We all know the ancient and special bond between dogs and humans. Our canine friends can read our tone of voice and our expression, and they look into our eyes for clues that help our two species get along so well. Well move over rover because it turns out your house cat, far from being the aloof master of the house can do the same thing.

In general, we found that cats are very good in following human gazing signals. In experiments, researchers put 2 exactly alike bowls of food on the floor, but only look at one and guess which one the cat went to? Whether it be in the way sustained gaze when we don’t take off our eyes from the target, or we do a momentary gaze when we just look shortly on the target and then turn back to the cat and independently of the difficulty or the level of difficulty of this gazing signals, cats are very good in following it.

The question these researchers are asking now: Is it just cats and dogs who’ve learned to do this because they have lived with us for so long. Or is this something that animals just do? Cats learn spontaneously that by human’s looking at can be important. And this is a very interesting thing because then you could ask that, okay if it is not in need but the cat learn it, could any other animals learn it?

This is the only test on this done so far but the results were clear. We established whether the given cat perform better than picking randomly. Our results showed that their success rate was 70% overall. Researchers say one of the reasons it has taken so long to learn about this behavior because cats are notoriously hard to study. Evidently, they just could not be bothered.

Kevin Enochs, VOA News.

Jim Malone VOA news Washington.

http://www.kekenet.com/broadcast/201812/573652.shtml