Tag Archives: human animal interactions

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voxWho would have guessed that the big research questions of 2014 would be all about cats (okay, I’m biased)? Do cats really love us? Do they recognize our voices? Do they hate petting? Why do they love boxes? Does anyone understand them (even our vets?)? Why are cats so mysterious???

the cutI wrote about several cat studies that came out in the last year or so: on whether cats ignore us when they hear our voices, whether cat bites are related to depression, whether play can prevent behavior problems, how people feel about stray cats, how little veterinarians know about cat behavior, and of course the yet-unpublished study claiming that cats aren’t attached to us.

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Dogs + Humping: Match made in heaven

Leave it to two of my science-blogging faves, DogSpies and BuzzHootRoar to bring us the top reasons that dogs hump, complete with animated GIFs. We can all just go home now, science journalism is done.

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Does your kitty have a history? Photo by Galawebdesign via Wikipedia/Creative Commons

I think most of us who adopt a kitty from a shelter (especially if they are an adult) wonder about their past life, before we brought them home. Who fed them? Were they born under a bed or under a bridge? But how important is it to adopters to know that their cat previously lived in a home, with people? A new study, "Is There a Bias Against Stray Cats in Shelters?" suggests that there might be a bias against stray cats with an unknown history.

The authors of the paper, Kathryn  Dybdall and Rosemary Strasser, did three studies. In the first, they examined shelter records of adult adoptable cats (12 months or older) who had been listed as either owner-surrender or stray. Owner-surrender cats tended to be adopted on average in 26 days, compared to 32 days for stray cats.

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You study...what?

dogspiesOne of my favorite blogs out there, Dog Spies, comes through just in time for Friday Faves. How people react when you tell them you study...dogs??????? Is that a science?

 

YES! Animal behavior/cognition is science!

Image via Dog Spies!

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This week, I have things to say about two of my favorite species, cats and squirrels...

How can we know that cats love us?

A recent article in the Atlantic discussed the "love hormone" oxytocin, and how it is released when we interact with our pets (turns out other animals have it too, and their oxy levels may go up after interactions with US too).

Most studies have been on dogs, and one study showed that the effects of interacting with cats were less "loving" than interacting with dogs. Most research on human-pet attachment also finds reports of stronger attachment to dogs than cats. Why is this? Are our relationships with cats that different than those with dogs? Are the scales flawed? Is it our co-evolution with dogs that leads to this oxy release? There are still many unanswered questions.

Of course, other studies have suggested that cats aren't attached to humans (my feelings about that study can be found here)...and everyone just wants to know: DOES MY CAT REALLY LOVE ME????? So what gives? I talked about it with the Dodo this week (and so did John Bradshaw!).

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Czech deer taking no chances

There used to be an electric fence at the Czech-German boundary. While the Iron Curtain may have come down 25 years ago, red deer prefer to maintain that previous line in the sand, and are not crossing into "foreign territory." Read more here.

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I recently purchased Meowspace (for more about my Meowspace chronicles, see my past blog posts here and here) – a device that allows me to feed my cats separately, but requires the Meowspace user to learn to get in and out of a box using a microchip-controlled cat flap. Whether I trained my cat or she figured it out herself is a good question.

Even though at times I felt like she was never going to succeed at Meowspacing, it took the Nibbler less than three weeks to learn to use the cat flap. As soon as she figured it out, I lured her in, and set up a videocamera to see exactly what she was doing to get out. At first I was watching her to see what she would do once she was in the box. Turns out she was doing the same thing to me – watching me to see if I was going to help her get out.

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Bees show scaffolded and social learning

Scientists had bees solve increasingly difficult "puzzle flowers" to get rewards. In a control group, they presented the hardest flower to the bee first, and the bee could not solve the problem. In a second study, naive bees watched experienced bees solve the puzzle, and then were able to solve it more quickly themselves. Read more here

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The "Love Hormone" and your pooch

The oxytocin hormone contributes to our feelings of love and care, and scientists have been exploring what it means for how dogs feel about us (they have oxytocin too). The results suggest it is not just oxytocin in general that directs those loving doggie feelings, but which SPECIFIC variant of the oxytocin receptor gene a dog has, that predicts how friendly they are toward people. DogSpies summarizes it all for us very nicely here:

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New Dish? Moles in Couscous

I'm not talking about spicy Mexican cuisine. Scientists at the University of Massachusetts investigated how moles burrow, by x-raying them in tunnels of couscous (apparently it has a nice texture).  Apparently moles are burly little creatures, able to dig with a force of forty times their body weight! Read and see more here (there's video!)

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Raising the Roof - with bovine flatulence

If you bring a lot of cows together in a small building, you are going to have serious gas (cows emit around 500 liters of methane a day - is there a cow fart suit like there is for dogs???). Add a bit of static electricity and you have an exploding barn. This happened in Germany this week. One cow was slightly injured, luckily no fatalities, and I once again can tag a blog post with the word "farting." There's not much more to the story really (cows, farts, explosions, what more do you need to know?) but you can read more about the science of cow flatulence here.

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The Dodo is a new website, named after the extinct bird, and focused on the complexities of our relationships with other animals. I'm excited to be a founding member of the Dodo community. There's loads of great reading on the website, including the first installment of a series I am doing on what it means to be a cat person....

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There's also been intense and eye-opening coverage of the dolphin hunt in Taiji, and DogSpies own Julie Hecht summarizes why your dog only LOOKS but doesn't feel guilty.

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That's just the tip of a huge iceberg of fascinating reading! I look forward to seeing what transpires as the Dodo continues to grow and evolve...