of cats and men

 I've recently seen a lot of comments and posts on social media asserting that cats don't recognize humans as being fundamentally different from cats.

This assertion is made in service of describing differences between cats and dogs. Dogs, the argument goes, know that people are not dogs. Cats, on the other hand, think that people are just incompetent cats.

I call bullshit.

Full disclosure: I am a cat person. Growing up, I had both dogs and cats. And I preferred dogs. But I -- and my family, once I got married -- have had cats since 1995. Right now my family has four -- Red, 18, Wilko and Copic.

I have seen how cats react to new and unknown cats and I've seen how they react to new and unknown people. If you bring a new adult cat into a home with cats who are already established, there's a lot of hissing, growling and swatting. The established cats make it clear that the new one is not welcome. If a new human comes into the house, the cats don't mostly ignore him.

Don;t tell me they don't know the difference.