Short Wave - Does Your Cat Like You — Or Just Tolerate You?

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

(Encore episode) It's another installment of our series, "Animal Slander," where we take a common phrase about animals and see what truth there is to it. The issue before the Short Wave court today: "Do cats deserve their aloof reputation?" We look at the evidence with cat researcher, Kristyn Vitale of Oregon State University. Follow Maddie Sofia on Twitter @maddie_sofia and Emily Kwong @emilykwong1234. Email the show at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey Duterino's Emily Kwong here. Hope you're enjoying Dog Week, shortwave style. So listen, for all my cat lovers out there who feel a little neglected, don't you worry. There's science for you, too. You may remember our series Animal Slander, which takes common phrases about animals and debunks them with data. One of our earliest episodes was Maddie and I talking about cats. Did they deserve their aloof reputation? or is it a bunch of slanderous nonsense?

Here's that episode, which features some choice dog research too. All right, enjoy. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Water in the quiet. Be seated. People say a lot of negative things about cats, myself included sometimes. If you don't believe me, just ask our project manager, Aaron Register. I just don't like when people say that cats don't like people.

Cats aren't friendly. They aren't playful. People aren't playful. Before animal slander was even a passing thought in my mind, Aaron was pushing us to do episodes on cats, which might have something to do with a very large cat versus dog debate barely simmering below the surface of the shortwave team. Barely simmering. Okay, we'll probably never settle this dispute about which animal is better. But we can at least set the record straight on some potential slander that cats endure.

such as cats are aloof, especially compared to dogs, that they love food more than they love us, and the idea that cats love people who don't love cats. Exactly. And for more on that, we spoke with Kristen Vitale. Kristen, I have to start with a hard-hitting question, cats or dogs. You know, I don't have a favorite necessarily and can't really say which one's better. She wouldn't play our game. Kind of a diplomatic answer.

but I think both species are very intelligent. She's a researcher at Oregon State University, and she specializes in cat social cognition. Basically, how cats are processing the social world around them. So, all rise. Hear ye, hear ye. Court is now in session. Today on the show, you be the jury, science will be the judge.

Do cats deserve their aloof reputation? Okay, Maddie. Yes. Today, we're looking at some potential catslander, Beginning with the question, do cats deserve their aloof reputation? And Kristen Vitale has been researching cat social cognition for years. One of her most recent studies was looking at cat attachments to humans and comparing it to dogs and babies. And what we know is that when these animals are placed in a strange situation, we see attachment behavior be heightened and then we're able to measure it.

So we wanted to put cats in a similar kind of strange situation and then look at if they displayed the same type of attachment behaviors toward their owner as we saw dogs and human infants. Attach what now? Attachment style. So in psychology, there's this thing called the strange situation. It's this standardized procedure scientists can use to test how the subject, here cats, attaches to its caregiver. There's actually three main styles that we see. The first is a secure attachment bond. So what this means is that the individual might show some distress when their caretaker leaves the room.

So the cats in this experiment will cry or search for their human. But when the caregiver comes back, they'll be this little cute reunion. And the cat will resume normal behavior. Exploring, batting around toys. Basically, Kristen says they're able to use that caregiver as a secure base from which to explore the novel situation of the room. That's a secure attachment bond. But we also see insecure responses where those individuals can't use their caretaker in that way and either excessively cling to them, which is known as insecure ambivalent, or excessively avoid them when they return, which is insecure avoidant. Okay, so with these three different attachment styles in mind, secure, insecure, ambivalent and insecure avoidant.

Honestly, sounds like the last three people I dated. You know what I mean? Okay, so anyways, with those in mind, they run this study. Yes. First, they brought in a cat or a kitten and its owner. And like we said earlier, human leaves, then human comes back. And we see how that cat behaves during that reunion. Do they display attachment behavior toward the owner when they come back?

And if so, is it the same styles of attachment that we see dogs and babies display toward their caregivers? So what did they see? More attached or less attached than dogs? The same. Yeah, so it was very, very interesting to find just how closely those numbers matched what we've seen in dogs and humans. The majority of both dogs and human children are securely attached. And that's anywhere from about 60 to 65 percent of the population, which again is exactly what we found in the cats. So this idea that cats are aloof, certainly more than dogs. Animal slander. It feels good to be on that end of it, doesn't it?

