Cats or Dogs - which are best? This question has been extensively explored by many young people on the Vx Community over the years with well over 2000 responses to date. Generally dogs win out at a rate of about 3:1. While the online debate continues maybe the dog lovers are right with news below that cats are selfish and unfeeling creatures.
Can that really be true?
'For years, dog and cat owners have been bickering over the relative merits of each type of pet.
But in recent years, scientific researchers have started to weigh in — and most of their findings so far come down firmly on the side of dogs.
Compared to dogs, scientists have found, cats don't seem to have the same sort of emotional attachment to their owners, and show genuine affection far less often than you might think. Further, they're an environmental disaster, killing literally billions of birds in the US every year — many of them from endangered species.
Most alarmingly there's compelling evidence that a parasite often found in cat feces can subtly change people's personalities over time, increasing rates of neuroticism, schizophrenia, and perhaps even suicide.
In other words, research is telling us that cats are selfish, unfeeling, environmentally devastating creatures. If you need to convince someone not to get a cat, here's the research you need to show them.
Daniel Mills, a veterinary researcher at the UK's University of Lincoln, is a cat lover. You can see his cat in the photo on his faculty page on the university's website. But experiments he and colleagues have conducted at the university's Animal Behaviour Clinic suggest that cats, as a whole, do not love their owners back — at least not in the same way that dogs do.
The researchers adapted a classic child psychology experiment called 'the strange situation,' in which a parent slips out of a room while a baby or young child is playing and then later returns. The child's behavior upon being abandoned and reunited with the parent is observed and analyzed. This sort of thing has been also done with dogs several times (including by Mills), and the experiments have found that dogs demonstrate an attachment with their owner — compared to a stranger, the dogs become more disturbed when their owners leave, and interact with them more when they return.
By contrast, Mills' cat experiments — which are still ongoing and haven't yet been published, but were featured in a BBC special last year — haven't come to the same conclusion. On the whole, the cats seem uninterested both when their owners depart and return. 'Owners invest a lot emotionally in the cat relationship,' Mills told the BBC. 'That doesn’t mean that the cat’s investing in the same sort of emotional relationship.' At the time, he said the results were inconclusive, but at the very least, it's safe to say that they haven't yielded the same obvious results that the dog studies have.
Meanwhile, other experiments carried out by a pair of Japanese researchers have provided evidence for a fact already known to most cat owners: they can hear you calling their name, but just don't really care. As detailed in a study published last year, the researchers gathered 20 cats (one at a time) and played them recordings of three different people calling their name — two strangers, plus their owners.
Why are cats so different from dogs in this way? The researchers speculate that the difference can be explained by evolutionary history: dogs were domesticated an estimated 15,000 years ago, compared to just 9,500 years for cats. Additionally, it's believed that dogs were actively selected by humans (to guard and herd animals), whereas cats likely selected themselves, spending time near people simply to eat the rats consuming grain stores.
Cat lovers will probably respond here that their pets do show affection, purring and rubbing up against their legs. But many researchers interpret this as an attempt, by the cat, to spread his or her scent — as a way to mark territory.
Purring, in some cases, also seems to mean something different than what you imagine. What may be going on, the researchers concluded, is that cats have figured out how to purr in a way that triggers humans' parenting instincts. They don't always purr this way, but they do so when they want food, because they know it'll get results.' http://www.vox.com/2014/10/16/6982177/the-case-against-owning-cats
Are cats really like this? Do dogs really make better pets? What do you think?
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