Why is cat behavior different from dogs when strangers attack their owners?

If a stranger attacks or harms you, your dog will not stand still and look at it kindly, but your cat will not react in the same way. Why?

There is an old stereotype about the difference between cats and dogs. While dogs are said to be loving and loyal, cats are considered withdrawn, cold, and indifferent. It's a stereotype that probably most cat lovers disagree with, and I myself certainly find it hard to believe that my cat, purring on my lap, doesn't really care about me.

In general, research conducted on the behavior of cats indicates that these pets form emotional bonds with their human owners, and they seem to suffer from anxiety when separated from them, and respond to their voices more than they do with strangers, and resort to them in search of reassurance when they feel afraid.

But a new study by researchers in Japan offers a more complex picture of our relationship with cats. By adopting a method previously used to study dog ​​behavior, the researchers found that cats - unlike dogs - do not avoid strangers who refuse to help their owners.

The study monitored the reactions of cats in an experiment, in which a cat watches its owner trying to open a box to reach something inside in the presence of two strangers sitting next to him, then turns to one of them and asks him for help.

The goal here is to record the cat's response in two cases. In the "helper" experiment, the stranger helps the cat's owner open the box, and in the "unhelpful" experiment, the stranger refuses to help, and remains passively sitting doing nothing.

Next, each of the strangers presents the cat with a favorite food, while the scientists watch the cat's reaction, and its choice of person to approach it first. Would you rather eat the food from the helper before the negative person, indicating a positive bias and that helping the stranger made the cat feel more affectionate with him? Or will it avoid eating from the unhelpful person, indicating a negative bias, meaning that the cat felt mistrust towards the person who did not help its owner?

When this method was used to test dogs' reaction, it revealed a clear negative bias. The dogs preferred not to eat food from a stranger who refused to help their owner. In contrast, the cats were completely indifferent. It showed no preference for the cooperating person, nor any avoidance of the uncooperative person. For cats, it seems, food is food, nothing more, nothing less, and it is always desirable

social lessons

What should we understand from this? The easiest conclusion might be that cats are selfish, and don't care at all how their owners are treated. Although this is consistent with our preconceptions about cats, it is a glaring example of prejudice and projection of human concepts on them, it explains the behavior of cats as if they were humans, but with a small size and a furry body, and not other creatures with distinctive ways of thinking of their own.

In order to truly understand cats, we have to get out of the mentality that is governed by human concepts, and think of them as cats, and nothing else. And when we do, we'll realize that what we saw as evidence of the cats' selfishness in this study likely came from that they weren't able to pick up on social interactions between humans. Cats did not even realize that some strangers were unkind or cooperative with their owners.

Although cats are able to pick up on some human social cues, can follow directions from humans, and are sensitive to their feelings, they are probably less attuned to our social relationships than dogs.

At the same time, the history of cat domestication is relatively recent, and the changes that domestication has left on their disposition are much less than that of dogs. While dogs are descended from social animals that live in herds, the ancestors of cats originally hunted their prey individually. It is possible that domestication developed already existing social skills in dogs, but it may not have done the same for cats, who were less socially aware. So we shouldn't be too quick to conclude that our pet cats aren't concerned with whether people treat us negatively or not. The most likely possibility is that she cannot realize this.

Despite the prevalence of cat breeding and its great popularity with humans, what we know about their way of thinking is still relatively little, and future research may reveal that cats' understanding of humans is more limited than we currently think. Or it may turn out that cats are better at recognizing the social expressive differences of humans in other contexts.

But no matter what the studies reveal, we should avoid explaining cat behavior from preconceived notions or according to our human projections. Before we judge our pet cats as indifferent or selfish, we must first try to look at the world through their eyes.

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