Care and Claws: Cat-Human Intimacy Beyond Domestication

^{by Mingkang/MK Hao
Cite As: Hao, Mingkang/MK. 2025. “Care and Claws: Cat-Human Intimacy Beyond Domestication.” EAS 590: Critical Animal Studies, May 1. https://asianpacific.duke.edu/blog-post/care-and-claws-cat-human-intimacy-beyond-domestication.}

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A Cat, A Me, and A Room

This is not a story of a pet and its caretaker. It is a story of cohabitation, refusal, scars, safety, and interdependency. In a world where domestication often implies one-sided dominance and control, my interspecies relationship with Jura—a cat I temporarily lived with—reconfigured my understanding of living-with through multi-sensory, embodied experience of taking care of her. We met when I was struggling with mental depression and its somatic scars. 

Rather than generating companionship in a soothing and consistent way, the intimate space opened up by both of us was ever-shifting, sometimes feeling uncomfortable and even painful—yet profoundly mutual, nonetheless. My encounter with Jura unfolded in my apartment, where she, over time, enabled me to see and understand my apartment in ways that weren’t available to me before. It became a space that Jura and I both navigated and inhabited together.

Care: Creating a Multispecies Shared Safe Space

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Jura, a rescue cat adopted by one of my friends from a Missouri shelter, arrived in my apartment as a shadow. She spent her initial days hiding behind washing machines, router wires, and suitcases in the storeroom (Picture 1). Her small, anxious body squeezed into every overlooked crack of my home, transforming “my” apartment into a landscape of gaps. To find her, I crawled on my hands and knees, discovering dust-coated corners to enter her hidden world. We started at each other, with our hands, elbows, claws, knees, and feet on the ground. At that time, there existed no difference between these human or nonhuman body sections but only the same behavior performed by Jura and I, to observe and tolerate each other in the same space voicelessly.

Through this bodily mimicry, I gradually realized that my “home” was no longer “private” or “safe” (just for myself). What my home looked and felt like completely shifted, now with Jura and me there; I thought I could make the space “safe” by “dominating” it for both us of, whereas, for Jura, it was exactly the overlooked margins that made her feel most “safe.” Anna Tsing says that domestication takes “the work of human control” to reshape species for our needs (Tsing 2018, 232). If this is the case, my initial engagement was a failed attempt at domesticating Jura that tried to comfort her by confining her to my idea of safe space. Jura refused to conform, always claiming space for herself in places I wished she wouldn’t.

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After several days, she began to walk around in my bedroom—jumping on my sofa and desk, sleeping on my bed, and even crawling into my bathtub and stretching out—as she pleased. Every time I saw her walk, stretch, or sleep within my sight, I’d proceed more slowly, quietly, and carefully—not to frighten her. Soon I realized that Jura was also doing the same; she would make room for me when she wanted to share the bed, desk, or sofa with me, rather than carelessly occupying the whole space.

Kath Weston emphasizes the “desire” to share space, get along, and negotiate during the process of “cohabitation” (Weston 2022, 55), for Jura and I, such desire was not greedy but with care and consideration. These reciprocal adjustments led me to look my home anew as something evolving into as a shared, multisensory space. We were negotiating the space together as we encountered each other, and I felt that we were growing closer and safer with one another’s existence. What emerged was a “multispecies comfort zone” built and sustained through shared relational labor of observation, retreat, waiting, and care by Jura and I.

Claw: Disturbing Scars and Vulnerabilities

Our early nights together were sleepless, sharing the same bed as well as the unpleasant feelings of being close to each other. Jura’s claws clicked across the wooden floor, and her low-pitched purring surrounded me, jolting me awake in the middle of the night. When she suddenly leaped onto my bed, or put her nose and claws on my skin, I was easily startled. Once, I woke from a nightmare of being trapped beneath a dragon’s claw, only to find Jura standing over me with her paws pressed against my chest. The boundary between fear and affection, threat and comfort, all blurred in these nightly encounters.

I was not the only being whose sleep was interrupted. Sleeping near me but always keeping some distance, Jura would settle between my legs, under my arms, or around my head or feet. My unconscious moves during the night would wake her up, making her find other places to lie down. From Jura’s perspective, the “noises” she made might also have expressed the discomfort involved in our co-bedding arrangement. In those restless nights, cause and effect blurred—our movements shaping and responding to each other in a shared process of disturbance, accommodation, and entangled rest: a shared embodiment of an “interpretive gap” across our species difference, and also, gestures of care deriving from it (Hathaway 2022, 77).

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Intimacy leaves marks. Jura’s claws often scratched me—when she curled against my chest, when I held her in my arms, when she tried to climb onto my lap or receive snacks from me, and when she stretched out to relax. My face, wrists, legs, and shoulders bore thin, red lines. At first, I interpreted these injuries as signs of failure. Why did I try to get close to her to get myself hurt? Why couldn’t she just relax without hurting me? Why couldn’t I clip her claws properly while keeping a safe distance for both her and myself?

Later, my friends—who also adopted cats from temporary shelters—told me that clipping cats’ claws would be difficult and harmful. For a rescue cat like Jura, any restraint could trigger panic. Her claws were not just defense mechanisms or survival tools; they carried histories—shaped by trauma and memory. Thinking of Anna Tsing’s critique on equaling domestication as a linear process of “civilization (Tsing, 2018, p. 232)” and taming the wild, I realized that my presumption that trimming her claws would create a safer, more intimate relationship was not only human-centric but also, for Jura, deeply unsafe.

