When my father was young, a dog saved his life by leaping on a striking snake. Decades later, I watched our overfed ginger cat “mourn” Dad’s death, lying every day in the garage where he once worked, rubbing whiskers against Dad’s tools.

No one who has lived with a pet could deny they have feelings: affection, irritation, fear, perhaps even shame and jealousy, perhaps love. But is their behaviour always what it seems? Did my father’s dog, who was rather unfairly named Bimbo, pounce on the snake to protect him or was some wolfish hunting instinct surfacing at last? Did Max the cat really wonder where Dad had gone or had he just decided to annex the newly available garage?

Dogs and cats have been our companions for thousands of years and remain fiercely popular (almost half of Australians now have a dog, for example). Yet serious scientific questions about their inner lives have only been asked in recent decades. Why is it that a dog always seems to know when you’re sad? Are cats secretly plotting world domination? How did these two species evolve from the wild into our homes? How do you read their body language? And could they one day learn to talk to us?

How did cats and dogs become cats and dogs?

A prehistoric puppy thawed from Siberia’s icy permafrost could solve the mystery of how wolves first became man’s best friend.. ‘Dogor’ is remarkably well preserved, for a two-month-old who died 18,000 years ago, with teeth, fur, even whiskers still intact. And yet, whenever scientists test his DNA to find out his species, they are stumped.

“We don’t [know] yet whether Dogor is a dog or a wolf or a bit of both,” says David Stanton, one of the researchers still testing the pup more than two years after his discovery. Could Dogor be the missing link between wolf and dog? Today the debate is far from settled but most researchers agree pooches evolved from wolves sometime between 15,000 and 32,000 years ago.

Dogs are the wolves that came in to sit by the campfire, who learnt to work with our ancestors for food, helping them hunt and manage other animals, offering protection and now, increasingly in the modern world, companionship. They evolved at our side, they can read our facial expressions. Even their patented “puppy dog eyes” offer an evolutionary advantage – for dogs, life has become not so much the survival of the fittest but of the cutest.

“We’re wired to respond to them, too,” says Melissa Starling, who both trains and researches dogs at the University of Sydney and has her own lively brood at home. “We have no defence against puppy dog eyes.”

Still, dogs today remain 99 per cent wolf (even pugs). The tiny
changes in their DNA affect the digestive system and the brain as
well as the rate of their physical development (which helps explain
the big differences between breeds). Essentially, dogs are well-mannered wolves who can eat grains.

But dogs are not prized as man’s best friend everywhere. In some cultures, they are eaten or considered impure.

Cats, too, face their fair share of prejudice. (Just ask my black rescue cat Nox.) And, while both cats and dogs have been carried out of shelters in huge numbers as we weather COVID-19 lockdowns at home, pets are still routinely abandoned to live as strays in the shadows of our cities and towns.

Unlike dogs, cats are not social by nature, coming from a long, proud line of solitary felines including tigers and leopards. How then have we tamed these wildcats into wearing collars and posing for Instagram photos?

It seems it was largely their idea.

When agriculture began some 10,000 years ago, the grain attracted rats and mice, which eventually attracted smaller wildcats. Our ancestors quite liked this pest control service and so left out treats to encourage the cats to stay. DNA evidence now shows that domestication has helped cats take over the world – shipped out from their original home in the Middle East to just about every continent on earth.

Yet cats have not been selectively bred to the same degree as dogs. Even today, they are still considered only semi-domesticated – the lion in your living room. Within a few generations in the wild, house cats can revert back to larger, fiercer animals, the feral cats that now wreak such a toll on our wildlife. (This might account for all those mysterious sightings of “panthers” and “leopards” in remote corners of Australia.)

Do cats and dogs love us?

Any wild animal might become “tamer” if handled by humans from a young age. And, as our urban sprawl keeps on sprawling, there are even early signs that other animals such as coyotes might be growing more familiar with us. But cats and dogs are different. While they still need to be around humans early to grow up “normal” (that is, well-behaved), it’s not just nurture at play. Thousands of years by our side has created some serious chemistry too.

