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Your Cat Actually Does Love You - AskMen 

Your Cat Actually Does Love You

Trending News: Contrary To Popular Belief, Your Cat Doesn't Want To Kill You Matt Shea
April 3, 2017


No, your cat isn’t only interested in you because you give it food (or because, if it was big enough, you would be its food). New research suggests what we all knew deep down all along: that your cat, y’know, kinda loves you.


Look at that cat in the corner of your living room. Just look at it. We bet it’s staring back at you, its gaze steadier than Christopher Walken in King of New York. And as we all know by now, turn your back just for one second and it will make a b-line for the jugular. Because cats are secretly plotting to kill us, as research from late 2015 illustrated.

But what if that’s not the case at all? Indeed, after a year of living with your worst enemy, sleeping with a knife under the pillow, you can relax, because it seems cats actually do like us. The proof lies in a new paper published online in Behavioural Processes.

Researchers from Oregon State University took 50 cats from both homes and shelters, and limited their contact with toys, food and people.

Then, the cats were exposed to four different types of stimuli: human contact, food, toys and scent. The researchers found that half of the cats preferred social interaction to every other type of stimulus, while only 37 percent preferred food.

“Although there was clear individual variability in cat preference, social interaction with humans was the most-preferred stimulus category for the majority of cats, followed by food,” the authors wrote in the paper. “This was true for cats in both the pet and shelter population.”

In short, cats dig people. So Chris over there isn’t going to claw you to death. More likely, the little fella just wants a cuddle. Do it.



So would different breeds of domesticated cat tend to have different preferences?


Cats sleep on average for 13 hours a day in order to conserve energy (to better kill you y’see).
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