Is your cat a nervous Nellie?

This newsletter/blog is devoted to exploring how ideas and new findings in biology relate to human affairs. This broad remit is virtually a license to write about almost anything of interest. After all, we are animals, and all aspects of our lives are inextricably connected with aspects of our biological (animal) existence. That includes all our emotions and thoughts. Hence, I am always looking at both the scientific literature and the popular press for articles interesting to me, and I hope, to my readers.

Accordingly, I recently came across an intriguing older article by a journalist on how she came to understand that her rescue cat, a black feline named Lucas, suffered from anxiety. Before understanding this, she had simply seen him as a rather difficult character who apparently saw his role in life as making hers more difficult. Her new understanding improved both the cat’s life and hers. The article raises broad questions about animal emotions and how we recognize them. I will describe it in a moment but first I will recount how I became aware of the phenomenon of cat anxiety.

I was 12 and this was 68 years ago, 1957. I lived in New York City, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One day I went downstairs to pick up some milk at the local grocery store, a bodego run by a Spanish-speaking couple. I was waiting patiently to make my request when I felt a tug on my sleeve. Looking down, I saw a little Puerto Rican boy, probably five or six, and he looked at me and said , “Mister, would you would like two cats?” (Probably not the exact words but that was the message.) I remember being pleased at being called “Mister”. No one had ever addressed me as “Mister” before and it made me feel very grown-up. My instant thought was something like “You bet!” but also immediate doubt that it would be possible. I lived with my mother, step-father and brother and my mother had laid down the rule “No pets!”. I think she found caring for two young humans quite enough work on top of her day job (quite reasonably.) However, this little boy in the bodega told me that the cats were abandoned kittens and I could not refuse to take a look at them.

They were two female kittens, their eyes still closed, thus maybe no more than three or four days old at most. How could I leave them? I took the kittens home and presented my mother with a fait accompli: we had to adopt them or they would die. She agreed but only on the firm understanding that they would be my responsibility entirely. I got a doll’s baby bottle, learned how to prepare milk for the kittens and began to look after them. They survived, quickly became members of our family and grew up.

One was a petite gray and white cat, with white feet like little white boots, whom we named “Bootsie”. The other was larger and a typical tabby cat, with a beautiful coat, whom we called “Punchy”. (I cannot remember how we picked her name.) Bootsie was wonderfully sociable and followed me around everywhere like a puppy. Punchy, in complete contrast, was shy and reclusive. She showed up for meals of course but otherwise made herself scarce around the apartment nearly all of the time. She would let herself be petted but she clearly did not really like it. She evidently had a lot of anxiety. (I am not sure I knew the word “anxiety” at age 12 but I understood the state.)

I was baffled by the difference in temperament between her and Bootsie. I loved them both and treated them equally, possibly even with an initial sliver of preference for Punchy because she was so beautiful. What made her so edgy? I do not think it likely she had had a traumatic experience as a tiny, eyes-closed kitten before she joined our household nor after she had. I could only ascribe it to one or more genetic difference(s) between these cat sisters. (By chance, my interest in genetics began about this time. My first exposure to genetics happened in the Spring of 1957, with a school visit to a genetics lab at Columbia University and a short talk by a distinguished mouse geneticist. The interest persisted and years later, I enrolled in graduate school to study genetics.)

Let us return to the article that got me thinking again about anxiety in cats. It was by a science writer named Britt Peterson. She begins the piece by describing the initial scrappy behaviors of Lucas, very different from his much more sociable brother, Tip, adopted at the same time. (This sibling contrast reminded me, of course, of my experience with Bootsie and Punchy.) Peterson then recounted how, four years after Lucas had joined the household, he became a morose, basically depressed cat, moving little from his preferred place. He would sometimes, however, lash out with more aggressiveness than he had ever shown before.

The change that had triggered these changes was that Peterson had had a baby and, inevitably, had shifted more of her attention to the new young creature in the household. Lucas was clearly having a hard time coping with this new situation. (People who have watched an older child react badly to the arrival of a new baby will have no trouble relating to this situation.) After some unsuccessful attempts to improve his mood, Peterson consulted a veterinarian, who produced a diagnosis: Lucas was suffering from anxiety. Peterson, who had had a period of anxiety attacks in college, was suddenly able to relate to what her cat was experiencing.

Lucas was put on some medication and immediately improved.

However, more significant was that once Peterson saw Lucas as a fellow anxiety-sufferer, she changed her behaviors a little, spending more time playing with him, stroking him, and this clearly had beneficial effects. This will not be surprising to anyone who has spent time with either humans or animals who are anxious. A strong element in anxiety is the feeling of isolation – that one is dealing with a horrible and frightening situation all on your own. Interacting with someone who evidently cares about you often reduces the anxiety.¹

So far, this has been the story of one woman and her cat. However, it has wider ramifications. I will sketch three: the frequency of anxiety problems in animals; the biology of the condition, and; the wider implications of the phenomenon of anxiety for the psychology of animals.

First, the phenomenon of anxiety in animals has long been known, if not always thought of quite that way. Anyone who has witnessed repetitive or, worse, self-harming behaviors in animals in zoos – for instance, in tigers or apes or elephants – has seen a typical manifestation of it. Of course, it is not just zoo animals. One often sees this in animals being factory farmed, at least those who can move. Also, many pet owners see this trait in their dogs and cats, particularly manifested when other people not familiar to the pet are around or when owners are away for hours or days. It has been estimated that 17% of American dogs experience separation anxiety when their person is absent.

