Let’s be honest: cats can be magnificent, unapologetic assholes.
They will knock your coffee mug off the counter while staring dead into your eyes. They will shred your curtains, ambush your ankles in the hallway, yowl at 3:00 AM because the void called to them, and ignore your existence for three days straight. They are independent, untamed, and entirely unbothered by your rules.
So why aren’t we shocking the cat?
Walk into any pet superstore, and you will find entire aisles dedicated to the electronic subjugation of dogs—remote shock collars, invisible fence zap-boxes, and anti-bark units. But try to find a commercial shock collar designed for a house cat. You won’t.
Why don’t people shock their cats? The answer reveals the entire dark truth about how we treat our dogs.
The Cat Won’t Take the Abuse
People don’t shock cats because owners intuitively know something profound: cats are not forgiving.
If you put a shock collar on a cat, zap it for acting like a cat, and try to break its spirit, that cat will never trust you again. It won’t look at you with pleading, co-dependent eyes waiting for forgiveness. It will write you off completely, hide under the bed, turn feral on your furniture, or slice your hand open the second you fall asleep.
Cats have firm boundaries. They refuse to be gaslit into believing that pain is love.
Dogs, on the other hand, are remarkably, heartbreakingly forgiving. A dog can be corrected, choked, yanked on a prong collar, or zapped with a remote training collar, and what does it do? It crawls back to your feet, wags its tail, and tries to appease you. It never stops trying to earn your approval, even when you are the source of its terror.
Taking Advantage of Loyalty
And that is the great, unspoken tragedy of the human-dog relationship: we take absolute advantage of that boundless loyalty.
We treat dogs the way we would never dare treat a cat precisely because a dog will endure it. We mistake compliance for happiness and forgiveness for consent. Because the dog keeps trying, we feel justified in applying more pressure, more management, more hardware, and more control.
If we treated cats the way we treat dogs, we’d be living in a war zone of shredded upholstery and open hostility. But because cats demand basic respect for their autonomy, we let them be cats. We give them a litter box, a scratching post, and space to exist without strapping a high-tech torture device to their neck.
Imagine if we extended that same basic decency to our dogs. Stop punishing them for forgiving us, strip away the industrial arsenal, and start treating loyalty like a privilege rather than a license to control.