Category: CatSci Blog

• August 14, 2015

  Scent, security, and stress

  Does your cat get anxious and hide when people come over? Does your cat pee or scratch on the carpet? These behaviors (if medical issues have been ruled out, always talk to your vet!) may indicate your cat does not feel secure in their environment. There are many ways you can help your cat to feel…

• June 2, 2015

  City of the Wildcats

  Hi all! I wanted to share a documentary entitled City of the Wildcats. It is a great introduction to cat social behavior. It is narrated by the great Sir David Attenborough and focuses on the behavior of feral colony cats living in Rome. Click here (Part 1, Part 2) or watch below ! Part 1

• March 2, 2015

  Cats have friends too

  Many people think of cats as solitary creatures. But, did you know that free-roaming colony cats have complex social relationships? Cats engage in a variety of behaviors with one another such as allorubbing (one cat rubs against another), allogrooming (one cat grooms another), cuffing (one cat smacks another with its paw), sniffing, playing, laying together……

• February 12, 2015

  Do cats understand human emotions? Yes!

  Here I talk about an extremely interesting study that examined the ability of cats to detect human emotion. The study is entitled “Social referencing and cat–human communication” and was published in Animal Cognition in 2015. Merola and colleagues examined if cats have the ability to use social referencing– or the ability of an individual to evaluate another individuals’s emotional state and…

• January 5, 2015

  Constant and Faithful Companion

  Originally posted on Sixty-Sixty: Sasha Twenty-six years ago this month a sixteen-year-old gray tabby cat named Sasha lay down on our bedspread and, content with the companionship of her lifelong friend and confidante Joan, closed her eyes and purred, consented to death, and left us behind. We’ve owned cats most of our married life. But…