🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Early-life experience profoundly shapes how friendly and confident a cat becomes, and research has identified a sensitive period in kittenhood, roughly between two and seven or eight weeks, when expos…

The vertical tail-up posture is one of the most studied visual signals in domestic cats and is widely interpreted as a friendly intention signal that precedes approach, allorubbing, and amicable inter…

Domestic cats produce a diverse set of vocalisations that researchers have grouped into categories such as murmurs made with a closed mouth, including purrs and trills, vowel-pattern calls such as the…

Owners often note that cats anticipate feeding times and other daily events, raising questions about feline timing abilities. This overview surveys research and theory on how cats track time, includin…

True tool use is essentially absent in cats, but felids display tool-adjacent behaviours that involve manipulating objects and environments to achieve goals. This overview surveys examples such as usi…

Spraying urine against vertical surfaces is a distinct marking behaviour, separate from elimination, used by cats of both sexes to deposit long-lasting chemical signals. This overview surveys research…

Cats communicate a great deal through the positions of their ears, tail, body, and fur, and through pupil dilation, conveying emotional state and intentions without sound. This overview surveys etholo…

Cats develop individually distinctive meows, and owners gradually learn to interpret their own cat's calls better than strangers do. This overview surveys research on acoustic individuality in cat voc…

A cat's facial whiskers, or vibrissae, are mobile tactile sensors that play a crucial role in the final moments of prey capture, when vision is too close to focus. This overview surveys research showi…

Many owners are puzzled when their well-fed cat carries dead or live prey indoors. This overview surveys the leading interpretations, including the transport of prey to a safe location for consumption…

Memory supports navigation, hunting, and social recognition in cats, and this overview surveys research on its different forms. It covers short-term and working memory for object locations, the persis…

This detailed developmental study described how kittens in litters engage in social play, cataloguing motor patterns such as the belly-up, stand-up, pounce, and chase, and charting how their frequency…

Meredith West · American Zoologist · 1974

When confronted with an ambiguous, potentially frightening object such as a noisy fan, do cats look to their owner for guidance? In this experiment owners reacted to the object with either a positive…

Isabella Merola and colleagues · Animal Cognition · 2015

Surveying owners of over two thousand pet cats, researchers used questionnaire ratings to identify five reliable personality dimensions, dubbed the Feline Five: neuroticism, extraversion, dominance, i…

Carla Litchfield and colleagues · PLOS ONE · 2017

This widely cited quantitative synthesis estimated that free-ranging domestic cats in the contiguous United States kill billions of birds and tens of billions of mammals annually, with unowned cats re…

Scott Loss, Tom Will, Peter Marra · Nature Communications · 2013

Two experiments tested whether the narrowed-eye, slow-blink expression functions as friendly signalling between cats and people. When owners slow-blinked at their cats, the cats were more likely to sl…

Tasmin Humphrey, Karen McComb, Leanne Proops and colleagues · Scientific Reports · 2020

Owners often report that a hungry cat's purr is peculiarly hard to ignore, and this study found why. Acoustic analysis revealed that some purrs contain an embedded high-frequency, cry-like component i…

Karen McComb, Anna Taylor, Christian Wilson, Benjamin Charlton · Current Biology · 2009

Researchers tracked litters of kittens to examine how the timing of weaning relates to changes in play. As mothers reduced nursing, kittens increased object-directed and predatory play while social pl…

Paul Martin, Patrick Bateson · Animal Behaviour · 1985

To test the common claim that cats are aloof, researchers offered both shelter and pet cats a choice among four stimulus categories: social interaction with a human, food, toy, and scent. After a depr…

Kristyn Vitale Shreve, Lindsay Mehrkam, Monique Udell · Behavioural Processes · 2017