You gotta earn it with a cat.

Dogs are for people that need the reassurance of the unconditional love

Cats are for people who have the kind of levels of self-confidence that makes the unconditional love of a dog both suffocatingly annoying and suspicious.

Depends on the dog.

Get a terrier. Best of both worlds. You have to earn their love, and they're as prickly as cats sometimes.

But you can also take them hiking, skiing, biking, or just chilling by a campfire growling at hypothetical bears in the dark forest at night.

> Get a terrier. Best of both worlds. You have to earn their love, and they're as prickly as cats sometimes.

Yes, might be really the case. I'm pretty much a cat person and when I'm thinking about getting a dog, then terriers are pretty much on top of the list.

What about Burmese cats - which act pretty much like cat shaped dogs - at least in terms of sociability and playfulness.

Dogs love everyone. Never as much as the cake on the table perhaps.

They are also much smarter than cats, which cat owners have problems to admit in their confidence.

The first statment makes the second one very dubious.

Seriously, one species has undergone intensive inbreeding with the express purposes of cultivating physical and mental dependency, the other is still a feral predator that can continue flourishing without you. That robustness necessarily implies intelligence, the ability to discriminate perceptions (Chimpanzees can perceive magic tricks; they can discriminate that something has taken place that should not have followed from what was known). People mistake socially pliable for intelligence.

Dogs are partners. You can work closely with them. You don't have to hunt with a dog to appreciate this but it's very obvious if you do.

A cat is a dumb version of a human. Who needs a cat when you have your couple and friends?

A dog is something different and special

Seriously, I get enough passive aggression from coworkers and romantic partners, why would I want more?

> Dogs are for people that need the reassurance of the unconditional love

I used to think this until I got a dog. The love is not unconditional and the dog takes more work to maintain than the cat.

“Dogs are for people who want a much more interactive pet.”

this is a very weird take, probably only possible by a cat owner.

Would you feel suffocated and suspicious from the unconditional love of your child? Its not about reassurance, its just that it is a beautiful experience in this life, and i give just as much love back to my dog.

if you view disinterested cats as the ideal relationship, I hope you can separate that from your human relationships

> You gotta earn it with a cat.

Do I detect catholic guilt ?

> So I guess she liked the life with the cat where it was just randomly mean or not interested in her sometimes.

If you think your cat is randomly mean to you, then you really don't understand your cat, you don't correctly read the clues it signalizes to you.

If I'm e.g. petting my cat and don't stop if she starts wagging her tail, which pretty much means she's overexcited, then she will scratch me to make it more clear to me.

To expect that your cat is all the time interested in you also seems honestly quite a bit narcissistic.

This says a lot about their romantic life, too