🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Cooperation is rare among felids, concentrated in the social lion and in cheetah and feral-cat male coalitions, making the family a useful contrast for theories of cooperation. This overview surveys r…

The same species that lives solitarily where prey is scarce forms dense colonies where food concentrates, and this flexibility makes the cat a model for density-dependent sociality. This overview surv…

Rough play among cats can resemble fighting, and distinguishing genuine play from aggression is important for welfare and household harmony. This overview surveys research on the behavioural markers t…

Beyond learning from other cats, researchers have asked whether cats can copy or learn from human demonstrators. This overview surveys exploratory studies, including reports that cats can be trained t…

Whether cats form dominance hierarchies has long been debated, since their social structure differs from the linear hierarchies of many group-living mammals. This overview surveys research on agonisti…

Elimination behaviour, including digging, covering, and substrate choice, has both innate and learned components and is a frequent source of household problems when disrupted. This overview surveys re…

Whether cats catch or respond to the emotions of others is an active research question. This overview surveys studies examining whether cats are affected by their owners' emotional states, respond to…

Cats are sensitive to environmental change, and chronic stress manifests in altered behaviour, from hiding and reduced activity to elimination problems and stress-related illness. This overview survey…

Cats are notoriously stoic, but research has shown that subtle facial changes carry information about pain and emotional state. This overview surveys the development of feline grimace scales that scor…

Anecdotes describe cats approaching distressed owners, and researchers have begun testing whether cats respond differentially to human emotional signals such as crying. This overview surveys explorato…

Long-term studies of urban feral cat colonies, including well-known work in Rome, document stable groups built around related females and their offspring, with males ranging more widely and showing lo…

The flehmen response, in which a cat draws back its lips, opens its mouth, and appears to grimace, delivers chemical signals to the vomeronasal organ in the roof of the mouth for processing of non-vol…

Whether companion animals understand human communicative gestures bears on how domestication reshapes cognition. This overview surveys research on cats' ability to use human pointing to locate hidden…

A cat's friendliness toward people is shaped by both genes and early experience, and this overview surveys research disentangling these influences. It covers classic studies showing that bold, friendl…

Free-ranging domestic cats maintain home ranges whose size and overlap depend on sex, reproductive status, food distribution, and population density. This overview surveys tracking studies showing tha…

Predatory behaviour and predatory play in cats are only loosely coupled to hunger, a feature that has intrigued researchers. This overview surveys studies manipulating feeding state and prey-like stim…

Maintaining social relationships requires recognising specific individuals, and this overview surveys evidence that cats discriminate familiar from unfamiliar conspecifics. It covers the cues involved…

Understanding behaviour and cognition is central to safeguarding feline welfare, and this overview surveys how research translates into care. It covers welfare frameworks that incorporate the cat's ev…

Do cats hold expectations about how physical objects behave, such as that unsupported objects fall? This overview surveys experiments probing feline intuitive physics, including studies using rattling…

Building on early comparative work, a series of studies probed how far cats can track objects hidden by invisible displacement, where an object is concealed in a container that is then moved behind a…

Classic developmental research showed that mother cats shape how their kittens come to treat prey, with kittens that observe their mother killing and eating prey more likely to become efficient predat…

Genetic studies of feral cat colonies have revealed promiscuous mating systems in which a single litter is frequently sired by several males. This overview surveys research using paternity analysis to…

The cat's hunting behaviour is organised as a sequence of partly independent modules: searching, stalking, chasing, pouncing, grabbing, killing, and consuming. This overview surveys research on how th…

Cat-human communication combines vocal, visual, and tactile channels, and research increasingly examines how these integrate. This overview surveys work on how cats coordinate meows, purrs, body postu…

Cats navigate complex home ranges and occasionally return home over surprising distances, prompting interest in their spatial abilities. This overview surveys research and historical experiments on fe…

Mother cats choose concealed, defensible nest sites and may relocate kittens repeatedly during the early weeks, carrying them by the scruff. This overview surveys research on maternal care, including…

Cats lose interest in a toy quickly but renew play when the object changes, a pattern that has been studied experimentally. This overview surveys research showing that habituation to a toy is reduced…

Object play in kittens, batting, grasping, and biting at small movable items, closely resembles components of the predatory sequence, prompting long debate over whether play functions as practice for…

Classic experiments established that kittens learn instrumental tasks faster by watching their mother than an unfamiliar adult or by trial and error alone. This overview surveys this body of work on m…

Although less commonly trained than dogs, cats learn readily through operant conditioning, and this overview surveys research and applied work on training them. It covers the use of positive reinforce…