They dont like you when you put tape on them
I have friends who tamed a feral adult cat, to the point at which not only would he actively come to them for pats and cuddles, but he let me pat him even though he only saw me a couple of times a year.
But it took them years to do that. He spent most of his first several years in their house in the basement, hiding up in the rafters. So tell your friend not to give up hope yet.
– I suppose you could try claiming that the frequent demands for pats are just because they like massages and head scratches; but if mine were only tolerating me, I don’t know why they’d so often be in the room (or the field) that I’m in, even when they’re not being patted or fed, and even though they’re also clearly entirely comfortable someplace else.
I also think it really unlikely that only humans ever evolved affection. Why should we think that when other animals act like they’re being affectionate, whether to us or to each other, that that’s not what they’re doing? We’re nowhere near as singular as some of us like to think.
Not sure what you mean by that. Cats often live in groups, if given half a chance – both ferals and barn cats form colonies; and I’ve had chairfuls of multiple cats curled up together.
I think they can, but don’t always. My sister is a dedicated cat person. In mid 2020 she wound up briefly catless, and took a pair from a shelter – a brother/sister who had been treated badly (not sure if details). Now, two years later, the female will tolerate petting; the male is still aloof. And she lives alone, has few visitors even when there isn’t a pandemic, so they might should have figured out that she’s their Obi-Wan by now.
Tangentially related: I’ve read that cats only meow at humans, not at each other. That suggests some recognition of the relationship.
Cats neither like us nor tolerate us. At best they don’t care about us and we won’t end up in an alien meat grinder.
Clearly cats SHOULD like humans.
What do cats really want? They like small, safe, snuggy places. Ones that are warm. Ones that are dry. Ones that aren’t exposed to predators. Ones that have easily obtained food supplies. Ones that offer safe water supplies, without lurking snakes or crocodiles. Ones that are soft to lie on. Ones that are high enough to give views of the surroundings. Ones that offer views onto other areas while protected from wind/rain/predators/cold/and all the other mentioned factors. Ones with accessible places to dispose of your wastes.
Places with all those attributes are vanishingly rare in the natural world.
Places with all those attributes are nearly universal in human built/maintained dwellings.
On top of that, humans themselves are self-heating and relatively squishy to sit upon, and will often scratch those annoying itches that develop around your ears and jaws and the center of your back.
If humans didn’t exist, cats would invent us.
Okay, we’re not perfect. They’d like us to be around 20 degrees F warmer. They’d like us to stop putting in doors they can’t open themselves. They wish we had eyes in our ankles so we’d stop running into them so often.
I guess we’re a work in process.
Do Cats Like Us, Or Just Tolerate Us?
Yes.
Yes, it depends on the cat, and also on the us.
As @Tibby said, cats are kind of like introverted humans. Like introverts, they’re more comfortable around people they know and trust. Like introverts, some of them like people and like socializing and being around lots of people, but on their own terms, and they need some alone time to recharge their batteries. And like introverts, some of them are loners, or antisocial, or just jerks, but not because they’re introverts.
Only some cats, and only some humans, but yes, I believe cats can like and even love us. With a cat, you know when it’s genuine. Cats do fairly well on their own; they don’t live as long as they would indoors, but they live quite a bit longer than most other escaped pets. They’re not so different from their wild ancestors. Dogs on the other hand, who knows how they really feel? They’re practically hard-wired to act out that slavish devotion toward their humans.
And dogs are the extroverts. They’re like frat boys or your uncle who puts a lampshade on his head when drunk. Broad, slap-sticky humor. A little dopey, but fun to be around once in a while.
But, when you want to chill, contemplate cerebral matters non-verbally, and appreciate dry humor, you gotta hang with the introverted cool cats. 
I think both cats and dogs will develop emotions closest to what humans understand as “love and affection” for a human that either raises or takes care of them for a long enough period of time. I think that dogs as pack animals that have been domesticated as far back as any animal by a large margin, and that has essentially developed to be a companion to humans, has things going on that make these emotions stronger and expressed in more human pleasing ways. A domestic dog isn’t just a wolf with a collar, their actual genetics has altered in ways that actually mean they develop behaviors that are specifically human pleasing, and that lets us feel “reciprocated” affection from a dog more easily than a cat that doesn’t have these adaptations.
