Anyone who has truly loved a cat will tell you they are as unique and emotionally deep as any human you might meet. Scientists in their labs will roll their eyes and call us deluded when we tell them our cat loves us, saying it is all in our minds. Depending on who you ask, they are unfeeling food manipulators or loving family members. So what, if any, are the emotional needs of your Maine Coon?
Cats such as your Maine Coon have a rich and complex inner world of instinct-based emotion with basic needs as deep as any dog or human. Cat’s emotions lie intertwined with their instinctual urges and usually satisfying the one achieves the other. Your cat needs cognitive, social, and physical enrichment in their environment to be stress-free and happy.
We have overlooked the cat’s emotional being for too long and perpetuated our own myths about the supposedly “selfish” creature that shares our home. While everyone has some sense of a dog’s world, we may not have cared to look deep into the minds of these beautiful predators longing for us to understand them. Here’s a deep dive into what it means to provide your Maine Coon’s emotional needs.
Contents
- Why Cats Emotional Needs Are Different to Dogs
- Understanding Your Maine Coon’s Needs
- 1. The Expression of Their Hunting Drive
- 2. Requirement for Personal Space
- 3. a Routine for Your Cat’s Happiness
- 4. The Necessity of Your Kitty to Mark Its Territory
- 5. Social Needs
- 6. Respecting Cats’ Personal Space
- 7. The Bond Between Cat and Human
- 8. Enrichment of Your Cat’s Environment
- Closing Meows
Why Cats Emotional Needs Are Different to Dogs
I always get so mad when I read so-called “scientific studies” that “prove” all kinds of things about cats that they have little analogous to human emotion—that their behavior is purely instinctual. They say cats don’t really love us or experience a rich inner world of purrfectly feline emotions. This attitude is a form of cognitive bias.
First, we need to eliminate this harmful myth of cats as selfish manipulators who tolerate human company for kibbles. Unlike dogs until reasonably recently, evolution-wise, cats stem from a solitary ancestor who lived their lives on their own—meeting only to mate and raise their young.
Cats domesticated themselves some 10,000 years ago, and we have only set to meddling in their genetics in any meaningful way over the last 200 years. And Guess what? Instead of breeding them for their social behavior like dogs, we decided to breed them for their looks, fur, and brachycephalic Persian faces that look like furry babies.
Their brains are perfect hunting instruments so perfectly adapted that even today, there are barely any noticeable differences between the domestic cat brain and that of their ancestors (beyond size reduction). People constantly compare their behavior to the innately social dog, purpose-bred for 40,000 years to please humans.
Research proves (when scientists even bother) that felines are far from selfish, self-contained creatures who are untrainable dictators who need little from us in terms of time and attention. We have ignored their inner needs for too long, neglecting them and then blaming their detachment and unhappiness as part of their natures.
So let’s take the step and dive into some cutting-edge research on your cat’s instincts and motivations so that we can finally give them not superficial love but the understanding and enriched lives we have denied them for so long.
Understanding Your Maine Coon’s Needs
To address what it entails to provide for your Maine Coon emotionally, we need a cat’s-eye view of what the world looks like. This way, we can understand what they need to thrive and be the happy and loving creatures they can be.
Negative emotions arise when a cat cannot change an undesirable environment or when they can’t achieve a desired outcome. Your cat’s physical and emotional world is deeply interlinked with environmental disturbances that give rise to emotional responses.
Although some physical needs seem unrelated to your cat’s emotions, their instinctual drives and the rich world of their senses provide the feel-good chemicals behind all happy mammals, including us. So, perfecting your cat’s environmental and instinctual needs is the first step to providing for their emotional ones.
1. The Expression of Their Hunting Drive
In your domesticated cat’s semi-wild brains, they are hardwired to hunt. In nature, they will likely spend as much as 50% of their time hunting prey, often eating 7-20 small critter meals daily. So much of a cat’s natural drive is to catch prey that two set meals a day in the morning and evening leave plenty of open time for your cat to fill.
More and more studies show that providing your cat with food puzzles and changing your cat’s eating routine makes a much happier cat. Depriving your cat of their instinctual need to hunt prey can lead to boredom, obesity, diabetes, and a host of behavioral problems—especially when more and more owners are confining their cats indoors.
Food puzzles come in various shapes and sizes, but the primary function is to hold kibbles or treats in a container your cat needs to manipulate to access their feed. Some food puzzles have optional holes that an owner can change, making it easier or difficult to reach their “prey.”
