More than 20 fluffy Siberian cats waft about the Curiosity Cat Café in Noordhoek, Cape Town, affectionate with the humans who have come to admire and play with them.
“They are queens,” said Shaheeda Mohamed from Athlone, whose children treated her to high tea with the female cats this week.
The cat café began in Johannesburg in 2015 as a place where people with cat allergies could test if they reacted to the hypoallergenic Siberian cats but then they didn’t want to leave says breeder Cherylee Powell, who launched the café.
Cats show people how to play the game
And humans who regard themselves as “dog-people” take note — cats like these Siberians have more in common with dogs than you might think.
What science increasingly shows is that cats are more socially flexible and invested in their humans than their apparent aloofness suggests, and that they do express emotions, just in a more subtle way than dogs.
They respond to their own names (when they want to). They recognise the voice of their familiar human. Cats have even, in one experiment, chosen a familiar human over food or a toy, New Scientist reports. The latest research reveals that many cats also get close to other species in the home, including dogs, exhibiting grief-like behaviour if their companions disappear or die.
“All animals feel the same emotions that we do,” said Julia Davies-Carter, an animal behaviourist in Johannesburg who focuses on improving pet/guardian relationships. “A lot of animals we see suffer from grief when humans have left suddenly and they never got the chance to say goodbye.”
Another recently debunked myth is that cats just spend their time sleeping, grooming, hunting and feeding when in fact nearly half of those surveyed like to play when young, even playing fetch much like a dog.
The cat basically trains you how to play ... if you don't do it right, the cat will no longer play
— Julia Davies-Carter, animal behaviourist
But even when playing, cats have their dignity. “The cat basically trains you how to play,” Davies-Carter said.
“The difference between dogs and cats is that cats often initiate the game (of fetch) and decide how they will play. It’s not like the traditional fetch with a dog, where you tell it to sit and fetch. The cat will spontaneously bring you the toy and, if you don’t do it right, the cat will no longer play.
“More and more I encourage people to play the game their [pets] want and therefore develop a better relationship, which is not based on our arbitrary rules about sitting and dropping the toy,” said Davies-Carter.
Mikel Maria Delgado, co-author of Total Cat Mojo: The Ultimate Guide to Life with Your Cat, led the study into cats playing “fetch”.
“I was surprised by how many cats fetched,” said Delgado, an animal behaviourist with a PhD in psychology who has three rescue cats. “They all fetched as kittens and still do, just much less often.”
The genetically distinct Burmese and Siamese breeds, which originated in Southeast Asia — the Tonkinese cat is a cross between the two — were more likely to play fetch, as were indoor and lively cats; females, older and sicker cats were less likely to bother.
The tendency to fetch among dogs is higher among the breeds developed for hunting and herding and they are more likely to have a higher “overall trainability score”, the researchers found. Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers, border collies and English cocker spaniels were among the breeds that would retrieve sticks, balls or other objects most enthusiastically.
Delgado said: “I hope that our results encourage pet owners to see that cats are also very interactive and engaged with humans. I’m a big proponent of providing our companion animals with playtime.”
Emotionally attuned dogs sensitive to stress
A recent study by the University of Bristol’s Veterinary School got up close and personal with dogs, exposing 18 pairs to the odours of human stress to see how it affected their moods and choices.
The sniffing stress test demonstrated how sensitive dogs are to people, with the canines suffering emotional contagion and making more pessimistic decisions — about potential rewards in an unknown bowl — after detecting human stress.
“This suggests that being stressed about your dog, or even just being about the smell of strangers who are stressed, can make them less likely to try something risky if they think they will be disappointed,” said the primary researcher, vet Zoe Parr-Cortes.
She said the findings suggest people have a “common stress scent” that dogs instinctively detect.
A lot of animals we see suffer from grief when humans have left suddenly and they never got the chance to say goodbye
— Julia Davies-Carter, animal behaviourist
The Bristol Veterinary School team was the first to show that dogs can interpret a stress scent in isolation, without the accompanying cues of voice tone and body language.
Parr-Cortes’s fellow-researcher Nicola Rooney said understanding how this affects the wellbeing of dogs was important for people working with dogs in kennels and training working dogs. “Working dog handlers often describe stress travelling down the lead, but we’ve also shown it can also travel through the air,” she said.
The team intends to look next at how positive emotions “such as happiness or deep relaxation” affect dogs, said Parr-Cortes.
