Montaigne wrote: “When I play with my cat, who knows if she is not more amused by me than I am by her!” We have no evidence that humans ever actually “domesticated” cats. Rather, at some point, cats realized that humans could be useful to them. In this book, John Gray tries to understand the philosophical and moral problems of the very strange connections between humans and these remarkable animals. Drawing on centuries of philosophical scholarship, from Montaigne to Schopenhauer, he examines the relationship we have with this most unusual of “pets.” At the heart of the book is a deep appreciation for cats as perhaps the only species that helps us, in our profound loneliness in the world, to understand our own animal nature.