Why your pet chose everyone else but you—a spare human’s lament – VegOut

The cat who changed everything arrived during the second year of lockdown, when touch had become dangerous and algorithms determined who we could love. Tom found her—a tortoiseshell with one white paw—behind a dumpster in Queens, brought her home to the apartment he shared with Sarah, and named her Mochi. Within a week, she’d chosen Sarah completely, definitively, with the kind of certainty that dating apps promise but never deliver.

Now Tom kneels on their kitchen floor at 6 AM, holding salmon treats in one hand and speaking in the high-pitched voice we reserve for creatures we desperately want to love us back. Mochi sits perfectly still, green eyes locked not on him but on the doorway where Sarah will eventually appear. When she does—hair messy, still in pajamas—the cat transforms. Stone becomes water. Mochi flows between Sarah’s legs, purring like something mechanical and necessary.

“She hates me,” Tom says, not for the first time, dropping the rejected treats back in the bag.

Sarah scoops up Mochi, who immediately nestles into her collarbone. “She doesn’t hate you.”

But we all know what Tom knows: in a world where we swipe through faces hoping for mutual selection, where algorithms sort us into desirable and undesirable, where even our cats seem to have standards we can’t meet, rejection hits different now. Mochi has made her choice with the kind of absoluteness that no amount of data science can replicate. And it wasn’t him.

The algorithm of the heart

I started collecting these stories after Tom first told me about Mochi, and they’re everywhere once you start looking. The golden retriever at my local dog park who walks past his owner to follow a stranger who resembles his first human. My neighbor’s African grey parrot who learned thirty words from their daughter but remains silent when anyone else approaches. The therapy dog who, despite training that should make him love everyone equally, spends every free moment beside one particular resident at the nursing home.

We want simple explanations: whoever feeds the pet becomes the favorite, or animals prefer whoever spends the most time with them. But the evidence tells a different story. Tom feeds Mochi every morning. He plays with her, cleans her litter box, paid the vet bills for that eye infection last spring. By any algorithmic measure—time invested, resources provided, care demonstrated—he should be her chosen person. Yet Mochi waits by the door each evening for Sarah, who works sixty-hour weeks and sometimes doesn’t get home until after the cat’s bedtime.

What makes this particularly resonant now is how it mirrors our broader cultural moment. Young adults navigating dating apps report that rejection sensitivity—the tendency to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and intensely react to rejection—has become a defining feature of modern romance. We’ve gamified love, turned it into a series of binary decisions, yes or no, swipe left or swipe right. But animals don’t swipe. They just know.

Tom tells me he’s started thinking of Mochi’s preference as “analog rejection”—no ghosting, no mixed signals, no “it’s not you, it’s me.” Just clear, consistent choice. “In a weird way, it’s almost refreshing,” he says. “At least I know where I stand.”

The biology of being chosen

Here’s what actually happens when Mochi sees Sarah: both of their brains release oxytocin, the same hormone that bonds mothers to infants. When researchers at Azabu University in Japan studied dog-human interactions, they discovered this interspecies oxytocin loop—mutual gazing increased the hormone in both parties by up to 300%, creating what scientists call a “positive feedback loop” of attachment.

But oxytocin isn’t just about creating bonds; it’s about creating selective bonds. Research from Duke University’s Canine Cognition Center found that when dogs were given oxytocin, they didn’t become indiscriminately affectionate. Instead, the hormone made them more discerning, increasing their preference for people who matched their energy and emotional state. Female dogs, in particular, showed heightened selectivity—choosing to gaze longer at their owners while becoming more wary of strangers.

This selectivity operates below conscious awareness. A 2021 study comparing pet dogs with pack-living dogs and wolvesrevealed that only household pets showed oxytocin spikes during human interaction. Despite being hand-raised by humans, pack animals maintained their own social hierarchies. The difference? Pet dogs live embedded in our daily rhythms, sharing our schedules, our spaces, our emotional weather.

Tom’s anxiety about being rejected—his tentative approaches, his slight tension when he reaches for Mochi—may actually be pushing her toward Sarah’s calmer presence. Studies of attachment in shelter animals show that cats and dogs are remarkably attuned to human stress signals, often preferring people whose cortisol levels are lower. The science suggests our pets aren’t just choosing who they like best; they’re choosing who makes them feel most regulated.

“I used to think I was doing everything right,” Tom says. “But maybe trying so hard was exactly what I was doing wrong.”

The certainty crisis

Sarah works in user experience design, building the invisible architectures that guide our choices online. When I ask her about Mochi’s preference, she laughs. “At work, we spend millions trying to predict and influence user behavior. We A/B test button colors, optimize conversion funnels, build machine learning models to anticipate what people want before they know they want it. Then I come home to this cat who decided within three days that I was her person, based on… what? My smell? The way I didn’t try too hard? Some ineffable cat algorithm we’ll never decode?”

She’s touching on something profound about our current moment. Dating app algorithms now sort potential matches based on everything from facial symmetry to linguistic patterns in our profiles—while claiming to connect people based on deeper compatibility. The very platforms designed to reduce the uncertainty of romantic connection have instead amplified it. Every match might be the algorithm manipulating you. Every rejection might be the code deciding you’re not optimal.

But Mochi’s choice feels different precisely because it’s illegible to our optimization-obsessed age. There’s no API for a cat’s affection, no way to hack your way into being chosen. This illegibility feels like resistance.

During lockdown, when everyone’s cortisol levels were spiking, this regulatory function became even more crucial. Pets weren’t just companions; they were co-regulation partners. And like all intimate relationships, the match had to be right. Chemistry, even between species, can’t be forced.

