would never see a cat do that to another cat. So we have a preexisting bias of unbalanced respect in the first place, which leads to the assumption that whatever the human is doing that doesn’t directly affect the cat is beneath notice.

I live in the woods. When I’m way out in the backyard, which is just another part of the forest, I’ve often found it more convenient to just pee behind a tree than to walk all the way back to the house. When my dog sees this, I can tell he understands. I know he’s thinking, “Yep. Good job. Nice arc. That’s now your tree.” And then he goes on to mark out his own territory: “This here’s my tree. And that’s my bucket. This corner of the house…Hey, neighbor kid! My kid now.” And so on.

Now when my cat sees me peeing behind a tree, he’s thinking, “Food processor! Scratching machine!” and walks right up. He’s got no idea about fluid dynamics. In particular the relationship of pressure to trajectory as it relates to distance. So he comes right up to stand at my feet and says, ‘Hey, food processor! How about some scrPTHPTHPTHPTHPHTPH!!”