If you know anything about cats, you know they don’t care about you or anyone you know. Don’t be offended, though; it’s not Mister Jinxy’s fault that he’s kind of a jerk to his owners. Turns out, evolution has designed cats to be completely indifferent to their caregivers. Grumpy Cat is just Cat’s final evolutionary form.
A study just published by Atsuko Saito and Kazutaka Shinozuka from the University of Japan showed that though cats do, in fact, recognize their owners voices, they actively choose to ignore them. Apparently, this is because cats actually domesticated themselves over the course of history, slowly moving closer to humans in order to gain access to rodents in populated areas. Thus, cats never needed to learn to follow human commands – they just went ahead and did everything themselves.
“Historically speaking, cats, unlike dogs, have not been domesticated to obey humans’ orders,” says the report, published in the Animal Cognition Journal. “Rather, they seem to take the initiative in human–cat interaction.”
The study ends on a hilarious note, basically saying that we have no idea why cat owners actually like cats, noting that “the behavioural aspect of cats that cause their owners to become attached to them are still undetermined.”
Guess some people just evolved to be crazy cat people, and some didn’t.
(via The Independent, image via Great Beyond)
- Here is David Tennant with a cat on his head
- And here’s a supercut of cats scaring people in horror flicks
- And here’s what happens when you photoshop an overweight cat into classical art
