A cat's personality is shaped by their life experience. Photo: Petri Jauhiainen
Sitting around watching cat videos all day? Don't feel bad - you could actually be contributing to some meaningful research, according to a companion animal welfare charity.
Companion Animals NZ (CANZ) has just launched a new study looking into how accurately people can decode cat interactions and facial expressions. The study involves participants watching a series of short cat videos and answering questions around whether they thought the interactions were positive or negative.
The videos are 30 to 40 seconds long, and there's only 10 in total, but CANZ Welfare Science Programmes Coordinator Dr Gosia Zobel says the results could reveal a lot about how people interpret and respond to cat behaviour.
"Cats are often in a multi-cat household and if people aren't interpreting the behaviour of those cats, they might actually be misinterpreting what's happening," Dr Zobel explains.
"They'll just say, 'Oh, my cat never comes indoors, my cat always hides out.' What we're trying to figure out is, is some of that to do with people not necessarily knowing their cat's language?"
Dr Zobel has collaborated on the study with US researchers Dr Britt Florkiewicz and Levi Neal from Lyon College in Arkansas. Together, they've sorted through more than 200 cat videos to shortlist the 10 interactions shown in the survey.
Participants begin by answering some background questions - like their previous experience with cats or whether they work with animals - then they watch the first half of each video.
"We split the videos in two, so first they get to watch one cat doing something and then they tell us what they think is gonna happen ... we ask the person, was this a positive or negative situation? And then we say, in a few words, explain why you think that.
"Then they get to watch the rest of the videos and see what the outcome is, and they go, 'Oh, is that what I thought or is that actually the opposite of what I was thinking?'"
The survey currently has 500 participants and is calling for more - and it's not just limited to "cat people".
"We want to hear from everybody," Dr Zobel says.
"People might be flatting, living in an environment where there are cats but they might not consider themselves as knowing much about cats. We're trying to capture all that kind of information."
Dr Zobel says this kind of qualitative research is "extremely rich" as she'll be looking out for specific responses that continuously come up.
Dr Gosia Zobel, Welfare Science Programmes Coordinator at Companion Animals NZ. Photo: Supplied
"When they're saying, 'That cat was really happy', okay well, what about that video specifically were people picking up on as a happy thing? Or if they're saying, 'That cat was really angry at that other cat', again, we can relate that to what we know is in the video. It's quite a strong way of analysing the data."
Dr Zobel says one of the biggest behavioural misinterpretations is people assuming their cat is simply aloof if it doesn't like spending much time around other cats - or people.
"That might just be its personality, if it's an introverted cat it wants to sit off and watch things. But a lot of that time, that body language is actually telling us something. It's telling us, this isn't a great environment for me, I don't like being in this room when there's seven other people in here. We might be interpreting it as aloofness when it's actually saying, 'I want out of this situation'.
"When we're looking at a cat-to-cat interaction, we think if a cat is constantly bashing around another cat, well that's kind of funny. But again, it might actually be extremely stressful if a cat is getting batted around and it doesn't have an escape route ... like how much of that, what we think is funny, is actually extremely unfunny for the cat?
"Maybe they've been in that environment for so long, they've just put up with it, but if we could recognise that this is a specific cat that could actually really appreciate the opportunity to go into another room, we could be improving the lives of both cats, and the other cat might learn to play with something other than the one that needs to escape."
Another misconception, Dr Zobel says, is that cats are always independent.
"A lot of it comes down to their life experience. Some cats might want to be by themselves, but we know a lot of cats if they've been raised together as kittens, they'll sleep together, they eat together, they play together, they follow each other around.
"... What we know about cat moods is very much dictated by their life experience, how they're being treated, what their environment looks like, whether they're enriched and have lots of things to play with ... you can reduce aggressive behaviour by giving them enrichment and things like that.
"The ideal outcome for us is, we're trying to create educational material to help people, if they can really pick up the happy cats but they're not so great at picking out if a cat is stressed out for instance ... we're creating a cat dictionary, and that qualitative research will give us the wording behind that."