A psychological experiment from the 1970s studied how attached young children are to their mothers (a lot), and more recently British researchers repeated it with pet dogs and cats. Once again, the results weren’t surprising.
The report does oversimplify one side issue, however. In the examples shown the pets are relatively extroverted and friendly, whereas individual dogs and cats vary greatly in their reactions to strangers. I’m suspect the experiments bore this out, but the point was not how pets deal with strangers but how they interact with their human employers. Dogs show a lot of attachment to individuals, cats considerably less. As is commonly said, cats are more independent.
Link: http://youtu.be/AEepVLQjDt8
And of course, no post referencing cats can omit to include a video collection of strange things done by cats. Several of the following involve cats demonstrating that they’re no more adept with technology than most humans, which should provide a little reassurance to those worried that cats will turn on us and take over.
If I had a cat I’d want the gizmo shown at 5:24 into the video, a box containing a robot cat. Push the button and it opens up, and the robot cat inside pushes the button again to close it. Observe how a real cat studies the phenomenon. All the meowing is done by the robot cat, I think.
Link: http://youtu.be/UF37Ouze7LY
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