Cats are known as very selfish and dominant creatures. Our cute furry friends can be a very lovely companion, but sometimes they can annoy the owner incredibly bad.
Most animals prefer to work for getting their food. Researchers concluded this after seeing how bears, dogs, mice, pigeons, and other animals prefer to uncover food trapped inside a puzzle rather than going for the one that’s freely available. But as you’ve already guessed, the rule doesn’t apply to cats.
Cats aren’t fans of contrafreeloading
Contrafreeloading is simply the concept stating that most animals prefer to work for getting food rather than choosing the meals that are widely exposed. Cats don’t do that, as a new experiment revealed by ScienceAlert.com reveals. The even more amusing and peculiar part is that the felines don’t engage in such behaviour because they’re necessarily lazy.
Within a home environment, researchers provided a small of indoor cats with a tray of food and a food puzzle. Even the most energetic cats consumed more food from the free tray than from the puzzle. Furthermore, eight of the cats didn’t even bother to touch the puzzle, although they had that chance for half an hour. None of the cats consumed more food from the puzzle than from the open tray.
Mikel Delgado, who is a cat behaviourist from the University of California Davis, declared as quoted by ScienceAlert.com:
It wasn’t that cats never used the food puzzle, but cats ate more food from the tray, spent more time at the tray and made more first choices to approach and eat from the tray rather than the puzzle.
Researchers believe that it’s worth finding out why cats don’t choose a food puzzle over a free meal. The answer could help cat owners take better care of their cute animals.
The new study was published in Animal Cognition.