Studies in wild cats in zoo scenarios show that food puzzle systems can improve physical well-being and reduce stress behaviors such as pacing. However, one should also provide a sense of novelty for your cat, rotating several cat puzzles to keep your moggy from getting bored.
Puzzle toys need not break the bank; you can devise your own from common household goods.
It’s a great idea to take advantage of your cat’s natural crepuscular hunting rhythms and feed them at their favorite times, dusk and early dawn. A great game is to hide your cat’s puzzle, so they have to search for their “prey.”
2. Requirement for Personal Space
Another strong emotional-instinctive drive in your Maine Coon is the deep-seated territorial impetus hardwired into their newly domesticated brains. Domestic cats’ ancestors were solitary, and territory was vital to resources, reproduction, and avoiding conflict with other solitary felines.
Your cat invests enormous importance in marking their spaces with glands that mark their scent in their paw pad, cheeks, and flanks. Felines hold a deep need for a place with their familiar scent, free from traffic and safe from disturbance.
Cats love to follow their wild companions and use higher vantage points to survey their dominion, so elevated cat platforms are essential to meet their needs. Their private space out of the way with their own water, litter box bedding, and toys also gives your cat a sense of sanctuary and safety.
Cats prefer to keep at least 3-9 feet from their other feline companions unless they seek companionship. So setting up a separate area for each of your kitties makes sense, and if your space is limited, you can create vertical space for your kitties to use when they go Garbo and “vant to be alone.”
3. a Routine for Your Cat’s Happiness
Cats thrive on routine and structure and consistent play, feed, and human contact, all affecting your cat’s emotional well-being. Routine gives cats a sense of security and reduces stress, activating the central threat response system (CTRS) and leading to behavioral problems and ill health.
Neglecting play times or distracting from giving proper attention and feeding times to your cat can make your cat sick physically or create issues like house soiling. And no, this is not a calculated revenge so many love to misattribute to their poor cats—but an actual physical manifestation of emotional stress. A consistent routine for playtime and interaction, and stick to it as far as your life allows. Your kitty will thrive on this one simple decision.
4. The Necessity of Your Kitty to Mark Its Territory
Your cat lives in a world filtered by their acute senses—a world of immediacy and a highly tuned physical apprehension of their reality. Many cat lovers underestimate the power of smell that their felines possess. Some estimate that their strength of smell is at least 14 times more powerful than ours. Cats have a deep genetic need to mark their areas with their scent, a strong evolutionary force from their not-so-distant wild cat past.
Although scientists still question the full role of odor in a feline’s life, evidence suggests that the variety of sebaceous glands on a cat provide valuable markers to organize the world into what is known and what is unknown.
Cats use complex scent markers to communicate with other cats, lay out their territory, and share their presence with other cats in the territory.
These scents, unrelated to urine or fecal marking, give a cat a sense of safety in their environment, so allowing them the freedom to mark their home is vital to keep your cat happy and stress-free. Scratching posts are essential in a cat home, providing a place to shed their outer claw skin and mark their world with special interdigital glands in their paw pads.
Likewise, cat litter boxes serve a dual function to eliminate waste and communicate complex signature scents in a cat’s territory. Clean, fragrance-free, and suitably deep litter boxes are essential for keeping your cat happy (and avoiding litter box failures).
5. Social Needs
Despite their solitary origins, studies in feral cat communities show they create social connections. However, these connections are that queen cats share feeding duties, and males (when not fighting for dominance) work together to protect the community from invasion. Cats form bonds and conduct allogrooming and tactile displays to those in their community and often sleep and play together.
However, the affectionate greetings between feral cats tend to be brief, and cats tend to keep their own space when not actively seeking communication.
Your Maine Coon: Early Life Experiences
Cats have a very narrow window to familiarize themselves with humans between 2 and 12 weeks. Early kittenhood often dictates whether a cat will be affectionate toward humans or entirely aloof.
When kittens are handled gently and often in their formative stages, they are more likely to express affection and love to their human family. Your kitten’s father also plays a genetic role in determining whether their brood will be people lovers.
Harmony Among Cats and Other Animals
Far from being aggressive towards other cats and species in the home; studies show that, on the whole, cats live together with their mixed families quite well, provided their owner provides for their needs.
A Public Library of Science peer-reviewed study of over 1200 cat owners found that far from being a disharmonious norm, cats and dogs slept together 68.5% and played together 62.4%.
6. Respecting Cats’ Personal Space
Cats are new to the art of socialization, so most don’t seek the amount of touch and attention that more social creatures like dogs require. Cats love human touch when they initiate affection. Still, their super-sensitive bodies can easily translate the pleasure of contact to pain and anxiety if you don’t follow their bodily cues.
