🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Veterinary visits are a major source of acute stress for cats and a barrier to care, since fearful cats are harder to examine and owners may avoid appointments. This overview surveys the science and p…

Cats communicate and organise their world through scent, marking with urine spray, facial rubbing, scratching and other signals, and the ability to perform and perceive these behaviours matters for we…

Whether to house shelter cats singly or in groups involves trade-offs between social opportunity, stress, disease transmission and space efficiency. This overview surveys research comparing the two: g…

Cats naturally rest and sleep for much of the day, which complicates welfare interpretation because inactivity can reflect either healthy, contented rest or boredom, depression and learned helplessnes…

Domestic cats are facultatively social and did not evolve to share territory with unrelated individuals, so multi-cat households can generate chronic social stress that manifests as behaviour and heal…

Shelters are inherently stressful for cats, combining novelty, confinement, unfamiliar conspecifics, noise, unpredictable handling and loss of control. This overview surveys the science of shelter-cat…

Feline upper respiratory disease is the most common illness in shelters, and a body of research connects its incidence to stress-related immunosuppression as much as to pathogen exposure. This overvie…

Synthetic analogues of feline facial and appeasing pheromones are widely marketed to reduce stress in cats, and their use in shelters, catteries and clinics has been studied with mixed but instructive…

Consensus veterinary guidelines distil decades of feline welfare science into five environmental needs: a safe place to retreat; multiple and separated key resources; opportunity for play and predator…

Cats used in research have specific welfare needs and have been the subject of foundational stress and housing studies. This overview surveys laboratory feline welfare: the classic finding that unpred…

Conceptual frameworks structure how we judge captive animal welfare, and they have evolved over time. This overview surveys the progression from the Five Freedoms, freedom from hunger, discomfort, pai…

Boarding catteries, breeding catteries and long-term confinement settings raise welfare considerations distinct from short shelter stays. This overview surveys research on cats in these environments:…

Unowned free-roaming cats present distinct welfare questions, and trap-neuter-return is the main alternative to lethal control for managing them. This overview surveys the welfare science around commu…

Hayes, Carey and Schmidt discovered that cats fed diets lacking sufficient taurine developed central retinal degeneration leading to blindness, identifying taurine as a dietary essential nutrient for…

Hayes KC, Carey RE, Schmidt SY · Science · 1975

Kessler and Turner used the Cat-Stress-Score, a validated behavioural scale they helped popularise, to assess domestic cats in boarding catteries kept alone, in pairs or in groups. Most cats showed el…

Kessler MR, Turner DC · Animal Welfare · 1997

Litchfield and colleagues surveyed owners of many pet cats to characterise feline personality, identifying five broad factors they termed the 'Feline Five': neuroticism, extraversion, dominance, impul…

Litchfield CA, Quinton G, Tindle H, Chiera B, Kikillus KH, Roetman P · PLoS ONE · 2017

Kry and Casey examined whether adding hiding enrichment to shelter cat housing affects both stress and adoptability. Cats with access to a hiding place showed lower stress-related behaviour and were m…

Kry K, Casey R · Animal Welfare · 2007

Gourkow and Fraser compared shelter housing and handling styles, contrasting enriched, basket-style housing with consistent gentle handling against conventional barren cages and inconsistent handling.…

Gourkow N, Fraser D · Animal Welfare · 2006

McCune studied how genetics and early experience shape feline friendliness, comparing kittens from bold versus shy fathers and kittens that were handled versus unhandled early in life. Both paternity…

McCune S · Applied Animal Behaviour Science · 1995

Vinke, Godijn and van der Leij tested whether giving newly admitted shelter cats a simple hiding box reduces stress. Cats provided with a hiding box showed significantly lower Cat-Stress-Scores and fa…

Vinke CM, Godijn LM, van der Leij WJR · Applied Animal Behaviour Science · 2014