Thinking this way, I chose to let Jura live with her claws, while I lived with the scars they left. Juno Salazar Parreña discussed scars as an inevitable form of personal sacrifice in the case of humans caring for orangutans (Parreña, 2018, 163-164). Scars in this sense were a site of both interspecies encounter and embodiment of care. Our relationship became inscribed on my body. In this way, the pain and scars she caused were not purely negative, but became her way of communicating—signs of memory, boundary, and trust.

Parreña also documented female caregivers’ struggle with gaining scars, caring for the animals, or stepping back for future intimacy with their own children (Parreña 2018, 163-164). What I learned from both Parreña’s fieldwork and my intimate relationship with Jura was that care is a relational labor that does not erase violence but absorbs it. Jura’s resistance to clipping claws was a form of her demands, and to care for her demands is also part of the interspecies care. I, in turn, had to learn a new language of care and scars—one that did not equal comfort or harmony.

Anna Tsing instead proposes that “domestication-as-rewilding” (Tsing 2018, 247) is a hopeful alternative in imagining multispecies life and cospecies world-making endeavors. Thinking of Jura’s claws, refusal, and scars she left on my skin, I realized that she never became fully “pet-like.” What I was experiencing was just her untamed displays of intimacy, care, and affection, which I did not need to “tame” at all.

Interdependency: Who Cared for Whom?

When my depression showed its worst face, my body and mind felt completely dysfunctional. I skipped meals and appointments, cried for no reason, and stayed in bed, overwhelmed with suicidal thoughts. Jura stayed, quietly assuming the role of my observer, caregiver, and lifeguard. She did not intervene in any human way, and never tried to console me with words and reason. Instead, her insistence on waking me up, her meowing, her unsheathed claws, and her steady companionship allowed me to see that I was the one who was cared for by her.

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One day, when I was deeply depressed and could do nothing but lie in bed and sleep, Jura’s care was less verbal but persistent. I could sense that Jura, like a nurse in an intensive care unit, was monitoring my minimal signs of vitality. My roommate later told me that Jura would pace near my bed when I didn’t move for hours. She would sniff my breath to check for signs of life. If I moved, she would jump off my bed and do her own stuff, while frequently coming back and checking my status. Sometimes, I did not (want to) respond, but she kept trying, time and again.

I finally woke up to the small and large scars on my arms or legs several times, with a mixed feeling of pain and itchiness. Jura looked at me closely with her eyes wide open. I winked back and reached out to her, but she jumped off the bed and started meowing and wandering around her bowl for food and water. I eventually pulled myself out of the bed and refilled her food and water, but she did not eat or drink at all. I suddenly realized that Jura was neither hungry nor thirsty, but wanted me to stay awake, get up, and move, at least for a while. When I burst out crying, she could sense my sadness and then walk around me, using her head and paws to touch my feet or legs as a way to show support and care—through patient presence, witnessing, and companionship.

Who is taking care of whom? Sunaura Taylor critiques that the devaluing of domesticated animals partly derives from their presumed “dependency” while “genuine independence” remains as a romantic ideal for all (Taylor 2021, 144). Jura does rely on me to provide her with food, water, her litter box, and space. But I also became dependent on her to deal with my depression. Such understanding and revaluing of interdependency also taught me that sexual intimacy isn’t the only form intimacy takes in our shared lives, and nor does it have to happen exclusively between human beings. Intimacy can emerge and evolve through care, in a shared space of vulnerability. In a similar and different way from LeCain’s description of politico-economic identification of “cattle people” or “silkworm people” (LeCain 2017, 139), I became a “cat person” in this messy, sweet, and tense domestic space while making a home with Jura. She may as well say that she also became a “human-like cat” because of my dependence on her care.

Jura, the Cat

The time came for Jura to leave me. I felt pain as I was trying to bring myself to saying goodbye to her. I tried to put her in her cat carrier, but she scratched me. She ran back to my room, her safety zone, the space we had built together. Perhaps she was resisting because she feared being separated from me. I stood there, bleeding and wondering—as the puzzled Man in John Berger’s novel looked at the Mouse after locking, naming, and freeing him out of the cage he made for his mouse (Berger 2009, 2-6).

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About the author

Mingkang/MK Hao is a PhD student in History at Duke University. MK’s research interests lie in gender and environmental history in modern East Asia and Global Asian Diasporic Communities. Mingkang’s ongoing research project focuses on human and non-human interactions within the Yellow River Dyke-centered microecology. Xe conducts the research project with the aim of making gender theory and environmental studies converse with each other.

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References

Berger, John. 2009. “A Mouse Story.” In Why Look at Animals?, 2–7. London: Penguin Press.

Hathaway, Michael J. 2022. What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

LeCain, Timothy J. 2017. The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parreñas, Juno Salazar. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Taylor, Sunaura. 2022. “Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-of-Care.” In Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, 141–158. Second Edition. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2018. “Nine Provocations for the Study of Domestication.” In Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations, edited by Heather Anne Swanson, Marianne Elisabeth Lien, and Gro B. Ween, 231–251. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Weston, Kath. 2022. “The Habit in Cohabitation. (Or, How to Meet a Tiger on the Path).” Humanimalia 13(1): 45–78.