History Main / CatsAreSuperior

** ''WesternAnimation/TheAristocats'' has the song "Everybody Wants to Be A Cat", where the cats sing an ode to their species' superiority. It actually has nothing to do with cats the animal. The song is a pun since at the time in the Jazz world, referring to someone as a "cat" meant that s/he was a hip and swingin' musician. If you listen to the lyrics, it does nothing to diss other animals, only "squares."

** The Glass Cat also has this attitude, viewing herself as superior even to regular cats due to her pink brains - "[[CatchPhrase you can see 'em work]]", and utterly contemptuous of the magician who brought her to life. She's a JerkWithAHeartOfGold, though, at one point running to get help for her companions as soon as she's sure they can't see her do it.

* Meowth from ''Anime/{{Pokemon}}'' has commented more than a few times that he thinks of himself as superior to humans.

** Harry has a massive 20+ pound cat named Mister. Harry routinely comments on how "above-it-all" Mister holds himself. Upon having a puppy brought into the apartment, Mister responded by creating a tradition of swatting it half way across the room with a paw. Since then the puppy has become a very large dog, but Mister sees no reason that should change his treatment of the dog, ''and the dog accepts it.''
*** The Sight allows Harry to see the true form of whatever he looks at. His dog glows with hidden power, his cop friend looks like an angel, monsters look even more hideous...and his cat looks exactly the same as it does when this power is turned off.

* ''LetsPlay/AfterlifeSMP'': In his second life, Jimmy [[LampshadeHanging mentions this]] while bearing the Feline origin, saying if someone has a pet cat, "their house" would in actuality be the ''cat's'' house and no long the person's. He himself displays that mentality by moving into Joel's house while he was on holiday in real life, meaning he could do nothing about the catboy that moved into his base, while proclaiming himself to be "adopted". [[spoiler:Sadly, Joel doesn't react quite as well to this, deciding to [[DisproportionateRetribution build a trap to murder Jimmy]] via TNT minecarts.]]

* Depending on your source, there are 6-8 [[https://www.livescience.com/33870-domesticated-animals-criteria.html criteria]] that animals must meet to be domesticated by humans. Cats do not meet the criteria. First of all, they're obligate carnivores, which makes them relatively difficult to feed -- you can't feed them pretty much anything you have lying around like you can dogs, pigs, or donkeys. Second, and more importantly, they're not pack animals who live in hierarchical groups and thus know how to take orders and can be taught to see humans as the proverbial alpha. While humans domesticated dogs long before the agricultural revolution and have since created many new dog breeds, cats are genetically still the same as their ancestors thousands of years ago. Not only did humans not intentionally breed cats the way they did dogs, but cats didn't start living with humans until long after the agricultural revolution. Cats were never intentionally captured, raised, and bred by humans to serve an intended purpose -- they simply began hanging out around human settlements to feast on the booming rodent populations therein and convinced the residents it was in humans' best interest to welcome them and their free pest control by providing them warmth and shelter. Cats truly ''aren't'' and never were pets the way dogs, fish, rabbits, etc. are -- since cats initiated the partnership, it wouldn't be entirely inaccurate to say that cats [[ThisIsMyHuman made humans their pets]]. How's that for superior?

* ''Literature/{{Plonqmas}}'': In “A Plonqmas Tale -- 1998” and “A Plonqmas Tale -- 1999,” Plonq’s feline pets are depicted as stereotypically detached, self-absorbed, quarreling, and food obsessed. In other words, typical cats.

-->So join in the jubilee!
-->"The cats are great," they'll all agree!
-->Find in each calamity
-->The cats' superiority!

-->'''Creator/TerryPratchett''': In ancient times, cats were worshiped as gods. They have never forgotten this.

** In most Muslim countries cats are considered superior because they were the favorite animal of Muhammad, who owned several. They are considered ritually clean, and allowed to enter mosques. Dogs get a negative rap because many Muslim clerics believe they're suitable only for hunting, not as pets and dogs, especially black dogs, scared Muhammad (they're often considered unclean). Many striped or tabby cats have three black streaks on their head, and there's a (though fairly obscure) Muslim legend that when Muhammad petted his favorite cat, three of his fingerprints stayed on her head and those of her descendants to mark their favored status. It's highly unlikely that all the cats with that marking are descended from one cat, but it's a good story. In another story, Muhammad is said to have cut the sleeve off a favorite robe that he was wearing rather than risk disturbing the cat who was sleeping on it.
** There is a Christian legend that there was a tabby cat in the stable on the first Christmas, and s/he snuggled up to the Baby Jesus to keep him warm. The Blessed Mother placed her initials on the cat's forehead as a mark of her favor.

* UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill, in explaining his fondness for pigs, observed, “Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”

* The fossil record is currently available suggests the reason there are so many more cat species than canine is that cats were driving canines extinct by virtue of being superior hunters, the exceptions usually being the canines who formed packs and the foxes.

* One common factoid is that cats rub their faces against objects to mark their territory, which is true. This then leads to the idea that cats rub on their owners because they think they own them. The truth may up to interpretation, as cats also rub faces with ''other cats'' as a friendly greeting and to create a shared smell for the colony. So, cats doing this to a human either think they own the human or, more charitably, they think the human is part of their colony.

* When cats rub their faces against yours, it's not just to be affectionate: they are also marking you with their scent glands. Meaning that, yes, they think they own you.

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[[caption-width-right:278:[[KneelBeforeZod Kneel before Mittens!!]]]]

* This is not just for interspecies breeding regarding cats. Cats are also not opposed to outbreeding the way humans are and are more vehemently opposed to inbreeding and incest than humans. Although Homo sapiens interbred with Homo neaderthalensis a big back when both were around, one of the reasons why the latter went extinct was because they inbred, and Homo sapiens since the agricultural revolutions (one in the Middle East, one in China, and one in the Andes) is not much better. The entire human population living today is descended from an astonishingly small population of ''Homo sapiens'' that lived 75,000 years ago, when fewer than 10,000 individuals (perhaps as low as '''2,000''') survived a supervolcano eruption in Sumatra. Inbreeding tends to be the trend for human royal families and there were times in history when humans criminalized racial mixing. Humans also foist their incestuous ways onto other species, especially onto domesticated animals like dogs and cultivated plants like bananas and crop plants. This is so bad with Cavendish bananas that they are clones of each other. Wildcats (Felis silvestris), on the other hand, happily breed between subspecies. Mother cats also have their male kittens set off to a different area to mate so as to prevent incest from occurring.

* This is not just for interspecies breeding regarding cats. Cats are also not opposed to outbreeding the way humans are and are more vehemently opposed to inbreeding and incest than humans. Although Homo sapiens interbred with Homo neaderthalensis a big back when both were around, one of the reasons why the latter went extinct was because they inbred, and Homo sapiens since the agricultural revolutions (one in the Middle East, one in China, and one in the Andes) is not much better. Inbreeding tends to be the trend for human royal families and there were times in history when humans criminalized racial mixing. Humans also foist their incestuous ways onto other species, especially onto domesticated animals like dogs and cultivated plants like bananas and crop plants. This is so bad with Cavendish bananas that they are clones of each other. Wildcats (Felis silvestris), on the other hand, happily breed between subspecies. Mother cats also have their male kittens set off to a different area to mate so as to prevent incest from occurring.

Cats are almost always portrayed as particularly intelligent, cunning, and independent, and in works with [[SlidingScaleOfAnthropomorphism any degree of anthropomorphization]] a cat is likely to be TheChessmaster, a DeadpanSnarker (see also CatsAreSnarkers), or other Sub-Tropes of TheTrickster. Sometimes they are all but stated to be a SuperiorSpecies.

* A story in ''ComicStrip/MandrakeTheMagician'' has Narda, Mandrake's girlfriend, [[AllJustADream dream]] -- [[OrWasItADream or does she?]] -- that cats are descendants of aliens that got stuck on Earth and used the primitive humans to survive, having lost their technology. (The same applies to dogs -- the dog aliens and cat aliens were at war, and the hostility between cats and dogs are a remnant of this.)

* ''Literature/TomcatBlueEyesDiaries'': Blue Eyes is very sweet little tom-cat who usually likes meeting other animals and respects more experienced cats but he is horrified when he meets a dog who belongs to his human's friend. He cannot understand how the dog can be so submissive and so satisfied taking orders. Eventually they become somewhat friendly but still, he's not Blue Eyes' favourite animal.

* In the children's series ''WesternAnimation/DoctorSnuggles'' a recurring character is The Cosmos Cat, a perhaps SufficientlyAdvancedAlien that is a RubberForeheadAlien -- its just that it is a cat that has the rubber forehead (antennas and such), not a human. (And at least in the Swedish dub, he speaks as an EruditeStoner.)

* Study of actual living felids suggests that they can regard the notion that you can't reproduce outside your species as quaintly provincial. For felids in general, species in the same Genus and of compatible sizes are more likely than not to be cross-fertile, and quite frequently the offspring are also fertile, unlike mules, which are another mammalian cross-species hybrid (half horsed and half assed/donkeyed), but are generally sterile. There are still fertility issues and male ligers are still generally sterile. Some exotic pet cat breeds are the result of crosses with smaller wild felines, such as servals, asian leopard cats, jungle cats, and even sand cats.

