Dog owners like to say their pets are much friendlier and more dependant on them than cats, but new research says otherwise.
The study concludes the majority of cats will choose human contact over food.
The researchers, from Oregon State University, took 50 cats from people’s homes and shelters and deprived them of human contact, scent, food and toys for several hours.
Then they introduced them to stimuli from these four categories and observed what the cats chose.
Most cats picked human contact over the other choices, with food coming in second.
"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," researchers Kristyn Vitale Shreve, Lindsay Mehrkam and Monique Udell wrote.
This is similar to recent research reported in InfoStream showing dogs prefer praise from their humans over food - maybe cats and dogs are more similar than one might think.
No comments:
Post a Comment