Why do cats hate vacuum cleaners? Some cats love them!

The default situation is that domestic cats hate vacuum cleaners because they are noisy and a strange, dangerous creature roaming around the living room. 

The domestic cat does not understand vacuum cleaners. The worst thing about them is the noise. Most of them are noisy. 

But if you dig around the Internet even a little bit you will find that some domestic cats adore to be vacuum cleaned! They obviously get used to the noise while the experience of the vacuum cleaner against their fur and skin clearly beats any downside that they might experience with the noise. There'll be competing forces: noise is negative while the pleasant feeling is the positive.

The enemy of cats! Normally. Image in public domain.

In the video, where you see a ginger tabby thoroughly enjoying being vacuumed, the vacuum cleaner is pretty quiet which probably helps a lot in ensuring that the cat accepts it. If a cat accepts being vacuumed it must be a good way of removing some loose hair strands and the occasional flea!

There are many human devices and objects that the domestic cat doesn't understand which is something that cat owners should be aware of. I'm sure most of them are but, you know, the domestic cat is very close to their wild cat ancestor in terms of character and behaviour, which is also something most cat owners understand. 

But this means that they are living in a human environment which can be a little bit alien to them sometimes. It accounts for the fact that 99% of domestic cats are really frightened of the vacuum cleaner. 

They are frightened of any object which is noisy and with which they are not familiar. And it doesn't have to be noisy to be scary as is very evident in the many videos of cats jumping up in the air in sheer terror when they turn around and see a cucumber on the floor. 

Or any other unfamiliar object close to them. Of course, the reaction depends upon the particular cat's character but the default reaction is caution arising out of fear and therefore they run and hide.

To be honest, I do not like videos of cats being frightened of cucumbers. It's certainly amusing to many people which is why they are highly successful videos but let's think of the cat for a moment; the video maker has frightened their cat in order to make a successful video for YouTube. I'm being boring. I'm being too serious. But as I'm concerned with domestic cat welfare more than anything else in these articles, I have to bring up this point.

I have mentioned it before but around 30% of all cats in funny cat videos have been found to be stressed because the funny cat video is based upon a domestic cat doing something strange or be terrified of running away or hiding or failing in a jump of some sort (the big 'fail') and falling to the ground. Failure is funny to a lot of people especially when it is a cat doing something they should good at such as jumping.

It's disrespectful to laugh at a cat failing.