The truth about cats and dogs

6 July 2019 | New Scientist |43

PSYCHOLOGIST Richard Wiseman’s

taste for quirky science is well known,

so his pet personality project should

come as no surprise. In an online survey, he

asked people to rate their pets for things like

friendliness and neuroticism. Over half of fish

owners said their watery friends had a good

sense of humour. Fish apparently appreciate a

joke more than cats, horses and birds – but not

as much as dogs. Reptiles entirely fail to see the

funny side of things, according to their owners.

The survey also asked people to evaluate

themselves. “Fish owners were the happiest,”

Wiseman reported on his Quirkology website,

“dog owners the most fun to be with, cat

owners the most dependable and emotionally

sensitive, and reptile owners the most

independent.” There were big differences

in personality, he noted. And here is the

clincher: most people attributed the traits

they possessed to their animals too. In

other words, we see our pets as reflections

of ourselves.

Just a bit of fun? You might think so. But

in recent years a new breed of researcher has

been investigating the complex relationship

The truth

about cats

and dogs

The science of pet ownership may still be in its

infancy. But we can already draw a few interesting

conclusions, reports Ruth Searle

>

THOMAS HOEPKER/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Features

Cats trick us into giving

them what they want

using a special purr6 July 2019 | New Scientist |45

people to look at photographs of dogs with

their supposed owners (they weren’t actually

the owners) and rate the people in the images

on several personality traits. The same person

was seen as friendlier if paired with a cocker

spaniel, more intelligent when paired with a

Jack Russell and more nervous if thought to

own a chihuahua. The researchers put this

down to “spontaneous trait transference”.

In other words, we subconsciously endow

people with characteristics we associate

with the breed of dog they own.

That may be so but, as any pet owner

will tell you, their furry/feathered/scaly

companion really does have a personality.

Such thinking was once derided in scientific

circles, but in the past two decades the idea

that personality isn’t confined to humans

has become well established. So much so, that

there is now a canine version of the Big Five

Inventory, which works by getting owners to

answer questions about their dog’s behaviour,

such as whether it tends to be lazy or aloof.

Using this canine questionnaire, along with

the regular Big Five Inventory, Lisa Cavanaugh

at the University of British Columbia in Canada

compared the personalities of pooches and

their owners. She found there were some

similarities. In particular, extroverts had

extroverted dogs. And a study by Borbála

Turcsán at Eötvös Loránd University in

Hungary found that the personalities of

owners are more similar to those of their

dogs than to those of their friends or spouses.

How the personality of a dog and its

owner come to be matched is another

question. Undoubtedly, specific breeds have

specific characteristics, which people may be

drawn to. But because dogs are also highly

sociable, you might expect them to behave

in ways that please their owners, so that

similarities in their personalities develop over

time. Wiseman’s survey supports this idea.

He found that the longer people had lived with

their pet, the more similar they believed its

personality was to their own. And a large study

of 14,000 pure breed and mixed breed dogs by

Turcsán confirmed that a pooch’s personality

is shaped by factors such as its owner’s

personality and their shared interactions.

Dogs may come to fit in with people, but

surely cats never would. If anything, don’t they

manipulate us? Take a study by Karen McComb

at the University of Sussex, UK. She found that

cats have perfected a special purr that sounds

higher aggression and more behavioural

problems, again reflecting what has been

found in children (and dogs) with more

neurotic carers.

“We don’t know the causal link from a

study like ours, but these results seem to

suggest that the behaviour of more anxious

owners is impacting on their cats’ well-being,

perhaps because their worries lead to an

overprotectiveness that can be unhealthy,”

says Mills. Such owners were, for example,

more likely to restrict their cat’s access to the

outdoors. On a more positive note, owners

who scored highly for conscientiousness

generally had more gregarious and chilled cats.

It is sobering to think that our neuroticism

might be rubbing off on the animals that share

our lives. On the other hand, there seems to

be an upside to our tendencies to choose and

then mould pets in our own image. Cavanaugh

found that people were happiest with dogs

whose levels of openness, agreeableness

and neuroticism exceeded their own.

It would appear that what we are really

looking for in our furry friends is a mini-me.

That is surely enough to make a goldfish smile.  ❚

like a baby crying. We find it hard to ignore,

so are tricked into giving moggie what it wants.

“Solicitation purring is just one of the methods

cats can use,” she says. However, it now seems

that the manipulation goes both ways.

Research published earlier this year delved

into the idea that many people see their pets

as substitute children and influence them in

similar ways. It used the Big Five Inventory to

assess the personalities of more than 3300 cat

owners. They were then asked questions about

their pet’s health, behaviour and weight. “We

found that carers with higher neuroticism

were more likely to have pets suffering from

a range of issues, including obesity and stress-

related illnesses,” says Daniel Mills at the

University of Lincoln, UK. That is exactly

what has been found in studies of parent-child

relationships. These cats also tended to show

Ruth Searle is a cat

person based in

Monmouthshire, UK

“Dogs may come

to fit in with

their owners,

but surely cats

never would?”

There’s now a personality

test to discover your dog’s

inner character

JORGE SANZ/PACIFIC PRESS VIA ZUMA WIRE/SHUTTERSTOCK