We all know that dogs love a game of fetch – be it a stick, ball or anything else that can be thrown – but research has found that some cats enjoy playing it just as much, as long as it’s on their terms.
Animal behaviour psychologists from the University of Sussex and Northumbria University have found that in 94.4% of cats studied, fetching appeared to be an instinctive behaviour, without the need for training. They also found that most of the cats started fetching as kittens or young cats, with 96.7% reported to first fetch under the age of seven, and 60.7% under one year old.
For the study, published in Scientific Reports, researchers surveyed 924 owners of 1,154 cats that play fetch to better understand this little-studied feline play behaviour.
Researchers also found that cats are more likely to play for longer and more frequently if they initiated the game. Conversely, if their owners stopped the game, the cats were more likely to pursue repeat games.
They also found that the cats influenced the play behaviour of their owner; while some cats played in the ‘traditional’ way – bringing an object back to their owner – others would only bring it back halfway, or gradually drop the object further and further away from their owner.
It was also found that sometimes cats only like to play fetch in certain rooms of the house, or just with particular people.
The most popular item to fetch were toys (38.4%), followed by spherical items (25.3%), such as baubles or crumpled pieces of paper, and then cosmetics (9.5%). Some cats would only fetch one specific type of item, such as a cotton bud.
“Our findings show that cats dictate this behaviour to directly influence how their human owners respond,” says Jemma Forman, lead author of the study and a doctoral researcher in the University of Sussex School of Psychology. “Cats who initiated their fetching sessions played more enthusiastically with more retrievals and more fetching sessions per month.
“This perceived sense of control from the cat’s perspective may be beneficial for the cat’s welfare and the cat-owner relationship. I’d encourage owners to be receptive to the needs of their cat by responding to their preferences for play – not all cats will want to play fetch, but if they do, it’s likely that they will have their own particular way of doing so!”
