Animal Behavior
What About Cats?
New research is increasing our understanding of our feline social media stars.
Updated September 4, 2026 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Key points
- We know much more about dogs than about cats.
- Cats are the only solitary animals that were domesticated.
- Today cats live in groups, but also solitary.
Whenever I give a talk about dogs, someone always will ask: "But what about cats?" People then typically tell me that they are a “cat person” and that their cat is very special.
I usually respond by saying that we don't know much about our cats. It is much easier to invite dog owners to cognitive tests with their highly motivated animals. Motivation is crucial in cognitive experiments: If an animal is not doing what we expect, we might think that it does not possess the cognitive skill that we are testing. But it might be simply that our subject is not motivated to solve the problem we confront it with.
Cat domestication
Cats are special because they are the only domestic animal that lived solitary, at least at the time of their domestication. They derived from the African wildcat, Felis lybica, around 10,000 to 5,000 years ago in the Middle East. In fact, researchers do not describe cats as having been domesticated by humans, but rather as having domesticated themselves. This fits nicely with our perception of cats as independent and headstrong, doesn't it?
The most likely scenario is that cats domesticated themselves because humans stored food in villages and, later, in towns. Cats weren't interested in flour and other supplies, but in the mice and rats that stole human food. This concentration of prey made it worthwhile for those earlier cats to live close to humans. Initially, cats became commensal pest controllers, and it was only much later that they developed affiliative behaviour towards humans (Driscoll et al. 2009).
Social cats
Today domestic cats are not necessarily solitary anymore: They do form groups with conspecifics in which related adult females even sometimes raise kittens together. Whether cats live in groups depends on the availability of food, shelter and mates, but also on their individual preferences, as some are more social than others. Cats groom each other and communicate via scent signals (Bradshaw 2016). In a new study, it was shown that each cat has its own chemical “calling card” based on 13 fatty acids. This allows other cats to recognize them as they associate urine odors with familiar conspecifics (Ichizawa et al. 2026).
But cats do not only form social relationships with conspecifics, but also with humans. It is not clear when during domestication the commensal cat became the lap-cat. What we know is that early socialisation has a significant impact on the cat-human relationship during ontogenesis. The period between two and seven weeks of life is particularly important in this regard. Cats that are handled frequently early on are not only friendlier and less fearful, but they also mature earlier and even exhibit differences in coat colour patterns.
But does their sociality also lead to enhanced cognitive skills? Not surprisingly, cats know their owner and can distinguish the voices of owners and strangers. But in contrast to dogs, they respond to human voices mainly through orienting behavior and not through communication. When tested in the classical attachment experiment that is also used with human children, cats show that they are indeed attached to their owner. Similar to dogs, cats are able to follow the human pointing gesture to locate hidden food. But when confronted with an unsolvable problem, they do not look at their owner to potentially elicit help (Vitale Shreve & Udell 2015).
Causal cats?
Cats like to play; you can find numerous cute clips on social media on that. They play with humans, with other cats, but also with objects. One would assume that they do understand physical causality when pulling a string. In an experiment, researchers wanted to know whether cats understand that they should pull the one of two strings that was attached to food. Cats did not show such a preference. Here we have the problem that I mentioned above. There are two possibilities to explain these results: Either cats do not understand the causal connection that the string leads to the food, or they like string-pulling itself and are simply not very motivated to get the food (Whitt et al. 2009).
Thus, the next time I encounter a cat lover after a talk, I can answer that there is a growing body of research on cats—and that they are much more social than I expected. Cats sometimes behave like dogs—and sometimes they have their own special way of behaving. In other words, they are smarter than you think.
References
Bradshaw, J. W. S. (2016). Sociality in cats: A comparative review. Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 11, 113–124. doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2015.09.004
Driscoll, C. A., Clutton-Brock, J., Kitchener, A. C., & O'Brien, S. J. (2009). The Taming of the cat. Genetic and archaeological findings hint that wildcats became housecats earlier--and in a different place--than previously thought. Sci Am, 300(6), 68–75.
Ichizawa, S., Caspers, J., Uenoyama, R., Ito, Y., Miyazaki, T., Morisasa, M., . . . Miyazaki, M. Signatures of branched-chain fatty acids derived from a kidney reservoir confer stable chemical individuality on domestic cats. Current Biology.
Vitale Shreve, K. R., & Udell, M. A. (2015). What's inside your cat's head? A review of cat (Felis silvestris catus) cognition research past, present and future. Anim Cogn, 18(6), 1195–1206.
Whitt, E., Douglas, M., Osthaus, B., & Hocking, I. (2009). Domestic cats (Felis catus) do not show causal understanding in a string-pulling task. Animal Cognition, 12(5), 739–743.
