By: Floro Mercene
Dog lovers always tell cat lovers that cat smells less, doesn’t need walking and is arguably more intelligent, but they don’t like humans and are fundamentally selfish. Comedian Eddie Izzard once quoted “Cats have a scam going – you buy the food, they eat the food, they go away. That’s the deal.”
Cats may have a reputation of being opportunistic and aloof who show their owners affection merely to fill their stomach, however, new research from Oregon State University, published recently in Behavioural Processes, concludes that cats enjoy human contact more than eating.
The researchers took 50 cats from shelters and people’s homes and deprived them of food (chicken, tune, cat’s snack), human conatact (talk to cat in baby languate, gentle stroke, play with cat’s toys), scent (matatabi/silvervine, mousy smell, cat’s smell) and toys (feather, mouse toy, cat-dancer) for a few hours. Then they introduced them to stimuli within these four categories to see what they chose.
Although there was clear individual variability in cat reference, social interaction with humans was the preferred activity for the majority of both pet and shelter cats, followed by food.
The authors of the study wrote: “While it has been suggested that cat sociality exists on a continuum, perhaps skewed toward independency, we have found that 50 % of cats tested preferred interaction with the social stimulus even though they had a direct choice between social interaction with a human and their other most preferred stimuli from the three other stimulus categories.”
Further study is needed to understand how a cat’s previous experiences or breed can affect their preference for stimuli, the researchers said.
“Increasingly cat cognition research is providing evidence of their complex socio-cognitive and problem solving abilities,” the study read. “Nonetheless, it is still common belief that cats are not especially sociable or trainable.”