You believe your cat loves you. Now science has proof

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Researchers are beginning to answer the kinds of questions that have long nagged at cat owners—overturning some long-held misconceptions in the process.

The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa

Cat lovers, of course, argue that there's more to it than that. Cats are far better at earning our affection than we give them credit for, argues Kristyn Vitale, an assistant professor in animal health and behavior at Unity College in Maine. Long perplexed by the haters who claimed her feline friends were inherently anti-​social, untrainable, stubborn and mean, Vitale has spent the last decade trying to correct the misperception that cats are antisocial and inferior to dogs.

To find out, the researchers drew on a well-known test from the field of human and primate developmental psychology. The test requires experimenters to hide food in one of several containers, then bring the animal into the room and guess which container has the food. To help them, researchers offer various cues, alternatively staring at, nodding toward or pointing to the correct container. The ability to complete what might appear a deceptively simple task implies something profound.

"Dogs are more social and the cats have more independence and autonomy," Pongrácz says."But against all these odds, both species really mastered the ability to live with humans.""A very basic feature of both cats and dogs is that, without any formal training, they are very quickly able to learn the main rules of that particular human family or group where they are living," he says.

Cat signals are subtle for a reason. Most cats in nature are solitary animals, notes, says Jennifer Vonk of Oakland University in Michigan, who studies how animals think and learn. Over the millennia, they were under less evolutionary pressure to develop the capacity for overt signaling—unlike dogs, who are often warning their fellow packmates of danger or telling them about a newly discovered source of food.

 

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