Avoid the tummy and don’t expect blind trust, respectively, science says.
You can tell with some accuracy The Back Page’s level of anxiety regarding the state of the pandemic in our home state of NSW by our level of fixation on cute pets.
So today we bring you two studies, one about not annoying your cat and one about not lying to your dog.
If you’re a cat owner who resembles a scratching post, give some thought to how and when your cat wants to be patted, and give them a choice about it, say the authors of a study out of Nottingham Trent University and the famous Battersea Dogs and Cat Home in the UK.
It’s about consent, people.
In the absence of “practical evidence-based guides to facilitate humans’ optimal animal handling and interaction” with their animals, they propose the acronym CAT for “providing the cat with choice and control (‘C’), paying attention (‘A’) to the cats’ behaviour and body language and limiting touch (‘T’), primarily to their temporal regions” (base of the ears, cheeks and chin).
People were videoed applying these guidelines in their interactions with cats at the home, and in a control condition where they didn’t.
“Compared to the control, on average, cats in the intervention condition waved their tails for significantly longer and more frequently, had their ears in a neutral or forwards position for longer, ‘treaded’ or ‘kneaded’ with their front paws for longer, sniffed the participant for longer and also rubbed against them more frequently.” For non-cat people, those are good things.
The team found only modest effect differences, but attributed this to the control conditions already outlawing a lot of the more obnoxious behaviour humans might display towards cats.
Over at the University of Vienna, researchers conducted experiments at the Clever Dog Lab to test doggie trust.
In their study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 260 dogs were advised by a human in which of two containers they might find food.
Sometimes the humans didn’t know what they were talking about, because another human performed a switcheroo in full view of the dog but not the first human. The dogs were tested on whether they blindly followed the human’s instruction, or knew that the human was operating under a false belief and chose the correct bowl.
(The food was actually removed before the dog made its choice, to remove the likelihood that it was guided by smell alone.)
A substantial minority still followed the false human cue (38%), and the younger hounds were more likely to do this than seasoned ones. But this was a smaller proportion than expected, given the performance of children under five and chimpanzees and bonobos in the classic test of false belief (Maxi puts chocolate in cupboard A and leaves room, mother moves it to cupboard B, Maxi comes back – does he expect the chocolate to be in A or B?).
It seems dogs didn’t spend 10,000 years evolving alongside humans without learning a thing or two – Clever Dogs indeed.
If you see a human up to no good, bark at felicity@medicalrepublic.com.au.
