Wherever a cat wanders, it seems to carry an attitude of indifference along with it. Our feline pets are famous for their detached, stand-offish ways, but despite their unfazed, grumpy expressions, they are not always as cold-hearted as their reputation suggests.
A new study has found that when a fellow household pet dies, surviving cats show grief-like signs that are similar to those of dogs.
“Our results are consistent with the idea that cats may experience the loss of companion animals in ways similar to what dogs experience despite having evolved from a less social ancestor,” write psychologists Brittany Greene and Jennifer Vonk from Oakland University in the US.
The researchers suggest this could change how we think of cats as asocial and aloof.
Their findings come from an online survey of 412 pet owners, who were the current caregivers for a living cat but who had also had a dog or a cat in the household that had recently died.
In the weeks and months following the loss of their pet, caregivers reported altered behavior in their surviving cats. These included increased vocalizations, time spent looking or sniffing for the deceased pet, and a decreased willingness to eat, sleep, or play.
The more time the surviving cat spent with the deceased pet, the more likely they were to show immediate and long-term behavioral changes “in the direction that would be expected if cats were capable of grief-like responses,” write Greene and Vonk.
Even when the deceased pet was a dog, the cats seemed to care that they were gone.
Pet owners in the survey claimed their cats showed temporary signs of confusion or fearfulness after the death of a dog, such as time spent hiding, or sniffing out the deceased pet’s favorite spots.
“Cats did not respond significantly differently to the loss of a companion dog or another cat,” write Greene and Vonk.
This changed behavior could, therefore, be a possible sign of a lost friend, or as the researchers put it in an ever-so-cat-like way, “an interspecific ‘preferred associate’.”
The findings align with a similar study, conducted in 2016, which found that in the six months or so after the death of a fellow pet, both cats and dogs increased their attention-seeking behaviors, such as the frequency and volume of their vocalizations. They also ate less.
Grief is a tricky emotion to objectively measure in non-human animals, but these behavioral changes suggest the loss of a pet has an impact on remaining pets in the household.
Either that or pet owners are projecting their own grief onto their cats and dogs.
After all, the findings of the current survey are only based on the perceptions of cat owners.
Caregivers who themselves reported greater grief after losing a pet, were more likely to report their surviving cats as spending more time alone, sleeping, or hiding.
Maybe that’s because those who are closer to their pets are better at ‘reading’ their emotions. Or it could be a sign that a pet owner is only seeing the emotions they want to see in their pet.
Further research, with more objective methods of emotional analysis, is needed to figure out what is driving these observed behavioral changes.
Scientists are still trying to figure out how cats communicate with us, and the nuances of their many vocalizations, gestures, and expressions can be easily misinterpreted.
“Despite some limitations, the current study adds to the very limited data on social cognition of cats,” conclude Greene and Vonk.
The study was published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
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