According to new research conducted on cats, furry felines prefer human interaction to food, despite their unjust reputation for being selfish and anti-social.
The March 2017 study, which was published in the journal Behavioural Processes, was compiled by researchers who ran cognitive tests on cats that they had previously run on dogs and tortoises.
The 50 participating cats were removed from both a cat shelter and their owner's homes and were left without food, toys or human contact for a few hours. They were then rewarded with different stimuli associated with each item (and a human) — and the majority of felines responded best to human interaction. In fact, only 37% chose food over social stimulus.
"While it has been suggested that cat sociality exists on a continuum, perhaps skewed toward independency, we have found that 50% of cats tested preferred interaction with the social stimulus even though they had a direct choice between social interaction with a human and their other most preferred stimuli from the three other stimulus categories," the study authors wrote.
"Increasingly cat cognition research is providing evidence of their complex socio-cognitive and problem-solving abilities," they continued. "Nonetheless, it is still common belief that cats are not especially sociable or trainable. This disconnect may be due, in part, to a lack of knowledge of what stimuli cats prefer and thus may be most motivated to work for."
It was also found that there was little difference between the response of cats that had owners and those that were looking for a new home.