>>107824
Ah. Thanks.
I say this as someone who has had cats, and who grew up with cats. I am accustomed to thinking of them as very affectionate and playful and sometimes silly creatures, though I also know that on some level those labels are anthropomorphization. On a chilly winter night the cat hops onto your bed and pokes you in the face until you let her get under the covers with you. She purrs, because she's warm now, and she can warm her feet on you. But on some level it feels like something more, like maybe she wouldn't do this with a stranger, like maybe she recognizes you as distinct from other humans and associates something with you beyond "provides food and cleans litter box."
At the same time, when you're a kid, the first time you see the cat kill and eat a bird, or a mouse, you realize that these are not little people in fur suits. They're not human, and you could even call them alien. And you realize that you're very lucky that the cat weighs eight pounds instead of a hundred and eighty pounds, because they're fast and sometimes unpredictable and not at all shy about using their claws when they're offended. All the videos of cats chasing laser dots or staggering around with slices of cheese on their faces doesn't change this.
But they're still mammals, and-- Well. Trying to predict or model the behavior of fictional or hypothetical feline-descended tool-using sophonts based on the behavior of housecats is a little like trying to predict human behavior, human nature, and human personalities based on observing lemurs and tarsiers, isn't it? Still, the descriptions of the story makes it seem very depressing, and like a very unfortunate predicament for the human character, rather than an adventure. I would still like to think that they'd purr, at least sometimes.