The Relationship Between Humans and House Cats

Japanese | English

– Those Being Healed Are Overwhelmingly Human –

People often say,
“I’m healed by my cat.”

But when we step back and observe this relationship calmly,
we find very little symmetry in it.
If anyone is being healed, it is overwhelmingly the human.

A house cat does not concern itself with our emotions.
It does not try to please us or adjust its behavior for our comfort.
It ignores our calls, avoids us when we insist, and approaches only when it chooses to.
Human convenience and sentiment are, at best, peripheral.

And yet, humans find peace in its presence.

A cat does not exist to heal.
It has no intention to comfort or reassure.
It simply exists—
as a living being occupying space.

The healing humans feel is not something the cat gives.
It is something humans take.

A body curled tightly in sleep.
A sudden moment of exposed vulnerability.
The low vibration of a purr.

These are not performances designed for human satisfaction.
They are behaviors shaped by survival and evolution.
Still, humans assign meaning to them, project emotions onto them, and declare themselves healed.

This imbalance is the essence of the human–cat relationship.

Humans say they “keep” cats.
In reality, humans enter the cat’s territory, provide food and safety, and receive emotional stability in return.
Cats may appear dependent, but inwardly they remain strikingly self-contained.

Humans, on the other hand, are not.

They carry loneliness, anxiety, exhaustion, and a constant overload of information.
And they are saved by a creature’s silence and indifference.
A presence that demands nothing, judges nothing, and explains nothing becomes, by its mere existence, a form of refuge.

A cat neither affirms nor denies a human.
It simply sits nearby—
if it feels like it.

That distance is precisely what humans find unbearably comforting.

For a cat, a human does not need to be a source of healing.
As long as there is food, warmth, and protection from danger—with minimal interference—that is enough.

Still, humans like to call this arrangement “coexistence,”
and search for equality within it.

But if we ask who is being healed, the answer is obvious.

The cat does not change.
The human does.

Humans project their need for support onto a voiceless being
and find salvation in its silence.

The relationship between humans and house cats is not one of being healed,
but of inevitably becoming healed.

And the cat remains unaware of all of it.

That is fine.

Because for humans,
that unknowing presence is the deepest healing of all.