Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more Feedback’s felines are often nowhere to be seen. For hours at a time – in the case of the more free-range cat, sometimes several days – they vanish from sight. What might they be doing?
Torturing the local small-animal population perhaps, or chasing fallen leaves around the yard, or visiting the local school to cause as much disruption to learning as possible, or perhaps just lazing in a warm spot to sleep. One person who does know is Michelle Smit at Massey University in New Zealand, because she and her colleagues put collar-mounted accelerometers on cats to follow their movements. Feedback learned of this from the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, which reported the study from the journal Pets on 12 September under the heading “Paws for thought: Science proves your cat really is that lazy”.
Smit’s team tracked 10 indoor pet cats and 18 free-roaming pets, as well as eight cats living semi-outdoors in research facilities. Their behaviours were grouped into eight categories: “active (walking and trotting), eating, grooming, littering, lying, scratching, sitting, and standing”. Presumably the data was insufficiently granular to capture other cat behaviours such as “pushing breakable objects off furniture onto hard floors” and “inexplicably hissing at one’s human after having previously been pleased with a cuddle”.
The most mobile cats were free-roaming pets: in summer, they were active a full 3.9 per cent of the time, though this fell to 2.7 per cent in winter. The indoor and research cats spent even less active time. Littering and scratching took up very little time, less than 1 per cent each.
Instead, overall, the cats devoted between 2.4 and 7.8 per cent of their time to eating, 4.6 to 7.9 per cent to grooming, and 9.3 to 15.6 per cent to standing. If you’ve been keeping track, you already know there’s a whole lot of day left. This the cats reserved for their two primary activities.
Sitting occupied them for 20.1 to 41.4 per cent of their time, while a whopping 34.8 to 52.9 per cent went to the really important one: lying. Feedback would say something about this, but first we’re going to lie down for 4 to 6 hours. Feedback is on a quest to compile a definitive database of unfortunate abbreviations triggered by technological systems, such as the “suggested follow” box on social media that shortened the name of the Stroke Association charity by eight letters.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