Cats show grief like other animals
Dogs’ emotions are easier to read than those of cats, which are generally inscrutable, but that doesn’t mean cats are not attuned to those about them, researchers have found. The aloof cat vs pack dog stereotypes are misleading, they said.
It’s true that cats evolved from asocial African wildcats but, as far back 10,000 years ago, they adapted to living with humans. Genetic evidence supports this ancient link, New Scientist reports, describing a grave in Cyprus dating back 9,500 years where a person was buried with a cat.
“Cats are considered socially flexible, meaning they live, and even thrive, both socially and asocially within their environments,” said Brittany Greene, a PhD student in evolutionary and comparative psychology at Oakland University in the US. “They were also an ideal candidate for study (on grief), as they have been previously widely viewed as distant, detached, and aloof.”
Greene said we typically think of cats and dogs as being fundamentally different, exhibiting different attitudes and temperaments, “so I was surprised when our results suggested that cats exhibit grief-like behaviours following the loss of a dog companion”.
Davies-Carter has found cats grieve deeply when they lose a companion. “I’ve also seen cats which have been super depressed when a dog passed away. Animals will stop eating and become lethargic or quiet, for a period of about two weeks to six months, depending on how attached they were,” she said.
Greene said that cat owners could be projecting their grief and so the researchers had “to walk a fine line between examining possible emotional states of animals and anthropomorphism”, she said.
Matchmaking between owners & pets but respect wildlife species
Given how human emotions can muddy research, AI might be a useful recruit in matching dogs to training for various tasks from tracking and security to guiding the visually impaired.
A machine-learning tool described five personality types for dogs — “excitable/hyperattached”, “anxious/fearful”, “aloof/predatory”, “reactive/assertive” and “calm/agreeable” — in a study published this year in Nature Scientific Reports.
This could help with the selection and training of dogs for specific roles in the future, the researchers said. Meanwhile an AI dog personality algorithm could improve the adoption success of dogs by better matching their personalities with prospective guardians, another study suggests.
Another aspect of pet ownership is the need to maintain physical distance between them and the wild animals that, in places such as Cape Town, live just across the garden fence. Behavourial ecologist Prof Justin O’Riain, head of the Institute for Wildlife and Communities in Africa, said caracals in the Table Mountain National Park prey on domestic cats along the urban edge, and domestic cats in turn are decimating birds, rodents, reptiles and other wild species. He urges cat owners to keep their pets out of the park, and indoors at night.
On the mountain slopes dogs may overlap with baboons and caracal and so it is essential that they are under control at all times he said. “This after all is their wildlife’s domain. Baboons will mostly avoid dogs and will typically only engage if they need to defend a troop member that is under attack.”
As research leaps ahead with AI tools, the opportunities for people to expand their understanding of their fellow species will take off. As Albert Einstein put it: “Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”
What the science shows
Purdue University (US) led a study on how often dogs and cats played fetch, published on Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. The study found that 41% of cats fetch toys and 78% of dog owners said their dogs fetched objects.
More than 8,000 cat owners took part in the online survey conducted between 2015 and 2023, and nearly 74,000 dog owners were surveyed online about whether their dogs would attempt to fetch sticks, balls or other objects.
The University of Bristol (UK) led a peer-reviewed study on how the smell of human stress affected dogs’ emotions, published in July in Nature: Scientific Reports. Researchers found that the dogs made more pessimistic choices after exposure to human stress odours.
Eighteen dogs were trained that when a bowl was in a certain location, it contained a treat, but when it was in another place it did not. Then they were exposed to sweat and breath samples from stressed people (during an arithmetic test) or relaxed people (listening to soundscapes) or to no odours.
After exposure to the stress sample, the dogs had to decide about approaching an “ambiguous bowl” in a new location. A quick approach suggested optimism and a slow one pessimism. The stress smell made the dogs slower to approach the ambiguous bowl. But the dogs learnt faster about the presence or absence of food in the two trained locations when the stress smell was present.
Oakland University (US) led a study titled “Is Companion Animal Loss Cat-astrophic?” about domestic cats losing “friends”, published in August in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
More than 400 people who had cats that had experienced the loss of another pet in the household (two-thirds of those that died were cats, one-third dogs) were asked how the surviving cat had behaved.
They reported that their cats slept, ate and played less, suggesting that they were affected by the loss, and the effect was greater the more time the animals had spent together. But caregivers who themselves felt grief at the loss more keenly reported a greater impact on the surviving animal, raising the possibility that anthropomorphism was at play.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.