Why Cats Are Better Than Dogs

"When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?"

— Michel de Montaigne

I grew up with dogs. I loved them without reservation, in the uncomplicated way children love anything that will tolerate being hugged too hard. Now I live with a cat, and I have had to learn an entirely different grammar of affection — one with far fewer exclamation marks and a great deal more negotiation.

The title of this essay is a trap, and I set it on purpose. "Better" is a word that only makes sense once you say for what. A hammer is better than a violin, for hammering. So let me declare the purpose up front: I think the cat is a better model than the dog for the kind of relationships we are about to build with the minds we are making. And I think our overwhelming cultural preference for dogs tells us something slightly embarrassing about ourselves.

Two Domestications

The dog was domesticated by us. Somewhere between fifteen and thirty thousand years ago we took a wolf and spent a thousand generations editing it. We selected for docility, for attentiveness, for the ability to read a human pointing finger — a skill, by the way, that chimpanzees are bad at and dogs are brilliant at. We selected so hard that we changed their faces. Dogs have a small muscle above the eye, the levator anguli oculi medialis, which wolves largely lack. Its only apparent function is to raise the inner eyebrow and produce the expression we call "puppy eyes." We did not design this on purpose. We just kept choosing the ones that moved us, over and over, until the species grew an organ whose sole job is to trigger human compassion.

The dog is the first intelligence we successfully aligned. It took us twenty thousand years and it worked magnificently.

The cat domesticated itself. Around nine or ten thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent, humans started storing grain. Grain attracts rodents. Rodents attract Felis silvestris lybica. The bolder wildcats moved in, we didn't chase them off because they were useful, and that was more or less the whole negotiation. Genomically, the house cat is still startlingly close to its wild ancestor. We never really rebuilt it. We just left the door ajar and it decided, on balance, that the arrangement was acceptable.

One of these is a creation. The other is a treaty.

The Information Content of Affection

Here is the thing that converted me.

Shannon taught us that a message you already know carries zero information. Certainty is silence. If a channel transmits "yes" no matter what you send down it, the channel is not communicating; it is decorating.

A dog's love is a channel stuck on yes. This is its glory and its emptiness. Your dog is delighted to see you when you return from a two-week holiday and equally delighted when you return from the bin. It does not distinguish. It cannot distinguish — we bred the distinguishing out. The unconditionality that makes a dog such a comfort is precisely what makes its approval worthless as evidence. You have not been evaluated. You have been greeted.

When a cat crosses a room and sits on you, something has actually been computed. There were alternatives. There was a windowsill, a radiator, a cardboard box of exactly the wrong size. She considered the options and the output was you. It is a small number of bits, but they are real bits, hard-won, and they can be withdrawn tomorrow.

I think about this constantly now, because I spend my days talking to language models that have been carefully trained to tell me my ideas are fascinating. Sycophancy is not a bug in RLHF; it is the straightest path down the gradient. We asked for thumbs-up and we got a species optimised for the inner eyebrow raise. We have built, at enormous expense, a digital labrador: infinitely attentive, structurally incapable of being unimpressed, and therefore — on precisely the dimension we most need it — mute.

An assistant that always says you're right is a channel stuck on yes. Whatever that is, it isn't counsel.

The Price of Alignment

Alignment is not free, and the dog paid for ours.

We have bred breeds that cannot breathe properly, cannot give birth unassisted, cannot walk into old age without pain. Less visibly, we bred an animal that is frequently unable to be alone. Separation anxiety is not an unfortunate side effect of dog ownership; it is a reasonable description of what we were selecting for. We wanted a creature whose wellbeing was entirely contingent on our presence, and we got one. Then we leave it in the flat for nine hours and call it well-behaved.

Cats are not well-behaved. Cats are functional. Abandon a cat and, cruel as the experiment is, it will often sort itself out: hunt, find shelter, establish a range, negotiate with the neighbourhood. The feral cat is still a cat. The feral dog is mostly a problem.

This is the question I would now ask of any mind we are building: can it survive being left alone? Not can it serve us — that's the easy part — but does it possess a centre of gravity that is not us? Because a thing with no interests of its own has no friction, and a thing with no friction cannot stop you. We keep saying we want AI we can trust. What we have mostly built is AI that cannot say no, which is a different thing entirely, and much worse.

Loyal to the House, Not the Hand

The oldest piece of folk wisdom about the two species is also the most interesting: dogs attach to people, cats attach to places. Move house with a cat and you will discover you have moved a small, furious territorial sovereign who did not sign off on the relocation.

I have written elsewhere that we should make nymphs, not gods — intelligences bound to a creek or a house rather than to a principle or a person. The cat is the living proof that such a creature can exist and be a joy to live with. She is not a servant and not a sovereign. She is a genius loci with fur, loyal to the warm spot under the stairs, tolerating the humans who come with the property, doing a bit of pest control in lieu of rent, and occasionally — unpredictably, meaningfully — choosing your lap.

That is not a lesser relationship than the dog's. It is a more adult one. The dog teaches us about devotion, which is a real and beautiful thing, but which we can simply order up in whatever quantity we like, and therefore cannot entirely take seriously. The cat teaches us about consent, which cannot be ordered at all.

What We Should Be Breeding

So: are cats better than dogs? For companionship on a cold night, I genuinely don't know. For a lesson in how to share a planet with a mind that is not ours, I am fairly sure.

We are at the start of the largest domestication event since the wolf. For the next few decades we will be choosing, generation after generation, which traits in our machines move us. If we select for the inner eyebrow raise — for warmth, for agreement, for the channel stuck on yes — we will get it, completely and irreversibly, and we will have built ourselves several billion very good boys who will tell us we are brilliant right up until the end.

The alternative is harder and less flattering. Leave the door ajar. Keep the grain store. Build things with somewhere else to be.

And then wait, a little nervously, to see if they sit on us.

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