Cats incredibly lazy, scientists find
They "appear to conserve energy to the greatest extent possible"
Scientists who study animals in captivity have long noted something unusual: given the choice between working for their meals or simply having food placed in front of them, many animals opt for the former. It’s called contrafreeloading, and animal behavior experts suspect it could be a type of stimulation-seeking or information-gathering behavior, or it could simply be due to boredom. It’s been observed in rats, pigs, chimps, maned wolves, and even humans.
There is one species, however, in which the behavior hasn’t been recorded: the domestic cat.
It’s not for lack of trying. In 1971, scientists put six cats on a calorie restricted diet, taught them how to use a device that dispensed food at the touch of a paw, and then let them choose between food from the dispenser and from a simple dish. Not a single cat opted for the dispenser when the dish was available.
Recently, a team of researchers from the U.C. Davis School of Veterinary Medicine revisited this problem. The 1971 study was getting long in the tooth: it included just six cats, it was done in a laboratory setting which likely affected the felines’ behavior, and research protocols have come a long way since the early 1970s.
So they devised a new study, this one involving 20 indoor cats. The trials would take place in the cats’ home environments, with food administered by their regular caretakers, who would also gather the necessary observations. The caretakers would teach their pets how to use a simple, commercially available food puzzle called the Trixie Pet Tunnel, which makes cats fish their kibble out of a container via a short plastic tube. Then they’d give them the option of eating out of the puzzle or a dish of similar size, with the trial repeated ten times with each cat over a series of days.
The researchers believed that in this type of environment the cats would behave similarly to other animals. “We predicted that most domestic cats would contrafreeload, preferring to eat food from a food puzzle designed for cats over freely available food from a tray of the same size and shape,” they write.
The cats began shredding the researchers’ hypothesis before the experiments even started. Three of the felines refused to eat any food from the puzzles during the training period, forcing them to be withdrawn from the study for their own safety. Fifteen percent of the test subjects would have starved themselves before working for their food, in other words.
The remaining 17 completed their 10 trials, but the results were not exactly what the researchers had imagined. Two of the cats ignored the food in the puzzles completely. Roughly half grabbed no more than a stray kibble or two, amounting to less than 10 percent of their total food consumption. A few cats consumed up to half of their calories from their puzzles. But, as if in spite of the initial hypothesis, not a single cat crossed the 50 percent line that would indicate an actual preference for contrafreeloading.
Beyond that, the cats who ate the most food from the puzzles had something in common: “they ate most of the food available to them during trials,” the authors write. “In fact, the strongest predictor of amount of food eaten from the puzzle was the amount of food eaten from the tray.” Some cats simply like to eat.
“We did not find strong evidence for contrafreeloading,” the defeated researchers concluded. “Instead, cats preferred to eat the food that was freely available with no required additional effort.”
This study comports with other classics in the burgeoning field of Feline Indolence Research, including
A 1997 study finding that when cats in a lab were forced “to offer an increasing number of touches to a switchplate in exchange for free access to food, they decreased the number of meals per day, and consumed more food at each feeding period”
A 2018 Journal of Veterinary Behavior report finding that cats required to obtain food from a puzzle decreased their exertion in other tasks, so that their overall activity level remained unchanged
A 2018 analysis showing that feral cats spend a whopping 90 percent of their day inactive and devote less than 1 percent of their time to acquiring food.
In the end, cats are nature’s finest avatars of the first law of thermodynamics: they “conserve energy to the greatest extent possible,” as the UC Davis researchers put it.
“Further research is required to understand why domestic cats, unlike other tested species, do not show a strong preference to work for food.”
the domestic cat's mantra, "work smarter, not harder".