In the cat world it is said that you should keep the friends of your people and the enemies of your people … just as close. This is the takedown of a new study showing that cats, unlike dogs, gladly accept food from people who are not nice to their owners.
Although dog lovers rejoice at the chance for another study suggesting that dogs are more loyal than cats, the conclusion is not so simple. It may not be that cats are disloyal; rather, it may be that they are too socially unaware to understand when someone is not good with their owners, according to the new study, which was published in the February issue of the magazine. Animal behavior and knowledge.
For the study, a group of researchers from 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 put together two groups: the “helpers” and the “non-helpers”. The cats watched as their owners tried in vain to open a container and take out an object. In the helper group, a second person, an actor, helped the owner open the container – in other words, they acted as a friend to the owner. In the non-helper group, the actor refuses to help and turns away and makes them an enemy. To serve as a point of comparison, a third person just sat there in both conditions and did not help or refuse to help.
After the sketch, the actor and the neutral person presented a piece of food to the cat from each experiment, and the experiments recorded from whom the cat took the food. After four trials, the conclusion was clear: The cats do not care who they take the food from. Previously, the research team showed that dogs undergoing the same experiment avoid people who refuse to help their owners.
So does this mean that dogs are loyal and cats are selfish?
Not quite. “It is conceivable that the cats in this study did not understand the meaning or purpose of the owners’ behavior,” the authors wrote. No studies have investigated whether cats can recognize others’ goals or intentions from their actions, they wrote. “But even if they understood the owner’s purpose or intent, they would not be able to detect the negative intent of the useless actor.”
In other words, they may not have realized that the other person is not helping their owner open the container.
“We believe that cats may not have the same social evaluation abilities as dogs, at least in this situation, because unlike the latter, they were not selected to work with humans,” the authors write in the study. (Over the years, dogs have been bred or artificially “selected” for more cooperative traits.)
To call cats selfish on the basis of this study would be an “anthropomorphic prejudice”, Ali Boyle, a research fellow in the Kinds of Intelligence project at the University of Cambridge, written in The Conversation. They are not ‘hairy people’, but ‘beings with their own distinctive ways of thinking’, wrote Boyle, who was not involved in the new study.
It is more likely that cats do not understand our social relationships as much as dogs, because dogs used to be moderate, she wrote. What’s more, the ancestors of dogs lived in social packs while cats were solitary, which could mean that dogs already had existing social skills that were hyperdeveloped when they were moderate.
It is also not clear whether these findings apply to all domestic cats. “About two-thirds of our subjects came from cat cafes, which makes us wary of generalizing the results of this study to all domestic cats,” the researchers wrote in the study. Although the domestic cats and the cafes do not show differences in behavior, they may have a different bond with their owners. Cafe cats, for example, can spend more time with strangers and have fewer individual interactions with their owners than domestic cats would do, they wrote.
Originally published on Live Science.