Of all the strange behaviours of the rich, owning horses long struck me as the most bizarre. A horse, when you think about it, is a hopelessly unsuccessful attempt to combine a pet with a form of transportation. So whenever anyone mentioned that their daughter wanted a horse, I always recommended they bought a Range Rover and a kitten instead. The two would cost much less to run, and provide far more in the way of utility, pleasure and companionship.
Or at least that’s what I used to think. I always loved cats and thought horses rather stupid. But then it dawned on me: cats have effectively hacked us.
The relationship between a horse and a human is a reciprocal one. They perform useful work and we supply them with food and shelter. It’s a straightforward business deal. That too was once the relationship we had with cats — they would control vermin in exchange for housing. But in time cats craftily developed a means to exploit a bug in the software of the human brain. By producing the purr and the winsome ‘silent miaow’ (two features believed to have evolved only after domestication) Felis catus found a vulnerability in our mental code: suddenly it was absolved from performing useful work around the house; the deluded owner would now supply all its needs in exchange for the illusion of affection.
Like many successful hacks, the cat hack exploits the human capacity for self-delusion. We desperately want to believe our cats adore us, and so we are surprisingly eager to interpret their self-serving behaviour as though it were motivated by love. Cats are the courtesans of the animal world.
In this respect, the cat hack is similar to the unconscious mental hack worked on us by the NHS, welfare programmes and international aid: we are so eager to believe in the value of good intentions that any mention of self-interest or adverse consequences in discussing such activities is met with self-righteous fury.
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