Cat owners everywhere: your cat has been lying to you. Extremely rude, right? Cats pretend they hate everything and everyone, always trying to avoid snuggles and being as rude as possible.
But a new study out of Oregon State University has something to say about cats and their fake-hate. It turns out, cats actually enjoy human contact more than they enjoy food. And we all know how much they love their food!
The study was pretty neat. It took 50 cats from both shelters and people's homes. For a few hours, the cats were deprived of food, human contact, scents, and toys. After the "cleansing" period, the cats were re-introduced to these stimuli to see what they chose.
"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 author of the study wrote.
This was the case for both the shelter cats and the house cats, which would take away any though that shelter cats want human interaction because they are more often deprived of it.
So there you have it, cat lovers. Your cat loves you back...they're just trying to play hard to get!