I guess, to animals, there are three classes of creatures they can encounter: "jerks", "victims", and "other dudes". Anything that isn't a jerk or a victim is just some other dude in their life. To the cat, there's little fundamental difference between his owners and the duck, except that the owners know how to open the Friskies can.
I think they also have a category, like "cool other dude", because especially with cats there can be a lot of neutral territory, but they always have that one human that they're like, "You're one of the good ones." But that's true, they probably don't look at us any differently than they look at a duck.