Tag: cats

Cats are too socially inept to be loyal | Live Science

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In the cat world, there’s a saying that you should keep your humans’ friends close and your humans’ enemies … just as close. That’s the takeaway 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 for another study suggesting dogs are more loyal than cats, the conclusion is not that simple. It might not be that cats are disloyal; rather, they may be too socially clueless to understand when someone is not being nice to their owners, according to the new study, which was published in the February issue of the journal Animal Behavior and Cognition.

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Why do cats meow? | Live Science

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Every day your cat walks into your office, looks at you indignantly and utters a despondent “meooow.” You may not speak cat, but her meaning is clear: “You haven’t fed me yet, you monster!”

House cats are unique in the way they use their voices to communicate with their human companions — they rarely meow at one another. So what makes our feline friends so chatty with us?

The answer has to do with domestication, experts told Live Science.

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How Much Do Cats and Dogs Remember? | Live Science

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Pet cats and dogs can remember the location of their food bowls and sometimes even how to perform tricks or find their way home. But just how good (or bad) are these fur balls at remembering the minutia of their days?

It depends on how useful those memories are to them, evolutionarily speaking, experts told Live Science.

Take free-roaming dogs, for example. About 75 percent of the world’s dogs aren’t pets and don’t live in human homes, said Monique Udell, an assistant professor of animal and rangeland sciences at Oregon State University. A memory that helps dogs excel at scavenging can help them survive on the streets, Udell said.

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Cats Do Control Humans, Study Finds | Live Science

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If you’ve ever wondered who’s in control, you or your cat, a new studypoints to the obvious. It’s your cat.

Household cats exercise this control with a certain type of urgent-sounding, high-pitched meow, according to the findings.

This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry. While people usually think of cat purring as a sign of happiness, some cats make this purr-cry sound when they want to be fed. The study showed that humans find these mixed calls annoying and difficult to ignore.

“The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response,” said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. “Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom.”

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