Catmoms and dads take note: Your pet appreciates human interaction more than food

Spend more time with your feline friends, say researchers.

Cat owners, your pet may enjoy your company more than you thought, as scientists have found that our feline friends prefer interacting with humans over eating food.

Researchers from Oregon State University in the US took 50 cats from people’s homes and a cat shelter and left them without food, toys and people for a few hours.

They then presented them with different stimuli associated with each of those things.

While there was little difference between the cats that came from homes and the shelter cats, scientists found that almost all of them preferred human socialisation to any of the other stimuli on offer.

Only 37% preferred food to human interaction, the Metro reported.

“While it has been suggested that cat sociality exists on a continuum, perhaps skewed toward independency, we have found that 50% of cats tested preferred interaction with the social stimulus even though they had a direct choice between social interaction with a human and their other most preferred stimuli from the three other stimulus categories,” researchers said.

The study was published in the journal Behavioural Processes.