The privilege of rejection

A friend who works at a Brooklyn shelter tells me the saddest stories involve returns. “Someone adopts a dog, expecting instant love, and when the dog bonds with their roommate or their kid instead, they bring it back. As if the animal failed some test.” She pauses. “The weird thing is, these are often the same people who complain about dating apps being superficial. They want authentic connection but can’t handle when authentic connection doesn’t choose them.”

But there’s a darker edge to these dynamics that becomes visible when you look across economic lines. Research on pet ownership during economic hardship reveals that financially stressed pet owners are more likely to risk their own health and safety for their animals, especially when the bond is strong. The same connection that provides comfort can become a vulnerability when resources are scarce.

Tom and Sarah can afford to find Mochi’s rejection amusing, even endearing. They have the economic cushion to treat it as a quirky household dynamic rather than a source of genuine distress. But for someone who’s lost everything else—job, home, human relationships—being rejected by the creature you’ve saved can hit different. The very intensity of human-animal bonds means they carry real stakes, and those stakes aren’t equally distributed.

“I volunteer at the shelter sometimes,” Tom tells me. “You see people who have nothing, whose dog is everything to them. If that dog preferred someone else? I don’t think they could laugh it off like I do.”

Learning from the unchosen

Six months after our first conversation, something has shifted in Tom and Sarah’s apartment. Tom no longer approaches Mochi with treats and desperate hope. He simply exists in the space, reading on the couch while she sits on Sarah’s lap. And sometimes—not often, but sometimes—Mochi walks across the couch to sniff his book.

“I stopped trying to make her love me,” Tom says. “I figured if I rescued her, gave her a good home, that should be enough. Even if she picked Sarah as her person.”

The irony is that this acceptance has actually improved their relationship. Without the pressure of Tom’s expectations, Mochi has begun to show small signs of acknowledgment—a slow blink here, a brief head bump there. Research on feline behavior suggests that cats are more likely to approach humans who ignore them, a phenomenon that Japanese researchers call the “cat paradox”. She’ll never be his cat the way she’s Sarah’s cat, but she’s beginning to recognize him as part of her chosen person’s pack.

This shift in Tom’s approach mirrors something larger about how we might navigate connection in an algorithmic age. “I’ve stopped taking it personally,” he tells me. “Like, genuinely stopped. And weirdly, that’s made me think differently about online dating too. Some matches won’t text back, some cats won’t choose you, and that’s just… how choice works.”

Beyond the algorithm

The stories I’ve collected reveal patterns that resist datafication. The elderly woman whose cat hides from everyone except the grocery delivery person who reminds him of his first owner. The couple whose dog chose their neighbor, leading to a joint custody arrangement that became a friendship none of them expected. The child whose hamster will only eat when she’s in the room, a preference so specific it reorganized the family’s entire dinner routine.

These choices create what Sarah calls “desire paths”—the routes worn by actual use rather than planned design. In UX, desire paths show where users actually want to go, regardless of where designers thought they should go. Mochi’s preference carved a desire path through their household, reorganizing the emotional landscape in ways no amount of planning could have predicted.

Recent neuroscience research suggests these preferences might be encoded at levels we’re only beginning to understand. A 2023 study on interspecies attachment found that animals form mental maps of their social world as complex as our own, with preferred individuals occupying privileged positions in their cognitive geography. When Mochi chose Sarah, she wasn’t just selecting a food provider—she was mapping her emotional universe.

The gift of arbitrary love

Maybe this is what we’re actually seeking when we talk about authentic connection: not the guarantee of being chosen, but the reality of choice itself. In a world where algorithms increasingly mediate our relationships, where machine learning tries to predict compatibility based on data points, the arbitrary certainty of an animal’s preference feels like resistance.

Tom and Sarah’s apartment has become a living experiment in acceptance. Mochi still waits by the door for Sarah. She still purrs louder when Sarah holds her. But she also now acknowledges Tom as part of her territory, someone worthy of the occasional head bump, the rare slow blink that cat behaviorists call a “kitty kiss.”

“You know what’s changed most?” Tom reflects. “I’m not performing for her anymore. I’m just… here. And apparently, that’s enough for her to occasionally remember I exist.”

This opacity might be the real gift our pets offer us. In an age of radical transparency, where our preferences are tracked, stored, analyzed, and sold, the mystery of animal choice remains uncolonized by data. We can’t A/B test our way to a cat’s affection or optimize our way into a dog’s heart. We can only be present, patient, and open to the possibility that love—real love—doesn’t always choose us back.

The pets in our homes are running ancient software on hardware refined by millions of years of evolution. When Mochi chose Sarah, she wasn’t making a decision based on optimization or compatibility scores. She was responding to something older than algorithms, deeper than data, more mysterious than any machine learning model we’ve yet built.

Perhaps that’s why these stories of animal favoritism captivate us now more than ever. They remind us that in a world of manufactured connections and predicted preferences, some choices remain wild. Arbitrary. Absolute. Even if we’re not the ones chosen, we get to witness choice itself—pure, inexplicable, and certain.

The next time you see a pet clearly playing favorites, resist the urge to take it personally. Instead, marvel at what you’re witnessing: millions of years of evolution culminating in this precise moment, when one small mammal looks at one specific human and says, in all the ways they can: “You. It’s you.”

Even if it’s not you, there’s something profound in being present for that choosing—in seeing love declare itself, mysterious and sure, in a world that’s forgotten what certainty feels like.