Researchers Strapped Tiny Cameras To 16 Felines Then Allowed Them To Roam Freely. Here Are The Results
Scientists have long had a knack for turning tiny cameras into big revelations, especially when animals are involved. This time, the setup was a little different, because the subjects were house cats, and they were allowed to wander wherever they pleased.
Maren Huck, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom, fitted 16 cats with small cameras for a study published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science. The project ran for nearly four years and was designed to test the technology, but it also captured plenty of unexpected feline behavior.
From hunting habits to how cats act around people and other animals, the footage gave researchers a rare look at what these pets do when nobody is watching. The results were not quite what many people would expect.
Here is the video of cats wearing cameras
One day in 2014, my cat Treacle brought home a merlin. The falcon was as big as she was, and I wondered whether she had really caught it herself, or if she had just grabbed it after it flew into a window. I wanted to keep a video diary of her exploits, so I bought a small camera on the internet; it’s about the diameter of a golf ball, but flatter and much lighter. It can record for about 2.5 hours, and it clips right onto the collar. It can also record in infrared, so I could track Treacle at night.
I collected footage for about six months. During that time, I noticed that Treacle vocalized less outside than she did inside the house, and that the pitch of her vocalizations was different. She only caught one thing that whole time: a woodmouse. I began wondering if I could conduct this more scientifically and follow a larger number of cats to get a better sense of how they behave when no one is watching.
A couple of other studies had put cameras on cats, but they tended to focus on only one aspect: how often cats cross roads, for example, or how many animals they kill. We wanted to examine a range of behaviors. In some other studies, people directly observed cats. However, cats behave much differently when a person is around. When I was outside in the garden with Treacle, she would spend a lot of time sleeping or grooming, probably because she felt protected with me there. When I wasn’t around, she mostly hunted and even interacted with other cats. And you can’t follow a cat when it jumps over a fence.
We started with 21 cats, but only 16 tolerated the cameras. The others either began racing around or tried to scratch them off. One mother cat reacted this way, and when we put the camera on her son, she started hitting him. So we didn’t use either cat.
This is the same kind of surprise as the 51 animals caught unaware, delivering comedy gold.
Cats are often seen as relatively lazy, especially compared to dogs. However, we observed that when they were outside, they became super alert. They scanned their surroundings, sometimes for a half-hour or more at a time. Even though cats are highly territorial, they didn’t always fight with other cats they encountered. Often, they simply sat a couple of meters away from each other for up to half an hour, possibly sizing each other up. Sometimes they would engage in a greeting, briefly touching noses.
When they were in their homes, the cats spent a lot of time following their humans around. They liked to be in the same room. Many of my students were surprised at how attached cats were to people.
The footage showed a side of cats that many people never get to see.
I hope more people will put cameras on cats to understand their behavior. There is also ongoing debate over whether cats should be kept indoors all the time. If we find that cats seem more bored or stressed when kept indoors, for example, by pacing, like some animals do at the zoo, that means we need to think more about enriching their indoor lives or providing them with some outdoor time.
I always acknowledge the animals I work with. I’ve been doing that since my Ph.D. thesis. I feel thankful because if the cats didn’t cooperate, we couldn’t conduct the study.
Source: ScienceMag
These cats definitely had the last word.
Want more camera chaos, see how a man strapped one onto his cat to film playtime.
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