Humans and cats have a long, ancient history of companionship – but how attached are our feline friends to us?
While dogs are constantly clinging to human reassurance, cats are far more independent and could equally seek comfort from a stranger than their owner, research has discovered.
The struggle scientists have faced in testing the bond between humans and cats is that companion cats tend to be difficult to test in a laboratory because they hate leaving their homes.
Researchers from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary tested 15 therapy cats, which are trained to enjoy travelling to new places, along with 13 regular companion cats. The cats were placed in a room and tested on how they reacted to their owner compared to a stranger.
The results were published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science and showed therapy cats tended to be equally friendly with a stranger as with their owner, even when their owner left the room. However, the companion cats didn’t react much to their owner or a stranger.
The study found “no sign of attachment to the owner in any of the cat groups”, even in “highly friendly and amicable cats”. It concludes that cats did not need to develop “dependency-based bonds with humans”.
Dr Péter Pongrácz, who led the study, told The Independent: “Cats developed a successful coexistence with people, which comes with mutual benefits (e.g. emotional) for both parties. However, while dogs achieved this through their domestication history by becoming dependent on humans (asymmetrical relationship), cats remained independent from us (they remained effective predators on their own). Thus, for cats, the classic attachment bond towards their owner is biologically irrelevant, because they live with the owner as 'equals'.
“In our experiment, the main novelty was that we tested therapy cats, who were comfortable at an unknown place, with unknown people. Thus, we could test them in the ‘strange situation test’, just like dogs, without extreme stress. We showed that these friendly cats did not show differential responses towards their owners or a stranger, which would be a prerequisite for attachment.”
To determine if animals are dependent on their owners, researchers measure how attached the pet is to their owner, how much anxiety they demonstrate when the owner is absent, and finally, the acceptance of a friendly stranger.
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This “strange situation test” has previously been used on dogs, and found they have a highly dependent child-parent relationship with their owner.
Signs of attachment include staying close to the owner within a metre, watching their owner and playing with their owner when they waved a toy.
The cats displayed little to no difference in how they interacted with their owner and the stranger.
