This is a philosophical question even if it does incorporate poo which is quite a nice juxtaposition. It is said that humans are hardwired to be repulsed by their own excreta. And apparently Charles Darwin identified human beings’ disgust at excrement as an essential human emotion. Further, Prof Valerie Curtis, a self-styled “disgustologist”, argued that being disgusted about your poop is an ancient and basic motivation which evolved to protect humans from pathogens and parasites in faeces. So, our disgust of faeces, including our own, is about self-preservation. So why aren’t cats disgusted by faeces?
Cats are just as good as humans, if not better than us, at self-preservation. After all, they have nine lives which is clearly indicative of their powers of survival. Cats go a lot further than not being disgusted by poo; they actually lick it off their bottoms when they need to. It’s instinctive. They are fastidiously clean as we know. They are also incredibly non-squeamish.
And they’ve decided that eating their own poo is not a danger to their health otherwise cats would have evolved to be disgusted by poo as humans are.
Unfortunately, I can’t find any experts who have commented on the domestic cat’s emotional relationship with their own faeces 😎. I have to think about it myself.
Having done so, I think that the difference between humans and cats in this regard is not to do with cats being particularly emotionally resilient and stoic but because humans have become very soft and pampered with a predisposition to being squeamish about a lot of things, perhaps partly because we tend, more so in developed countries, to live in a sterile world of our own making.
Humans like to brush things under the carpet i.e. push away and bury anything which they don’t like to think about. They choose to be blind to the difficult issues in life and kick them into the long grass. You see this over and over again. The classic is climate change. Because we can’t OFTEN see the effects of climate change, we want to believe that it doesn’t exist. The effects are becoming more in-your-face.
And this is the reason why idiot car drivers leave their car engines running while they are NOT travelling. They don’t see the poisonous fumes emitted by the exhaust system which they inhale themselves. It’s pure ignorance and its blindness to stuff they don’t want to think about.
And the same goes for the dreaded shit. We want to flush it down the toilet as quickly as possible and forget about it. It then disappears into the ‘ether’ but actually it goes somewhere, often into the sea because the water companies do not treat it properly and so discharge it into the sea or rivers. Perhaps one of the biggest problems in society is how to get rid of shit!
Raw sewage discharged into the sea on the south coast of the UK – Aug 20, 2022.
We see glittering and glistening cities particularly in the Middle East where everything is impressively grand and spotlessly clean but the whole edifice is built upon a mountain of shit! Enough already.
I’ve digressed but cats are great realists. They live in the moment; they are not squeamish about anything. After all, mothers giving birth to kittens eat the placenta and sometimes eat their own kittens if they are stillborn or going to die anyway. And domestic cats can flick a switch between eating a mouse that they killed one second ago and which is still hot and then nibble on some dry cat food from a bowl. That’s the power of the mentality of the domestic cat.
I guess I have to finish up on the point that domestic cats don’t seem to suffer health wise from licking their bottoms. So, I’ve got a feeling that the instinctive self-preservation idea of humans being disgusted by their own poop is misleading.
Back in the Middle Ages the religious types thought that because cats wash their own bottoms, they were devils because it was devilish behaviour. More ignorance. Even today a lot of people who don’t like cats criticise cats for licking their bottoms. The same difference almost.
Proposed local law to deal with domestic cats pooping in neighbor’s backyard
