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Science pokes under the sofa, bats around a few ideas

The most common myth that people have about cats is that they're solitary, asocial creatures, fumes Sharon L. Crowell-Davis, a behavioral veterinarian at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Supposed standoffishness hurts an animal's image, says Crowell-Davis, and she diagnoses the perceived aloofness of Felis catus as the main contributor to outbursts of anticatism. Which species provided the devious villains in the recent movie Cats & Dogs, for example? Not the romping, barking pack. And don't even get her started on the humor book that lists a hundred and one uses for a dead cat.

Crowell-Davis contends that even in the scientific community, stereotypes of cat asociality persist. In the literature, "I've read that because cats don't form [a particular kind of] dominance hierarchy, that's evidence of their nonsocial behavior," she says. "And then I read that cats do form that hierarchy, and that's evidence of their nonsocial nature."

The simplest definition of a social species requires its members to form stable relationships, she explains, and several decades of fieldwork have documented them in cats, from the English dockyards to the Forum in Rome. Crowell-Davis, in fact, is convinced that "there's a lot of politics in a cat colony."

Interpreting social structures is only one of the fascinations of watching groups of cats. Other researchers are turning to domestic cats to answer questions about mating systems and the impact of hunting by clustered animals. Also, some scientists are tackling the question of whether Fluffy and Tiger's endearing quirks represent an animal version of personality.

Showing that a species forms social groups takes a bit more than spotting two animals in the same place, cautions David MacDonald of Oxford University in England. He and two of his Oxford colleagues reviewed studies of cat sociality and published their conclusions in the 2000 update of the behavioral classic The Domestic Cat (2000, D. Turner and P. Bateson, eds., Cambridge University Press).

Analyses in the 1970s tended to treat clusters of cats as a bunch of asocial loners drawn to the same resource, MacDonald recalls. He led a study of three colonies of free-living cats, such as those hanging out around a farmer's barn. The researchers kept track of which cats hunkered down within 5 meters of each other, a task that required 59,000 observations of several dozen cats.

# posted by Medical Information : 3:28 AM