AS THE PROUD OWNER OF FOUR housecats—Cookie, Sushi, Crumbles and Stinky—Péter Pongrácz can think of a million worthy research questions that might shed light on the mysterious inner lives of the world’s second most popular species of domesticated pet. How do they feel toward humans? And what do they think of us?
It’s not always easy to find graduate students with enough patience and determination to answer them. Particularly when dogs, which will do virtually anything for a little human validation or a big juicy bone, are available as alternative research subjects.
The scope of that challenge was driven home to the jovial Hungarian ethologist when he and his colleagues brought a cat into their laboratory at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 2005. Within minutes of arriving, the cat disappeared into a floor-level air conditioning duct and wouldn’t come out. The team spent the afternoon disassembling a laboratory wall as the animal’s distraught owner’s increasingly desperate calls went unheeded. It took more than a decade for Pongrácz to find a graduate student willing to try again.
“I am really interested in cats and whenever there is a possibility to do cat research, I am on it,” Pongrácz says. “I always have good ideas, of course, but I am always waiting for students who would like to work with cats.”
A few years ago, Pongrácz took his first tentative steps back into the field known as “cat cognition.” To avoid the problem of test subjects disappearing into the laboratory air ducts, they decided to go where the cats lived. They asked owners of cats a bunch of questions—do their pets imitate the vocalizations of other cats? Do they consider their cats to be empathetic and communicative? How much did they believe their cats understood? With the survey results in hand, only then did Pongrácz dispatch graduate students to visit the cats and observe their actual behavior in their own homes.
“Cats are control freaks. They want to CALL THE SHOTS. They want to feel like they have the ability to walk away OR ESCAPE when they want to.”
The research, published in 2018, revealed new insights into the ability of cats to get along with their human benefactors. It turns out that cats are surprisingly adept at following a person’s gaze and making inferences about their intentions. And the difference in lifestyles of indoor and outdoor cats has a big effect on their cognitive habits: indoor cats are far more interested in playing with balls