Both species have been recorded getting a boost in oxytocin – the hormone released when we’re in love or bonding – while being patted by their owners. Dogs seem to get a bigger hit of this “molecule d’amour” than cats. Indeed, both dogs and their owners can produce it just by staring into each other’s eyes (this does not happen between wolves and humans). When US neuroscientist Gregory Berns began training dogs to lie still in noisy MRI machines, he found another promising sign of affection: the reward centre in a dog’s brain lights up more powerfully in the presence of its owner’s scent compared to when it’s sniffing other humans or dogs.

Twenty-five years ago, Jeffrey Masson, a former psychoanalyst from California, wrote his first bestselling book on animals When Elephants Weep and found himself accused of that great intellectual sin: anthropomorphising (attributing human traits to animals or objects). But, today, most scientists agree that animals can have complex, even profound emotions.

Masson himself believes dogs are now better at loving than people are. “Just as you can’t be as content as a cat, no one will ever love you like your dog,” he says. “They love purely.”

He recalls a tiny puppy he rescued from a car crash when he was studying in India. The pair became inseparable until it was time for Masson to return home to the States. He found the dog, which he’d named Puppy, a loving new family and had the tearful goodbye. But, the next day as he was farewelling a professor at his university, there came a sudden banging and scratching at the door. “It was Puppy. I still can’t understand it. Someone even swore later they had seen Puppy hop on and off a bus to the university.”

With cats, love is a little more complicated. They are famously independent, even aloof at times. They require wooing, chin scratches, multiple openings of tin cans. And even then it’s hard to ignore that cold look of disdain from the top of the bookshelf while doing your morning yoga routine.

“Cats are so graceful, everything they do is aesthetically pleasing,” says Masson. “Of course, not everything we do is pleasing to them … But they choose us, they’re capable of deep affection. If you’ve ever shared a bed with a cat, you’ll know. They really settle in, they purr.”

Still, cats are not necessarily faithful. One of Masson’s own once migrated next door. “And my neighbour didn’t even like cats [at first].”

The fickleness of cats is why many scientists are still loath to study them in the lab. To test one cat, you need three, they will say, as the other two will probably withdraw consent halfway through. “They are notoriously difficult,” says Federico Rossano, who works with animals of all shapes and sizes as director of the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California. “We saw a huge boost in research into dogs starting from the ’90s but we haven’t seen the same with cats. But when they do participate, they can give us great results, even match the dogs sometimes.”

At the University of Oregon, Kristyn Vitale and Monique Udell have run groundbreaking experiments showing that cats display the same signs of attachment to their owners as dogs. Even more astounding, they’ve shown that cats prefer interacting with people over toys and, yes, food, and will seek out humans who pay attention to them.

Because domestication has made cats and dogs reliant on us, both species live in a kind of permanent juvenile mindset, Vitale says, where we become almost a surrogate mother. It’s why you see cats purring and “kneading” with their paws – the same behaviours kittens usually grow out of.

How do cats and dogs perceive the world?

Humans tend to see the world first – dogs smell it. For dogs (and to a lesser extent cats), smell is the primary sense – and the world is one aromatic buffet of informative scents. The nose of a dog is at least 10,000 times more powerful than your own. It can sniff out storms before a whisper of rain is on the air, find cancer cells in our blood, or catch a familiar scent up to 20 kilometres away. We have bred dogs to help us hunt and now we train them for more modern jobs such as sniffing out bombs, drugs, even COVID. Squads of coronavirus-sniffing canines, for example, have been trialled in airports around the world (but don’t expect a pooch to replace the eye-watering Q-tip
test any time soon)

“Smell is such a minor sense for us it’s hard to appreciate what the world is like for them,” Starling says. When a dog stops on a walk, it’s a little like checking social media, they will often sniff around to see who else has been there and leave behind a “post” of their own.

But, as it turns out, cats may make even better sniffer animals than dogs (if they could be persuaded to take up the job). Research by Vitale and others has found that, while cats have fewer smell receptors than dogs overall, they have a more refined palate, with more of a particular protein in the nose believed to help animals differentiate between smells. Vitale, who once ran her own version of puppy preschool for kittens, insists cats can be trained, too. “People think it’s bananas but they are quite capable of learning,′
Starling agrees. ’Especially if they’re food motivated.”

I don’t have a backyard, and so I don’t have a dog at the moment. But, in the interest of research (or perhaps as a cry for help), I have instead started taking my two cats for walks – on leads. Most days we make it to the end of the street before turning for home. After a brief standoff, they usually waddle back, pausing perhaps to solicit some extra pats or cast one synchronised glare at the grey cat over the road.