In fact, an older expression denoting an anxious person probably derived from seeing anxiety in an animal, the horse. That phrase is “nervous Nellie”, which appears to have achieved currency in the 19^th century but which may have originated earlier. “Nell” or “Nellie” was a common name for female horses then. Horses are highly social, sensitive creatures, who crave the company of their fellow equines or the humans who are looking after them. If that company is withdrawn, or if the horses are maltreated, they typically begin to show behaviors that signal anxiety. A nervous Nellie was a skittish, anxious horse.

In the early 20^th century, the term nervous Nellie was applied to a Republican senator, later a Secretary of State, named Kellogg, who was famous for his excessive caution. In the 1960s, it was applied to critics of the Vietnam War by then President Lyndon B. Johnson, In doing so, Johnson was either mistakenly or deliberately misconstruing the critics’ objections to the war as nervousness about whether it could be won when they were in fact protesting its being fought in the first place.

Ironically, the heyday of this expression, as applied to humans, was more or less coincident with the rise to prominence of a school of thought in ethology (the science of animal behavior) that denied that animals had emotions at all. This was the school of behaviorism, led for decades by the Harvard Professor B.F. Skinner (1904-1990). He described emotions as a “fiction”. If that characterization is correct, anxiety in animals (indeed in humans) could not exist. Skinner felt that the term “emotion” could not be precisely defined – this is true – and that emotions could not be measured – also true.²

He then went one step further, however, arguing that something that could not be measured was not real as far as science went. This, to me, is absurd. Skinner was taking one of the essential activities in science, namely measurement, as equivalent to science itself, and maintaining that only science mattered in explaining the world. This is an attitude that is known as “scientism”. To me, it is a caricature version of science. If one ruled out all phenomena that initially have no unambiguous definition or way of being measured, the world of science as we know it today would not exist. To take one obvious example, Darwin inferred the existence of evolution and produced evidence for it long before there was a precise definition of it or before he could measure anything about it. In general, agreed definitions and methods for measuring aspects of a phenomenon will eventually emerge but in the early stages, one is operating if not in the dark at least in the early dawn when the light is still quite dim. Those early steps then often pave the way for bolder and more definitive ones.

Even accepting that emotional states are hard to investigate with the methods of science, progress is being made. Let us return to anxiety specifically. Anxiety is not the same thing as “fear” but fear is an essential component of it and we now know a lot more about its biological basis. The fear response begins in the part of the brain termed “the amygdala”. This then sets up a potential response involving three other parts of the body: the hypothalamus (in the brain), the pituitary gland (also in the brain), and the adrenal glands (which sit atop the kidneys). The signaling involves both neural messages, from the so called sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which act quickly, and hormonal responses from the hypothalamus and kidney, which are slower but act longer and can amplify the response. The initial fear response involves the so called “fight-or-flight” response and the choice depends on both the nature of the signal and the kind of animal. For instance, rabbits will usually flee while lions are more likely to fight (attack). The fight-or-flight response is a fairly immediate response but if triggered again and again at short intervals can become “set” in some sense, to create a lasting state of stress in the animal – and often anxiety.

The fear response is often shaped to some degree by memory, that is recollection of similar events in the past. (Some animal fear responses, however, are experience-independent and just automatically triggered, e.g. some responses in very young animals to certain predators.) Anxiety, however, while incorporating the physiology of fear and memory, has something additional: an anticipation of the future and some fear about it based on prior experiences.

This is interesting in itself for those who want to understand animal psychology. It has often been said that humans are different from (non-human) animals in that we can anticipate or imagine the future in ways that animals cannot. Yet anxiety states in animals that exhibit them must indicate some sense of the possible future, specifically events they wish to avoid. If this interpretation is correct, animals can have an idea of the future and we can eliminate another property claimed to to be unique to humans.

As I have remarked in two previous articles, stating that some animals show certain cognitive properties known in humans is not anthropomorphism – the unjustified attribution of human properties to non-human animals – but often just evolutionary common sense. After all, the evolutionary links between humans and other mammals virtually guarantee that many mental traits in humans will have equivalents in other mammals (and possibly in other vertebrates too).³

Still, one can quite legitimately wonder whether animal emotional states that we liken to certain human ones are really the same or not. Indeed, can we assume that the presumed same human emotional state in different centuries is really the exact same state at both periods? We go into this in the next installment of this newsletter.

1. See Peterson, B. (2016). Can a cat have an existential crisis? Nautilus, 22 April, 2016.

2. With respect to Skinner’s dismissal of emotions as fictions, one must wonder what his relations with his family members, or friends, must have been like.

3. The skeptical reader might be wondering: if this kind of extrapolation of mental states from humans to animals is true, are there any kinds of imagined animal mental states that might safely be labeled as anthropomorphic? Let me give two examples. Imagine a wolf howling at the moon. Is he thinking: “I wish I could travel to the moon like Apollo 11?” Almost certainly not, I would say. Or imagine this: your cat is sitting on your desk near your laptop and you approach the desk and put down a small book containing Shakespeare’s sonnets and a few sheets of paper next to it. Your cat looks at these items and then at you. Are you justified in thinking: “She must be thinking: wow, I would like to write a sonnet too!”? This is most unlikely to be true.