奇速英语

What does your cat think of you? Maybe not too much. A new study suggests that cats don’t need their owners to feel secure and safe — the way dogs do — but rely on them mostly as a reliable source of food.

“Animal-human relationships may be built on different priorities(优先事项). For dogs safety and security are clearly important, but this is not the case in cats,” Dr. Daniel Mills, professor of veterinary(兽医的) behavioral medicine at the University of Lincoln in England and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “It seems cats are much more resource focused.”

The study was patterned on a classic psychology experiment known as “strange situation”, so named because in the experiment a baby or child is left in a room to play by the mother or caregiver while a stranger then walks in. The experiment is modeled to help scientists judge how attached children are to their mothers.

Similarly, the researchers placed 20 pet cats in an unfamiliar room and then observed how they responded when they were left alone in the room with a stranger and their owner, or simply by themselves. The researchers selected cats whose owners said they were particularly attached to them.

What did the researchers find? The cats vocalized(发声) slightly more meows when their owners left them in the room with a stranger, but the researchers didn’t notice any other evidence to suggest that the cats were strongly attached to their owners.

“This vocalization might simply be a sign of frustration or learned response, since no other signs of attachment were reliably seen,” Mills said in a written statement. “In strange situations, attached individuals seek to stay close to their career, show signs of distress when they are separated and show pleasure when their attachment figure returns, but these trends weren’t apparent during our research.”

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