Cats do indeed have emotions and do worry about being replaced
in their owners' affections. Only a moron would say that this is
anthropomorphism. Cats vying for one's attention is an observable
phenomenon--and so is their territorial nature. The feelings that go
along with the behavior are certainly a matter of speculation, but so
is all discussion of the feelings of others, regardless of the species.
Cats feel love and cats feel jealousy. Cats certainly feel threatened.

As for rec.pets.cats, I wondered about the possibility t hat none of
my servers carried it just as I hit "send."

In any case, to claim that animals do not have emotions and do
not feel love or worry about another animal replacing them in their
human's affections is bullshit, whether your intent is to inflame or
just to demonstrate your superior intellect.

Companion animals are in fact

...

I wonder if this is true.

Baby, a nine-year old of great intelligence, can
somehow deduce from a few noises in the garage
(carrying cages being readied), a simple change of
circumstance (my getting dressed to go out in the
morning, not the afternoon), and some other indicator
that I am not aware of that a trip to the vet is
imminent.  She then takes appropriate evasive measures
before I even come up the stairs to find the lucky
victim.

Jason, then 12 and even more intelligent, plotted a
course to an open window where she'd never been before,
over an ironing board that was up temporarily, in order
to spy on a cat whose prowling outside she'd heard from
another room.

This same Jason, spying a rival on a fence from my
office window, jumped from the window to the desk, out
the door, down the hall to the kitchen, into the
garage, out the window, down a path between the shed
and the house past the gardenias and down another path
under the original window through the garden to meet
the intruder.  All but the path under the window was
concealed from that part of the fence she was
interested in.  And until she left the garage window,
her track took her away from the stranger.

I have often watched a cat examine a situation, say,
the top of a table they cannot see, listening,
sniffing, looking from different vantage points.  And
then decide either to jump or not.

These are all examples of complex thinking about
future, unseen or conditional situations.  As emotions
differ little from other sensations, an organism
capable of complex thinking about sensations could
reasonably use emotions as the target or object of
ratiocination.

The emotions cats feel do not, as you say, match our
own.  But then we are not certain that any human's
emotions or even sensations match our own.  We judge
that they probably do where we encounter similar
circumstances.  When we see someone taste table salt,
for instance, we think, "He is tasting salt."  We do
not know the taste he tastes is the taste we call
"salt".  For convenience, we assume he does, that
because he is built like us, he feels or senses like
us.  Very probably we are often wrong.

Our experience of cats is the same.  When I was so
angry with Sally, I wouldn't talk to her, she came
around, nuzzling, pushing, falling over in a display of
what looked like humble supplication.  And when I
relented, she sprang up and around and ran in and out,
playing hide and seek under the tissue paper.  Just as
a human might (sans tissue paper) when the beloved,
once turned away, now turns back.  Just as I say, "This
fellow tastes salt," so I say, "Sally loves me."  And
with just as much accuracy, I think.

Well, enough.  One last edifying -- or if not edifying,
at any rate amusing -- story: my nephew was saying,
"Cats aren't like people.  They don't feel envy..." and
would have gone on except that Alice on the coffee
table reached down to swipe at Baby who just then was
approaching.  There is no love lost between the two.
Alice has declared herself my owner, a position
disputed by Baby, who has known and loved me much
longer.