I agree with you about the cats. I'm sure there are some people out there that have a method for converting feral cats but mostly cats don't try to please their owners the way dogs do and while this is a massive over-generalization, cats don't seem to need attention and love the way dogs seem to.
Then we start talking about those exotic cats that are all the rage now where the cats are only once removed from "wild." These have always been failures as far as I have seen since they are basically tiny tigers and behave as such.