* In ''Literature/TheCinderSpires'', cats are fully sentient creatures who cohabit the Spires with humans. The chapters narrated by Rowl, [[WarriorPrince Prince of the Silent Paws clan]], show them to be incredibly arrogant and selfish, but nonetheless very brave, honourable (albeit with BlueAndOrangeMorality,) and capable of forming strong bonds with humans who earn their affection (though they usually find some way to justify their displays of affection to avoid acknowledging actual ''care'' for the lowly humans]].

** Harry has a massive 20+ pound cat named Mister. Harry routinely comments on how "above-it-all" Mister holds himself. Upon having a puppy brought into the apartment, Mister responded by creating a tradition of swatting it half way across the room with a paw. Since then the puppy has become a very large dog, but Mister sees no reason that should stop his treatment of the dog, ''and the dog accepts it.''

* This is, somewhat, the whole schtick in ''ComicBook/{{Katmandu}}'', as the anthro feline races that dwell the titular planet are the predominant race in the setting, while the rodents are the other, less predominant one. Oddly enough, most of the FantasticRacism goes between the felines ((Velites and Hoplites, the first based on domestic cats, while the latter are based on wild felines like tigers, lions, coungars, etc) rather than against the rodents, except in some isolated cases, and most of those cases [[YouDirtyRat involves the rats]].

This can, but need not, overlap with CatsAreMean. Superior cats can have a wide range of attitudes toward lesser creatures: showing contempt for them, ignoring them, treating them with amused tolerance, or [[ComesGreatResponsibility taking pains to guide and protect them]]. There's also an overlap between this and CatsAreLazy, with cats thinking that they should be pampered on.

* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'': A number of cat Pokémon are like this, including Mewtwo for a bit in the anime.

* The goddess Bastet from Myth/EgyptianMythology is an [[OlderThanDirt ancient example]] of this trope. Depicted as a human woman with a cat head, she was a soldier of [[ThePowerOfTheSun Ra]] in his daily battle against [[SnakesAreSinister Apep]]. Unlike Set, another soldier of Ra who was [[{{Demonization}} increasingly vilified]] after the New Kingdom period, Bastet retained her role as Ra's guardian and came to be seen as protector kingship and fertility (because cats can give birth to dozens of kittens every year). The Egyptians built an entire city dedicated to the worship of Bastet, Bubastis.

* ''ComicStrip/{{Garfield}}'', perhaps. He's definitely smarter than his human. The cartoon takes it a step further, with cats actually being aliens that "rule" humans in that they get free food and don't have to do anything all day.
* A story in ComicStrip/MandrakeTheMagician has Narda, Mandrake's girlfriend, [[AllJustADream dream]] -- [[OrWasItADream or does she?]] -- that cats are descendants of aliens that got stuck on Earth and used the primitive humans to survive, having lost their technology. (The same applies to dogs -- the dog aliens and cat aliens were at war, and the hostility between cats and dogs are a remnant of this.)

** In ''WesternAnimation/TheJungleBook1967'', this is applied to both Shere Kahn the tiger and Bagheera the leopard. The former overlaps with CatsAreMean by being portrayed as WickedCultured, whereas the latter subverts CatsAreMean by making Bagheera still a hero, but of the DeadpanSnarker[=/=]GoodIsNotNice variety. Which makes Bagheera meaner than in [[Literature/TheJungleBook the original books]] (seems like a Disney theme to make cats mean). In the source material, Bagheera was the one to spoil Mowgli and be overindulgent with him, while Baloo the bear was the overly strict teacher.

* ''ComicStrip/{{Garfield}}'', perhaps. He's definitely smarter than his owner. The cartoon takes it a step further, with cats actually being aliens that "rule" humans in that they get free food and don't have to do anything all day.

** In ''WesternAnimation/TheJungleBook1967'', this is applied to both Shere Kahn and Bagheera. The former overlaps with CatsAreMean by being portrayed as WickedCultured, whereas the latter subverts CatsAreMean by making Bagheera still a hero, but of the DeadpanSnarker[=/=]GoodIsNotNice variety. Which makes Bagheera more mean than in [[Literature/TheJungleBook the book]] (seems like a Disney theme to make cats mean). In the book Bagheera was the one to spoil Mowgli and be overindulgent with him while Baloo the bear was the overly strict teacher.

* "The Cat Who Walked By Himself" makes bargains with the first humans where other animals become servants. OlderThanRadio.