Petting doesn’t make all kitties purr
Posted by staff / October 13, 2013
When most of us think of enjoying time with a pet, it involves hours of devoted petting, yet a new study testing what conditions caused pets stress showed that some cats — much like some people — would rather have anything but.
Prompted by the assertion that cats who live in feline solitude are more psychologically healthy, researchers discovered that kittens without company seemed more stressed than those that lived in multi-cat households, and cats who merely tolerated petting also seemed to fare better when there were other animals around to satisfy their owner’s need to show affection.
“Many people keep groups of cats in their home and although they might seem happy together, some people have argued that because this is an unnatural setup, it is not good for their welfare,” Daniel Mills, professor of veterinary behavioral medicine at England’s University
of Lincoln, said in a statement. “Our research shows this is not necessarily the case.”
They do warn that this was a small-scale study, and the most important take-away was to give pets the room to choose the optimal conditions for their personal type.
We should also note that the study stopped at households with four cats, so twenty is still overdoing it.
Full story at Physiology and Behavior via LiveScience.
Photo credit: Fotolia
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