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And are a religious text, trying not be disrespectful, I say that there are three reasons that cats might be seen negatively by the author:
1.) Cats might have been only semi-domesticated in India at that time. The scenario for how cats were domesticated is thought to be that human settlements brought steady populations of rodents; wild cats started hanging around human settlements for the improved hunting; humans realized that wild cats killing mice and rats was a big help, so they encouraged the wild cats to hang around with occasional gifts of food.
These kinds of cats would be feral cats, and would treat humans with a healthy amount of fear and caution. So pretty much the only time you would see a cat is when it was killing some of the rodents you attracted, or when it was eating food you left out for it as rapidly as possible and then running away from you in terror. If you accidentally got too close to a feral cat you were feeding, it would freak out, hissing and puffing up and attacking you if it felt like it had no other choice.
2.) Cat body language is much different than human or dog body language. Cats communicate whether they're hostile to other cats through eye contact. If a cat stares into the eyes of another cat with its eyes fully open, its challenging the other cat to a fight. The second cat signals that it accepts the challenge by returning the eye contact with its eyes fully open. If the second cat doesn't want to fight, it looks away and/or half closes its eyes. Even when there's no desire to fight, cats show that they have no aggressive intentions toward another cat by blinking, looking at each other with half closed eyes or closing their eyes and yawning, and/or not making any kind of direct eye contact. (All their non-aggressive interactions involve body language: they twine tails, groom each other, etc.)
Humans and dogs, on the other hand, show lack of aggression by looking unblinking into another set of eyes. Cats have to spend a lot of time learning to trust a particular human before they can override their instinctive reaction of "OH MY GOD THAT HUGE ANIMAL IS LOOKING RIGHT AT ME AND CHALLENGING ME TO A FIGHT I'M GONNA DIE RUN AWAY!!!!!!".
That is why cats always want to cuddle when we're reading or working on the computer or doing something else that requires us to focus our eyes on something besides the cat - - any time we're not looking at them directly, they read it as "I am so comfortable with you I'm completely ignoring you - - let's groom and twine tails and purr and roll up into a ball and sleep". And that's also why, when strange people are introduced into a cat's environment, the cat will seem to seek out the person who likes cats the least to rub up against and try and sit in their lap. The human who likes cats will often be looking straight at the cat's face, trying make eye contact, but the human who hates or fears cats will not look at it at all.
To many people who do not know cat body language, cats can seem cold and ungrateful.
3.) Many religious texts contain negative references to the religious texts and symbols of rival religions (or religions that were at one time rivals). There may have been an earlier religion in some part of India were cats had some important ritual significance, and the negative image of cats in the text is one of the few surviving clues to that struggle of ideas.
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