In the cat world, there is a saying that you must keep your humans ‘friends close and your humans’ enemies … equally close. This is the result of a new study that shows that cats, unlike dogs, will gladly accept food from people who are not nice to their owners.
While dog lovers may rejoice at the chance that another study suggests that dogs are more loyal than cats, the conclusion is not so simple. It may not be that cats are disloyal; instead, they can be socially ignorant to understand when someone is not being nice to their owners, according to the new study, which was published in the magazine’s February issue. Animal behavior and cognition.
For the study, a group of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan tested the loyalty of domestic cats by adapting a technique previously used in dogs. The experiment involved a container, 36 domestic cats (13 were domestic cats and 23 lived in cat cafes) and their owners.
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The researchers created two groups: “helpers” and “non-helpers”. The cats watched as their owners tried in vain to open a container and remove an object. In the group of helpers, a second person, an actor, helped the owner to open the container – in other words, he acted as a friend of the owner. In the group of non-helpers, the actor refused to help and walked away – making them enemies. To act as a point of comparison, a third person just sat there during both conditions, without helping or refusing to help.
After the sketch, the actor and the neutral person at each attempt offered the cat a piece of food and the experimenters recorded which person the cat took the food from. After four attempts, the conclusion was clear: the cats didn’t care who picked up the food. Previously, the research team showed that dogs subjected to the same experiment avoided people who refused to help their owners.
So does this mean that dogs are loyal and cats are selfish?
Not exactly. “It is conceivable that the cats in this study did not understand the meaning or purpose of the owners’ behavior,” wrote the authors. No study has investigated whether cats can recognize others’ goals or intentions from their actions, they wrote. “But even if they understood the owner’s goal or intention, they may have failed to detect the negative intention of the non-useful actor.”
In other words, they may not have realized that the other person was not helping their owner to open the container.
“We believe that cats may not have the same social assessment skills as dogs, at least in this situation, because unlike the latter, they were not selected to cooperate with humans,” wrote the authors in the study. (Over the years, dogs have been bred or “selected” artificially for more cooperative characteristics.)
To call cats selfish on the basis of this study would be “anthropomorphic prejudice”, Ali Boyle, a researcher on the Kinds of Intelligence project at Cambridge University, wrote in The Conversation. They are not “little furry humans”, but “creatures with their own different ways of thinking,” wrote Boyle, who was not involved in the new study.
Cats are more likely to not understand our social relationships as much as dogs, because dogs were domesticated much earlier, she wrote. Furthermore, the ancestors of dogs lived in social packs, whereas cats were solitary hunters, which may mean that dogs already had existing social skills that were overdeveloped when they were domesticated.
It is also unclear whether these findings extend to all domestic cats. “About two-thirds of our participants were from cat cafes, which makes us cautious in generalizing the results of this study to all domestic cats,” wrote the researchers in the study. Although domestic cats and coffee cats do not exhibit differences in behavior, they may have a different bond with their owners. Coffee cats, for example, may spend more time socializing with strangers and may have less individual interactions with their owners than domestic cats, they wrote.
Originally published on Live Science.