Many people thought that Scientific American had achieved Peak Woke in November 2023 when one of its articles proclaimed that “[i]nequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” As Michael Shermer retorted, “As she herself has admitted, Serena Williams would not be able to beat any of the top 100 male tennis players.”

But in September 2024, another article applied Woke ideology to animals. In it, readers are scolded for stereotyping … cats.

Cats hate water, but they love fish—and these two stereotypes contradict each other. Although today’s furry house rulers can enjoy fishy feasts while staying high and dry, since time immemorial, wild cats have apparently been willing to get their paws wet to snag some tasty treats.

This discrepancy is just one clue that blithely assuming that all cats hate water is a mistake, says Wailani Sung, a veterinary behaviorist at Joybound People & Pets, a rescue and veterinary service in California. “I think when we generalize like that, we do animals a disservice,” she says. “Cats are all individuals. Some cats like water. Some cats don’t.”

Meghan Bartels, “Do Cats Really Hate Water?,” September 4, 2024

It’s one thing to inflict this kind of thing on humans who can just reject it. But animals risk mistreatment if they are casual targets.

Cats don’ “hate” water, of course, but most cats do tend to avoid it for good reasons. The article offers some of them: “Cats have whiskerlike hairs all over their body that help them sense the world around them, and getting these hairs wet might disrupt how they perceive their environment, Sung speculates. Wet fur might also leave a cat vulnerable to the cold, Siracusa says, because cats—like most furry mammals—use their fur to trap air as insulation.”

Right. Anyway, immersion in water forces the cat to spend a lot of time drying himself off. Many cats find the “wet dog shake” difficult. More than that, as both predator and prey, the cat has a heavy investment in being clean, dry, invisible, inaudible, and as scent-free as possible, and water plays no role in that.

One hopes Scientific American will pick some other topic to scold its readers about.

You may also wish to read: Woke SciAm Editor Resigns in Post-US Election Uproar. Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine and former Scientific American columnist, offers a thoughtful response, Shermer writes, “the people promulgating these woke ideas are mostly true believers” and their fervor makes it easier to convince themselves, not others.