It does. I'm tapping into the rage I do possess. Okay, okay. But as a devil's advocate and at risk of sounding pro dog, that is one study, right? One little study. Well, I'm not done. We're only like seven minutes into this episode, and Kristen's been studying this for years. In previous research, you also found that cats prefer playing with humans over.

eating? Is that right? Yeah, so we actually had four different categories of items we were interested in looking at. Okay. So whether cats most preferred different types of social interaction with humans, so that include playing, petting, or just being talked to. Maybe you're not talking to your cats enough, Maddie. Three different types of food, three different types of toys and three different types of sense. And as you said, we found that the majority, 50% of the cats that we tested, most preferred that social interaction with people and 38% most preferred food. So we still saw a lot preferring food, but the majority did prefer that social interaction. Food would not be second to me.

Food would be. If I were a cat, food would be first. You would be an aloof cat, wouldn't you? I will not say. This probably goes without saying, but because we're on a quest to figure out how much of this cats are aloof is slander. You did some research to figure out if cats spend more time with people who give them attention to, right? Right. So what we did was put a person in the room with a cat. Basically, what they did is just sit on the floor for two minutes, either ignoring the cat and then two minutes of paying attention to the cat. And we looked at how much time the cat spent near to the person in each of those phases.

One thing to keep in mind is they're also looking at how the cat's. were brought up. So they ran this experiment with pet cats, but also shelter cats. And what we found is that both shelter cats and pet cats spend significantly more time with a person who's paying attention to them. Okay, so basically, regardless of the type of cat, cats were actually more likely to pay attention to you if you pay attention to them. That's right. And that makes sense. I mean, if we're, you know, hanging out with friends and our friends are ignoring us, we're probably not going to be initiating a lot. of interaction with them either. You know, it flies in the face of, I've sat in many, many living rooms with people who've said, oh, the trick to get the cat to pay attention to you is to ignore them.

Oh, yeah. And there's kind of that old idea that cats like the people that hate them. You know, like if we know there's a non-cat person in the room, that's the person the cat's going to seek out. But at least the results of this study, don't show that. I have definitely tried to ignore a cat, hoping it would suddenly care of. about me when I could have just made my interests known, Kwong. This is lies.

It's all lies all the way down. Think of all the cat friends you could have made along the way. You fast up. Honestly, I have some cat-based apologies maybe that I need to make. You better start acting right, Sophia. Okay. So it's not necessarily like every single cat is aloof or every single cat is social, right? It's like some of them are, some of them not, just like dogs.

Exactly. There's a whole spectrum of personality. So you can't say overall cats are aloof. Okay, so I will say, Emily Kwong, after this hard-hitting, deep investigative reporting that you have done, the evidence is clear. This is cat slander. You'll be happy to know, Kristen is right there with you. One last thing. Do these sayings that cats are aloof, my cat doesn't care, they just want food, do they ever bother you?

You know, they do bother me because some of the, you. These ideas, I think, are why the field of cat cognition has been stagnant for a long time. I think that a lot of these expectations shape the work that people want to do. And if we say cats are aloof and untrainable, well, they can't then learn how to engage in cognitive testing. But in our lab, we're showing cats can be trained just as readily as dogs. They can learn sit, come when called, go to Matt and stay. We've even had kittens out of our class go on to kayaks with their owner.

So I think that some of these statements can harm not only the field, but interactions of owners with their cats. If people don't think that they can bond to their cat or can engage in a lot of these, you know, interactions, why even try? And if we don't try with our cats, that's going to produce a very different individual, than we see with dogs. Well, well, well, I guess this one really is for you, project manager, Aaron Register. In defense of cats. You can definitely tell half of our team that they're wrong because science. Absolutely.

And next time, someone says, I love this cat so much because it acts like a dog. Lovingly tell them, no. This cat acts like a cat. Well, you've really taken on this injustice. It's better than I could ever imagine. Thank you, Emily Kwong. You're welcome, Maddie Safaya. This episode was produced by a tiny, securely attached human kitten named Rebecca Romeroz

and edited with dignity and respect by Viet Le. Special thanks to Natasha Branch for her unbelievable engineering as always, and to Emily Vaughn for fact-checking. I'm Maddie Safia. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR. NPR's Planet Money Summer School is now in session. Everything you want to know about investing. from expert guest professors. New classes every Wednesday to Labor Day in the Planet Money podcast feed.