They say cats are more sinister than dogs, but I think that is unfair. While dogs are continuously honored as man’s best friends, cats must dutifully assume the role of man’s worst enemy or most persistent bully. In our collective imagination, cats are often aligned with dark powers and/or the supernatural: they have nine lives, they bring bad luck, they might dabble in time-travel. But all of these things are slander and in fact, prejudiced against cats, who have done nothing wrong except having fucked-up faces.
Cats just look like that, according to experts; they’re not actually planning your demise and it’s rude to call them psychopaths, as that’s a term that’s meant to be applied only to humans. The problem with cats is they’re nothing like humans—and they’re not like dogs either, which according to the Atlantic, “humans have spent thousands more years domesticating and molding in our image.”
It’s not your cat’s fault their face is fucked up. That’s how they were born:
Cats, [researcher Mikel Maria Delgado] points out, simply don’t have the facial muscles to make the variety of expressions a dog (or human) can. So when we look at a cat staring at us impassively, it looks like a psychopath who cannot feel or show emotion. But that’s just its face.
If you gaze upon your cat’s sweet yet unsmiling face and feel a twinge of fear, you’re just not paying close enough attention. Cats make use of what they got, and that’s their tails and ears:
Cats communicate not with facial expressions but through the positions of their ears and tails. Their emotional lives can seem inscrutable—and even nonexistent—until you spend a lot of time getting to know one.
Humans rely on a wide range of social cues to make sense of each other and the world. Do not make the mistake of thinking your cat can or should conform to these expectations. Cats—who, again, just look like that and are not making a weird face at you—are cats, and you can’t change them. Nor should you want to, in my opinion. Just let cats be, and don’t be so judgmental about it.