That being said, cats still have the ability to reciprocate and show affection in ways that humans identify with and like, but it’s just not as well tuned as dogs. Cats originally became domesticated, AFAIK, to be vermin hunters in human granaries, and while even the ancients quickly decided they really liked having cats as companion animals, the timeline is a lot shorter than dog domestication and the cat has not made the same sort of adaptations. TLDR–I think cats like us but they aren’t evolved the same way as dogs so they don’t show it as clearly. I suspect that even a standoffish cat, if it’s a cat you’ve raised and fed for years most likely has positive feelings of affection towards you, just doesn’t feel the same drive to demonstrate it in a human pleasing way as dogs do.
ETA – something I always find interesting is there’s a bit of a popular conception that modern pet lovers “take it too far” and that humans used to have a more stoic and utilitarian view on animals. I actually don’t think this is well supported by the evidence, it is certainly true that working animals were probably seen a tad less emotionally, but it’s quite surprising if you do your digging how many ancient Roman writings there are lamenting a lost pet and praising the departed pet’s virtues, and even recovered monuments and epitaphs dedicated to pets. That isn’t the behavior of people who lacked sentiment for their pets. Also remember that as far back as the Homeric times–brave Odysseus cries when, upon returning to Ithaca, he sees his hunting dog, aged 20 years, aged and decrepit and on its last breath.
In fact, cats are only semi-domesticated. Unlike domestic dogs, they don’t need humans to survive on their own in the wilderness. They stay with us because they want to, mainly for easy food and shelter, but also (I believe) because they enjoy our company. Personally, I find it fascinating and a bit humbling to have semi-wild animals wanting to cohabitate with me.
Dogs want to learn as much Human as they can. Cats expect the humans to learn to speak Cat.
Most dogs are a whole lot better at learning Human than most humans are at learning Cat, or at learning anything other than Human. It isn’t just that we aren’t equipped with the tail, fur, or useful ear motion, it’s that all too many of us don’t think other ways of communicating even exist, so we don’t bother to try to perceive them, let alone to learn them.
I had a friend, a few years ago, say to me ‘I don’t know if my cat even likes me.’ I said, ‘Imagine yourself in the kitchen; you’ve been in there for a while. Look around: is the cat in the kitchen with you?’ She said yes; and I said, ‘Now imagine you’ve left the kitchen and gone to some other room; you’ve been there half an hour or so. Is the cat now in that other room with you?’ She said ‘yes, she probably is.’ I said, ‘Your cat likes you just fine. With some cats, that’s what you get.’
With other cats, of course, you get quite a bit more. But even the one who’s all over your lap and headbutting you is also communicating with the angle of the ears, the set of the tail, the position of the body as a whole – and may not realize it if you don’t understand a bit of that. Dogs do that too, of course (though their tail signals are different); but they also tend to produce a lot more signals that are perceptible to most humans. Most of them have even evolved something that looks like eyebrows, so that humans will think they’ve got human facial expressions.
Indeed.
On the other hand, these people have gone entirely too far. Some people seem to incapable of asking, “What could go wrong”?
I’ve observed firsthand many times the independent, self-sufficient nature of cats, coupled with their desire to live among humans.
All of my current string of cats are indoor-only, but growing up, all of our cats were indoor/outdoor. Directly across the street from our house was a large tract of woods, extending for miles. This was the cats daily playground. They often stayed in the woods for extended periods of time (sometimes for a couple of days), but they always came home.
They had plenty of shelter, water and small game in the woods. And, there were few if any predators larger than them. When the cats were in the woods, they were the alpha predator. Yet, they always came home.
They often brought back small game live and let it loose in the house, much to the dismay of my mother and sister (especially our hunter-extrordinare Manx cat who regularly brought back large, live snakes). I think that’s the reason Mom’s hair turned prematurely gray.
