Strangely, yes, is the answer to the question in the title. To a large extent the answer baffles me because people adopt cats for companionship and affection. They want their cat to come to them and interact. What is the point in having a cat unless they interact and keep you company? In the extreme, the alternative is a cat that runs away and hides all day and all night and does nothing to enhance your lifestyle.
So, the answer really is about the extent of that affection and how it impacts your life. And this is also about the expectation of the cat owner. It’s what they personally demand from their cat and expect from their cat.
There is no one single answer to the question because it is dependent upon individual human preferences. Indeed, it is dependent upon how a person would define the phrase “too affectionate”.
That said, there is a story online which illustrates how a cat can be too affectionate for their temporary human caregiver with whom they lived.
Bruno
The story concerns a cat called Bruno. He is a beautiful, slightly rangy and skinny pale, ginger tabby-and white standard non-purebred domestic cat. He likes to head-butt, cuddle at bedtime and does all those beautifully affection things that good cat companions do.
He was adopted from a New Jersey, USA animal shelter. He was quite quickly returned to the shelter a week later. The reason given was that he was too affectionate.
The animal shelter concerned, Montville Animal Shelter, have a Facebook page and they posted about this story. So, we have it first-hand. This is what they say in their post. I’ve been selective to pick out the salient points.
“Sad news Bruno came back after only a week! The family never had a cat before and said he was too affectionate, always wanted to sit on their laps, follow them around, and head butt them for kisses and pets. He was also too playful and got zoomies in the evening! So if anyone is looking for a Velcro cat, he’s your guy.”
From my perspective, they are describing an ideal domestic cat! The French have a saying: “Chacun son truc”. The translation as you might expect is “each his own”. We are all different and for these first-time adopters he was too demanding.
Patience?
I think they made a mistake actually because they gave themselves one week or less to make a decision to return him to the shelter. Perhaps if they had kept on going for a few months they would have found that Bruno would have settled down a bit and they would have learned to love his affection. Patience is a good quality in cat caregiving.
Young cat?
Another point worth noting is that Bruno is two years old. He’s a young male cat. He’s going to be active. He will slow down over the years and when he enters middle age. And when he gets used to his new owners he will also settle down a bit and some of the excitement might go out of him.
Shelter life to home life impact?
Having suddenly found himself transported from shelter life which is difficult to very difficult for a domestic cat to living in a human home, a much superior environment, he was bound to be a little boisterous, excitable, excited and affecionate. I think they should have given him time to settle in.
Unsuited people?
Without wishing to be unkind, sometimes I think that new adopters are unsuited to be cat caregivers. The think that they would like a cat and they do the right thing and adopt from a shelter but then find that they can’t really cope with it or don’t actually like it because what transpires does not meet their expectations.
Once again, this is about expectation management. What I mean is that people have to have the right expectation before adopting a cat on all the parameters namely commitment, time to care for their cat, sufficient amounts of money to do a proper job (and it can be quite expensive sometimes) and so on. Preparation before adoption is time never wasted in my view.
Percentage of adopted shelter cats that are returned
What’s the percentage of failed shelter cat adoptions? It is relevant to the discussion because Bruno’s story is a failed shelter cat adoption. A study published in April 2021 (see title below), and therefore quite recent, found that shelter cats had a return rate of 4.2% compared to dogs at 16.3%. Out of 23,932 adopted animals there was an average return rate of 9.2%. That is about 1 in 10 shelter animals returned.
14.3% of the returned animals were returned more than once. For cats, the risk of return varied between the age groups. Senior cats, adult cats and young adult cats were 5x, 4x and 3x (respectively) more likely to be returned than kittens.
The information is very interesting in the context of this discussion. Senior cats are most likely to be failures when adopted from shelters because they are less willing to interact with humans. This strongly implies that people adopt shelter cats because they want them to interact with them which makes sense and is common sense.
This is the opposite conclusion to the Bruno story. Once again, I’m drawn to what is clearly apparent namely this is about an individual person’s expectation about what they can get from a cat companion and whether the cat that they adopted meets those expectations.
Education
This leads me to briefly touch on the possibility of taking proactive steps to prevent that near 10% failure rate. You wonder if new adopters were asked to meet with shelter staff before the adoption for a 20-minute discussion about cat caregiving to see whether it altered their expectations and increased the chance of success. Perhaps this already happens at some shelters. I don’t know.
Study mentioned
Characterizing unsuccessful animal adoptions: age and breed predict the likelihood of return, reasons for return and post-return outcomes by Lauren Powell, Chelsea Reinhard, Donya Satriale, Margaret Morris, James Serpell & Brittany Watson and published in Scientific Reports [link].
