WSJ: A Pet Food Giant’s Mission to Understand Cats

WSJ: A Pet Food Giant’s Mission to Understand Cats

The Mars company makes M&M’s, Snickers and other human food, along with pet food brands like IAMS, Eukanuba, Pedigree and Sheba.

The pet food giant had a problem. Cats were rapidly catching up to dogs as America’s favorite pets, but the company was filled with people who didn’t fully understand the mercurial creatures—or their owners.

So Mars launched a mission to get its dog-loving workers inside cats’ heads.

Sparky is the only dog I’ve ever had, and he is exceptional, but I can explain the difference between cats and dogs.

Cats are wild animals.  They have adapted to the “living with humans” habitat. 

Dogs are cartoons.  They present an exaggerated expression of human emotion.  

Predators are interesting pets because they are intelligent, independent and have an agenda.  For a few years, I kept an aquarium in my classroom with three piranha.  They were engaging pets because they were always thinking.  The gold fish they fed on were pathetic and stupid.  Nobody cared when a gold fish died, because they never really lived.

Don’t give me the “All God’s creatures” speech.  The gold fish were treated properly, but their prospects for the future were never very rosy.

Cats are good pets because they don’t need us.  They can exist in the wild, so having a cat changes a house into a habitat. 

Ten years ago, Pixar released the Inside Out movie which featured five personified emotions that governed the actions of some kid. 

That’s what dogs do.  They personify emotions better than people do. 

Here I am, on stage with Mark Zuckerberg’s wife and Sal Khan of Khan Academy, in front of celebrities, tech billionaires and Nobel prize winners. 

They gave me $50,000 and my brief speech was over, and I still couldn’t look anywhere near as joyful or content as Sparky does when we go on a car ride.

Dogs cartoonishly look more happy, bored, angry, frightened, contrite or inquisitive than a human ever could, and they do it all the time.  Dogs need to be with others.  Some dogs can survive in the wild if they find a pack, but they are best with humans.

That’s the difference between cats and dogs, and that would extend to the pet owners.

The goal: Reorient the entire team—from those who formulate new products to those putting together advertisements—around one of cat parents’ chief sources of angst: “feline insecurity,” a fear of cats’ indifference to their owners’ affection. (Type “Does my cat” into Google, and the top search is “love me.” The second is “know I love her.”)

This is a bullshit conclusion.  Here are the Google lists for both.

Cat and dog owners both wonder about loving and being loved.  Dogs and cats don’t think like humans, so it’s a nonsense question.  Sparky and I aren’t sentimental, so don’t worry about love.  Sparky enthusiastically greets me when I get home, and every morning, I pull Sparky up on my lap to talk about his plans for the day.  That’s good enough.

There is something to be gleaned from the two lists.  Cross off the searches that are common for both.

The dog list has only one item addressing what the dog thinks, while the rest are health-related.  The cat list has only one item addressing health, while the rest are about about what the cat thinks.  I’m including the “need a friend” as a “think I’m boring” kind of question.

The dog question, “Does my dog understand kisses?” is kind of dumb.  What’s to understand?  Dogs get the general idea of affection.  Does the owner understand kisses?  Dogs lick their own asses and all sorts of other things.

The cat questions indicate that cats are inscrutable.  For some cat owners, that undermines their confidence and makes them question the nature of the relationship.

Pets think or feel differently than people.  They are what they do, and we can interpret that as we like.

Living with a dog is like living with a precocious child.  You love the dog, but don’t always like what it does.  No clue what’s going on inside the dog’s head.

Living with a cat is like living with a roommate from another country.  The cat may be a standoffish Scandinavian or a passionate Italian, but you never know what’s going on inside the cat’s head.

When I was a little kid, I used to think that all dogs were boys and all cats were girls.  Yeah, I know that sounds stupid, but unless you are Doogie Howser, you probably had a bunch of stupid ideas when you were little.  Maybe the Mars company should just run with that.

Dogs are from Mars and Cats are from Venus.

I don’t know what the hell that saying is supposed to mean with regard to men and women, but the Mars company may as well adopt it for cats and dogs.  Just promise a bunch of things that you can’t deliver, and suck as much money out of us as you can.