If cats could talk, I imagine our’s would say:
Cat: Dude, as you can clearly see by the live mouse I just let loose in our house, I don’t need you to feed or protect me…I just happen to prefer the taste of Little Friskies® and the comfortable bed you made for me. I’m here because you like me…and gosh darn it, [blush] I guess I like you, too. [/blush]
…but, bro, please take this stupid bell off my collar. It makes me look like a sissy in front of my clowder of friends and it’s messing up my kill ratio.
Oh, yeah.
I live with and have lived with cats who occasionally swatted at me. Damage has always been tolerable, at least to me. But a casual mildly annoyed swipe from a cougar, with no serious harm meant, may do significant harm anyway.
And of course a cougar may decide it does want to do significant harm. A non-feral felis catus isn’t likely to, especially to a familiar human.
Mine are indoor/outdoor cats (I live on 80 acres on a dead-end road.) And yes: they come home.
I once had a cat go missing for several weeks. When he came back, he heard me calling another cat, and he ran to me at high speed across a field, meowing with every bound. I scooped him up, checked rapidly for damage (he was fine), brought him in the house, and opened him an entire can of tuna; which unusual treat he promptly dove into.
Until – this was in the 1990’s – I left the room to go to a phone to call my mother and tell her he was home. At which point he left the dish of tuna to follow me. (And returned to it promptly when I went back over to it; so it wasn’t that he wasn’t still hungry.)
People watching me get up and down and up and down to open the door for cats ask me why I don’t have a cat door. That is why.
We have three, two of which are recused ferals, ear clip and all. Those two both like petting and attention- at times.
The third is a rescue, but he genuinely wants to be where the people are.
He follows me around, and wants to be where my wife or I am. He gets upset when I leave for any length of time. I’d go so far as to he he loves me.
We have had other loving cats. But some are, indeed, kinda aloof, wanting attention on their own schedule.
We just got back from a long weekend getaway for July 4th. We left our cats, Sadie Mae and Wilson, at home with extra kibble and litter so their physical needs were taken care of, and had a neighbor check on them a couple times over the weekend. We got home earlier this afternoon, and neither one has let us out of their sight for more than a minute or two. Sadie Mae is curled up next to my chair and Wilson is laying just a few feet away from me. However, in typical cat fashion, they are doing this in an extremely nonchalant manner, as if, “Well this just happens to be where I want to sit right now. The fact that is is right in your line of sight is just a strange coincidence.” I definitely believe most cats love their owners and are as devoted to them as most dogs are to their owners. They just don’t do the outward and blatant displays of affection that dogs do.
A pet jaguar would be even worse. With a bite force of 2000psi (the highest of all cats), they kill large prey by suffocating with a throat bite, breaking the spine with a neck bite, or crushing the skull with a head bite. Play too roughhouse with him and you’ll be wiping your brain up from the floor.
“Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equal.” - Winston Churchill
And Churchill loved cats.
A few years ago, one of the neighborhood cats – a beautiful black cat named Raven – befriended me. She strolled into my yard as I was going out to get the mail, walked ahead of me, sprawled down to the ground and exposed her belly, while meowing sweetly. I petted her for a while, and commenced towards the mailbox. Then she went on “rinse-and-repeat” cycle. So I did more petting. Lotsa petting! Raven followed me to the mailbox, and then back down the driveway. I was telling her what a sweet, pretty cat she was. When she got to my car in the back of the house, she hopped up on it, and I petted her a lot more. Very sweet, outgoing cat!
I eventually went back inside with the mail. Every few days, though, she would come to visit me, and I would have a good time petting her. She spent more time at my sister’s house, though, just four doors down from me. My sister was one of the people that fed Raven and about three other neighborhood cats, so that provided the felines extra incentive to hang around.
I never once fed her or any other cats, but Raven really did seem excited to see me. I enjoyed petting her whenever she would come to visit. My sister remarked that, of all the neighborhood cats, Raven seemed by far the friendliest and most outgoing when it came to people. She really loved my brother-in-law, or at least seemed to, and enjoyed cuddling with him and falling asleep on his chest as he sat in his lawnchair.
Perhaps she was lulling us into a sense of complacency, and eventually planned on eating us. But it could also have been genuine affection.
Sadly, Raven took ill and died a couple of years ago. I think that she was only about five years old. It is true that “only the good die young”. I think about her every day…