Cat Herders Day

What the day is

Cat Herders Day is observed on December 15. It is for people whose work involves getting independent-minded parties to move in one direction, which is the job the idiom describes.

Origin and background

The phrase like herding cats came into common use in American business and technology circles during the late twentieth century, and was fixed in popular memory by a television advertisement at the turn of the century showing cowboys driving a herd of cats across open country. The image did the work that no amount of explanation would have.

The biology behind the joke is genuinely interesting. Dogs descend from a social, cooperative-hunting ancestor and were then bred for thousands of years specifically for responsiveness to human direction. Herding breeds exist because taking instruction at a distance was the trait being selected for.

Cats arrived by a different route. The domestic cat descends from the African wildcat, a solitary and territorial hunter, and the domestication appears to have been largely self-directed: cats moved in around the grain stores of early farming settlements because those stores attracted rodents, and the people tolerated them. Nobody was selecting for obedience, because nothing about the arrangement required it. Cats are social when it suits them, which is a real capacity rather than an absence of one, but they were never shaped into an animal that takes orders.

None of which means cats cannot be trained. They respond well to reward-based training, and clicker training works about as well as it does with dogs. What fails is pressure and correction, which produce avoidance rather than compliance. Cats also recognize their own names, which research has demonstrated fairly clearly, and simply decline to act on them.

How to take part

• Thank whoever does the coordinating on your team. The work is invisible when done well.
• Try clicker training a cat, starting with something it already does.
• Reward rather than correct, with both cats and colleagues.
• Accept that some groups are aligned rather than directed, and plan accordingly.
• Say your cat's name and note the deliberate pause before it ignores you.