Today more than 80 million cats 🐈 reside in U.S. homes, with an estimated three cats for every dog on the planet. (Watch a video about the secret lives of cats Yet there's still a lot we don't know about our feline friends—including what they think of their owners..... 🐈
John Bradshaw is a 🐈 cat-behavior expert at the University of Bristol . and the author of the new book cat sens After observing pet cats for several years, he's come to an intriguing conclusion: They don't really understand us the way dogs do..... 🐈
Bradshaw recently shared some of his insights with National Geographic.... 🐈
For the first 20 years of my career I studied olfactory [smell] behavior in invertebrates. I've always been fascinated by this other world that animals live in—primarily of odor, which is dogs' primary sense. So in the early 1980s I started working on dog behavior. [Later] I very quickly became fascinated with cats, and what their idea of the world is compared to the one we have..... 🐈
A lot of observation—watching groups of cats to see how they interact with one another and deducing their social structure. [I watch] cats in colonies that are free-ranging, and in animal shelters where quite a number will be housed together—you get interesting dynamics [when new cats are introduced]..... 🐈
I've also done slightly more manipulative things, such as studying the way cats play with toys, or testing cat [behaviors] at different times of the day. [I also observe] relationships with owners, interviewing them and giving them questionnaires to find out how they perceive their cats.... 🐈
Great &lots of information