If your pet cat isn’t a little predator, that’s perfectly okay! Joybound’s Dr. Wailani Sung was recently interviewed by USA Today about feline instincts and what they mean for a cat’s personality. Check it out!
Your Cat’s Not Broken if it Can’t Catch Mice. Its Personality is Just Too Nice to Kill.
Claire Thornton
USA TODAY
All house cats have the ability to be lethal predators, even if they never act like it − as can be seen in viral TikTok videos showing cats lazily look on at mice that would be easy targets, except the cat seems completely uninterested.
The cats in the videos aren’t lazy or broken, they just have nicer personalities that lower their drive to kill, scientists say.
If a cat has a more pleasant personality − like if it is friendly with people and other cats − that could correlate with it catching less prey, said Emmanuelle Baudry, an ecologist and lead author of the study, “Pet cat personality linked to owner-reported predation frequency.”
“This is not cats being broken at all – this is cats being just fine and friendly, nice, wonderful pets,” Baudry told USA TODAY.
For years, scientists did not consider the different observable personalities in cats, Baundry and her co-authors wrote in their 2022 study. Only recently did biologists begin to hypothesize that a cat’s individual personality could correlate with its hunting tendencies, the authors said… (Read more)
