According to the research, cats that no one has tried to teach are the most enthusiastic retrievers.
Notoriously dogs like to pick up an object thrown by a person and bring it back to be thrown again, but yes, many cats like the game of fetch as well. However, it has been studied less frequently with them.
It has remained unclear whether cats only start fetching when taught.
Now British researchers recruited more than 900 cat owners with an international online survey, who told about more than a thousand of their fetching cats.
According to the owners, more than 94 percent of the fetching cats had adopted the habit without special teaching. Most started when they were puppies or young adults.
The majority did not live in the company of fetching dogs or other fetching cats, so they had hardly learned from other animals either.
In addition, the cats engaged in fetching most often and most enthusiastically when they started the games themselves, says the study In Scientific Reports.
According to previous observations, among cat breeds, for example, Siamese have a tendency to fetch. The enthusiasm of Siamese showed up in this study as well, as did Bengals and Ragdolls, but more than 90 percent of the reported retrievers did not represent any particular breed.
The story has been published in Tiede Luonno 2/2024
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