Looking for a SF short story told from a kitten's point of view

Question

The kitten regards older cats with disdain looking on them as a different species because they are dull and don’t play like the youngster. It thinks it’s going to grow up to be like the children of house who are fun and boisterous. At the end of the story the kitten is horrified to realize that it is aging in to being a cat. For some reason I keep linking this story to Isaac Asimov. Read in the late 70s, early 80s, part of an anthology.

Answer 1

"Space-Time for Springers", a short story by Fritz Leiber, the first story in his Gummitch the Cat series; first published in the 1958 anthology Star Science Fiction Stories No. 4 (Frederik Pohl, ed.). You may have read it in one of these compilations.

"Space-Time for Springers" is in several compilations available for borrowing (free but registration required) from the Internet Archive. It can also be read here (link provided in Organic Marble's unaccepted answer to another question). The sequel "Kreativity for Kats" is available at Project Gutenberg.

ISFDB synopsis:

A kitten develops theories of natural philosophy, while waiting for the time he will mature into a human.

Excerpts:

Gummitch was a superkitten, as he knew very well, with an I. Q. of about 160. Of course, he didn't talk. But everybody knows that I. Q. tests based on language ability are very one-sided. Besides, he would talk as soon as they started setting a place for him at table and pouring him coffee. Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra ate horsemeat from pans on the floor and they didn't talk. Baby dined in his crib on milk from a bottle and he didn't talk. Sissy sat at table but they didn't pour her coffee and she didn't talk—not one word. Father and Mother (whom Gummitch had nicknamed Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here) sat at table and poured each other coffee and they did talk. Q. E. D.

And the secret of his birth was only the beginning. His intellectual faculties aroused, Gummitch had two days later intuited a further and greater secret: since he was the child of humans he would, upon reaching this maturation date of which Old Horsemeat had spoken, turn not into a sullen tom but into a godlike human youth with reddish golden hair the color of his present fur. He would be poured coffee; and he would instantly be able to talk, probably in all languages. While Sissy (how clear it was now!) would at approximately the same time shrink and fur out into a sharp-clawed and vicious she-cat dark as her hair, sex and self-love her only concerns, fit harem-mate for Cleopatra, concubine to Ashurbanipal.

Exactly the same was true, Gummitch realized at once, for all kittens and babies, all humans and cats, wherever they might dwell. Metamorphosis was as much a part of the fabric of their lives as it was of the insects'. It was also the basic fact underlying all legends of werewolves, vampires and witches' familiars.

If you just rid your mind of preconceived notions, Gummitch told himself, it was all very logical. Babies were stupid, fumbling, vindictive creatures without reason or speech. What more natural than that they should grow up into mute sullen selfish beasts bent only on rapine and reproduction? While kittens were quick, sensitive, subtle, supremely alive. What other destiny were they possibly fitted for except to become the deft, word-speaking, book-writing, music-making, meat-getting-and-dispensing masters of the world?

The ending:

And that was natural when you come to think of it, for as Gummitch knew very well, bitterly well indeed, his fate was to be the only kitten in the world that did not grow up to be a man.