Masson assures me I haven’t gone mad. He confesses he used to take his six cats for walks to the beach when he lived on the coast of New Zealand. They’d stroll down in the dead of night when no one else was around. The family dog would come too and the chickens and rabbit would sometimes follow. “It was some of the happiest times of my life,” Masson says. “The cats would race off and then hide and leap out and scare the dog. They loved it!”

To my surprise, so do mine. They meow at the back door. They drag out their harnesses. They throw their little heads back in the breeze and flop in the grass, eyes closed, purring. They even let me lead them, sort of, if I ask really nicely. Their ears are constantly moving, triangulating sounds.

A cat’s hearing is even better than a dog’s (perfect for catching every stealthy opening of the pantry door) and both animals can pick up much higher frequencies than humans. Where we have
the advantage is in catching minor differences in pitch, say for appreciating a Vivaldi concerto. Humans are unusually good at this in the animal kingdom, rivalled only by bats. But, as biologist
John Bradshaw writes in Cat Sense, a cat could never be trained to sing in tune, which is “bad news for Andrew Lloyd Webber”.

The vision of cats and dogs is also less precise than humans because it’s designed to help them hunt, catching movement more than detail. So, while they have a wider field of vision (240 degrees for dogs and 200 for cats compared to 180 for humans), cats in particular struggle to focus close up. They also don’t see in the rich spectrum of colour that we enjoy, but neither are they completely colour blind; the world is painted in mostly blues and
yellows for cats and dogs. And they can see much better than we can at night thanks to a reflective layer behind the eye that helps catch even the faintest glimmer of light (and gives them that distinctive green eyeshine). Some scientists even think they can see in ultraviolet.

Starling watches one of her dogs, Kestral, a Portuguese Podengo bred originally to chase rabbits, shoot through a tiny hole in the fence without slowing a beat. “She’s so fast, she’ll go straight for a gap I don’t even know is there, like she’s got a map in her head.” Of course, Kestral returns.

Dogs like to stay near their humans, while cats tend to stick to a more vaguely defined home territory (that sometimes extends into the neighbour’s kitchen). Armed with a famously gravity-defying sense of balance, as well as sensitive whiskers to judge space, they will scale fences, trees, roofs and squeeze through every nook and cranny. Yet, while cats often fight other felines who cross into this range, research (and spy cameras) have revealed they are not as militant about defending it as once believed. A cat investigating another’s scent in their yard, or on their owner, might be more curious than jealous, Vitale says. When they rub on us, she thinks it’s more to say ‘this is someone I know and like’ rather than ‘this is my human, not yours’. Stray cats sometimes greet each other in the same way, and even have the unusual habit of forming colonies that loosely resemble lion prides.

Can pets teach us things, and sense our feelings?

It had been a sweet but unlucky puppy named Harvey who prepared me for the suddenness of death, the chest-splitting pain. I was eight when he died. For many children, Masson says, the death of a beloved pet will be their first experience of grief. “The good thing is people don’t really say ‘It’s just a dog’ anymore. Pets help teach children empathy, too.”

And they can do more than that. At the end of his mother’s life, Masson would take his dog Benjy into her nursing home and watch him lift the shadow of dementia from her eyes. As a reporter, I’ve seen it too, the therapeutic power of an animal, not just in aged care but in schools among children with a history of trauma. They’d tell me the moment they reached out their hands to touch the therapy dog, they instantly calmed down, as if the dog was a kind of talisman.

“Dogs want to be near us,” Starling says. But, while she agrees most pooches know when the humans around them are sad, and many will try to fix it, she notes sometimes, in coming over, they are really seeking comfort themselves.

“They’re saying, ‘This is stressing me out. I need some pats.’ They’re like children in a lot of ways. Some dogs make excellent therapy dogs, just like some people make great counsellors. Some can’t handle it.”

Starling, whose own dog Erik the Tall is being treated for clinical anxiety, calls canines "social acrobats". "They can handle a lot of situations and live in harmony with lots of other species. But they put up with things humans do too, even when their body language tells me they don’t really like it.”