Cats enjoy petting around their ears and face, areas rich with sebaceous glands that produce their signature scent. They most enjoy your touch in the temporal region—between the eyes and ears. The caudal region at the base of the tail is usually a no-go area where your cat will react with varying levels of irritation—or needle-sharp reprimands!
Cats can’t explain what they like and hate, so their bodies express many warning signs when humans overstep their boundaries. Being sensitive to your cat’s autonomy goes a long way toward building trust—essential for a strong emotional bond.
Here are some cat body clues that express displeasure:
| Cat Body Part | Movement |
|---|---|
| The tail | Twitches side to side |
| The ears | Flattened or pulled back |
| Eyes | Wide open, dilated pupils, few blinks |
| Head | Lowering the head, turning the head to the side |
| Whiskers | Flattened to the face |
| Body | Low to the ground, tense |
You can harm your relationship with your cat more by being overly affectionate than under affectionate, so always respect your Maine Coons boundaries.
On the other hand, your cat may express happiness by the following signs:
| Cat Body Part | Movement |
|---|---|
| Tail | Upright with a hooked tip |
| Ears | Ears at shoulder height or higher |
| Eyes | Wide open with narrow pupils, slow blinks=love |
| Whiskers | Neutral, as the sides of the face or slightly forward |
| Body | Loose and fluid, languid |
7. The Bond Between Cat and Human
Cats take social cues from their owner’s facial expressions, often initiating contact more readily when owners have happy expressions and performing allorubbing when their owner shows depression.
Cats, on the whole, enjoy initiating contact when they feel sociable, and often, humans can upset a cat by timing their affections poorly, such as when a cat is at rest or sleeping. Overzealous owners often have the opposite effect on cats, who withdraw when humans ignore their signals for peace.
Human personality also affects cat behavior, with neurotic owners often displaying fear of strangers and negative social interactions. Happy, confident owners, cats tend to be bolder and more friendly.
Cats Feel More Safe in Their Humans Company
Independent studies in feline behavior have found that cats display more confidence when their primary humans are near and show a bond to their chosen human comparable to infants. They express more curiosity about new environments and more positive bodily cues when in the presence of their chosen human.
Cats Experience Separation Anxiety
Recent research by the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants (IAABC) shows that cats deeply bonded with their humans show substantial separation anxiety when separated from their loved humans for long stretches and even daily absences.
The bond between cats and humans can be so strong that separation can be behind several physical ailments in felines. The stress of separation from their loved humans may cause behavioral maladaptations such as house soiling and even urination on their owner’s beds. People erroneously attribute the poor creature with spite or vengeful behaviors when the poor creature is experiencing acute psychological distress.
According to some experts, cats can and do experience feelings such as happiness, contentment, anger, fear, and frustration. Cats react to facial and bodily cues from their humans, as well as grief and panic when separated from their attachment figures.
Cats use sounds and vocalizations with their chosen humans that have no comparison in feral or wild cat communities. Moreover, these “love languages‘ are similar but different between individual cats and their loved humans.
Humans who share close bonds with cats can also recognize the different types of meows of strange cats and their motivation, while cats recognize their owner’s voice out of several similarly toned human voices. This evidence shows the unique effects of bonding between cats and humans and how it fosters this beautiful connection between humans and felines.
Here are some of the sweetest Maine Coons chatting to their humans:
8. Enrichment of Your Cat’s Environment
We can’t all stay at home with our kitty as much as we would love to, but you can do some things to alleviate the stress caused by your cats missing you. Create a fun place for your cat to be, especially if they are indoor cats.
- Cat gyms and climbing trees greatly distract cats on their own.
- Access to places where a cat can view the world outside, such as window cat hammocks or elevated runs, can give your kitty something to distract themselves.
- Cat music is gaining popularity, with specialist tones and registers that cats enjoy.
- Cat TV can give your kitty something to trill over while you are working.
- Catnip hidden in toys is a helpful solution to boredom.
- Interactive treat puzzles are a good distraction as they also serve as an outlet for the prey drive.
- Consider calming cat pheromones such as Feliway Friends.
- If your cat stays alone, consider a companion cat for company.
- Provide protected outdoor access or harness train your apartment cat.
Closing Meows
You can meet the emotional needs of your Maine Coon by paying attention and understanding the physical and mental needs of your feline sidekick. First, you must decipher their unique language to feel happy and express their carefree and oh-so-engaging behaviors. Your effort will pay for the priceless experience of cat love in all its soft, furry, heart-melting glory.
