Cats Actually Evolved To Be Indifferent To The People Who Love Them

Every cat is Grumpy Cat by nature.
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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)

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Sam Maggs
Sam Maggs is a writer and televisioner, currently hailing from the Kingdom of the North (Toronto). Her first book, THE FANGIRL'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY will be out soon from Quirk Books. Sam’s parents saw Star Wars: A New Hope 24 times when it first came out, so none of this is really her fault.