A wagging tail is not always the sign of a happy dog – if it’s high and stiff, the dog could be agitated. “That’s when I look at the face. If there’s tension there, if they’re making jerky glances around. And then, if they suddenly close their mouth, that’s a problem. Often, what happens next is quite dramatic.”

Likewise felines, and their famously inscrutable ‘resting cat face’; it can be hard to know when a cat is about to scratch or purr. Even Grumpy Cat, made famous by the internet for her signature frown, was not really grumpy, just misunderstood (and with a rare medical condition). Vitale has four cats at home and says felines are easy enough to read if you know what you’re looking for. Slow, sleepy blinks can actually function like a smile. But, when the ears go back, and their tail is swishing with sudden speed, it’s probably time to take your hand back from that tummy rub. And a cat ‘chattering’ at a bird could be a sign of frustrated hunting instinct – and a need for more play.

But what if our pets could just tell us what they wanted?

Primates might be closer to humans in DNA (and brainpower) but researchers say cats and dogs are much better at understanding us, and that means they might also be better at communicating. In 2018, speech pathologist Christina Hunger began teaching her young blue heeler, Stella, to ‘talk’ using the same interactive soundboard she deploys to help young children master language
(tapping a button on the board will play a recorded phrase). In one
video, Stella taps the ‘outside’ and ‘look’ buttons in response to a
sudden noise outside.

Copycat “talking dogs” have since flooded the internet. A Sheepadoodle named Bunny may have even achieved some kind of self-awareness. In one viral TikTok video, Bunny appears to tap the button to play the phrase ’Who” “This” before staring at herself in the mirror.

Rossano is now studying Bunny and 1650 other dogs learning to “speak” with the soundboards at home – as well as 85 obliging cats and three curious horses.

Above: Estelle the dog delights her owner by pressing the “Love you” button. Source: TheyCanTalk.org

“We’re trying to work out if the [animals] are tapping the button because they’ve been trained to do it, because they get a reward or attention, or because they really understand,” Rossano says. “Videos on Instagram can be edited. What we’re looking for is if they start showing flexibility the way a toddler would, using a word like ‘where’ to ask for the location of different things.”

So far, Rossano says the canines in the study have outstripped his expectations – at times asking for help if in pain or even speaking for other dogs in the house the way an older sibling would. “I thought the humans would be leading the conversations, instead we see the dogs initiating it. And, interestingly, most of their owners say they seem less frustrated now, they’re barking less. It’s kind of like a toddler screaming if they’re not being understood.”

While Rossano is making no big claims until the data is in (“it may just be wishful thinking”), if animals do pass the test it could transform our relationship to them. “Dogs seem particularly well suited to this [given] they’re already so co-operative with humans. But you see pigs act almost like dogs if raised with people . . . what if pigs could [speak] too?”

Above: The feline participants in Rossano’s study, “They Can Talk”, are particularly fond of the “more” “treats” buttons on the soundboard. Source: TheyCanTalk.org

Masson, Rossano and Vitale don’t think it’s unethical to keep
pets, especially if adopting a stray. (“These animals are here now,” Vitale says.) But they stress that the more we understand the
richness of animal thinking, the more we may need to rethink how
we treat them.

What do our pets know of death, for instance? Dogs seem to want us with them when they are dying. “Vets will tell you they panic if [their owners] leave the room when they’re being put down, like they know,” Masson says. And cats often slink off somewhere, as if to wait out death alone.

Our old family cat slipped away into the garden like this the very evening I was finishing this article. She was always in the garden, our Padfoot. She liked to sneak up on unsuspecting visitors and start a game of tag. You’d hear a sudden, startling meow behind you, part greeting, part battlecry, and then a white paw would whip out from a bush to tap your foot, and the chase was on. So we buried her there, under greystones from the pond. We lit candles and said a few words. She looked tiny in death; one of the finest hunters in the animal kingdom, wrapped in a seemingly unnecessary amount of fluff.

It struck me then. We may not always know what our animals really mean to us: are they roommates, workers, critics or family? They are not people, of course. But they seem to reach us somewhere other humans can’t. And they leave us far too quickly.

Whether they get as much out of this deal of companionship as we do, no one can say. But, millennia on, they are still at our side.

And it didn’t feel nearly as strange as I thought it would to give a cat a funeral.

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