Social interaction, food, scent or toys? Assessing cat preferences

Vitale Shreve, Mehrkam and Udell ran a structured preference assessment to learn what most motivates cats, testing pet and shelter cats with stimuli from four categories: human social interaction, food, scent and toys. After a period of deprivation, each cat could engage with representative items, and the experimenters measured time spent with each to rank preferences. Although individual cats varied, the most frequently preferred category overall was human social interaction, ahead of food, challenging the common assumption that cats are primarily food-motivated and indifferent to people. The findings have practical implications for training, enrichment and welfare, suggesting social attention can be a powerful reward, and they reinforce a growing body of work showing cats are more socially oriented toward humans than their aloof reputation implies.