How to tell if your cats are fighting or just having fun

Researchers write in Scientific Reports that some behaviors in domestic cats might be revealing signals of whether a contact is friendly, hostile, or somewhere in between.

It's a common question from cat owners, says Mikel Delgado of Feline Minds, a cat behavior consulting firm in Sacramento, Calif., who was not associated with the research. So a lot of experts are delighted to discover that scholars are tackling this issue.

It can be difficult to tell whether two cats are playing or fighting, according to veterinarian and cat behavior researcher Noema Gajdo-Kmecová of the University of Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy in Koice, Slovakia (SN: 9/23/19). Researchers have examined cats' social relationships with both humans and other cats.

When cat owners mistakenly believe their pets are merely playing, they frequently miss the warning signals of a difficult relationship, which can create stress and disease in the animals, according to the expert. Other times, owners rehome their cats because they believed, wrongly, that their cats were fighting.

Gajdo-Kmecová and associates saw roughly 100 movies of various cats interacting in pairs in order to evaluate and characterize interactions. Gajdo-Kmecová recognized six types of activities, including wrestling and remaining still, after watching around one-third of the movies. Then she viewed every video and recorded how frequently and for how long each cat displayed one of the listed behaviors. She identified three different interactions between cat pairs: playful, aggressive, and intermediate by doing statistical analysis on the behaviors.

Other team members watched the recordings and annotated each cat-to-cat encounter to verify the results. 

A few distinct correlations were observed. In contrast to vocalizations like snarling, hissing, or gurgling, quiet chasing and wrestling, for example, suggested fun.

Intermediate interactions featured both playful and aggressive characteristics, but they were distinguished by sustained activity on the part of one cat toward the other, such as pouncing on or grooming its feline companion. The authors speculate that these interstitial interactions might be signs that one cat wants to continue playing while the other does not, with the more playful cat softly prodding to check whether its companion wants to continue.

According to Gajdo-Kmecová, this investigation offers preliminary understandings of cat relationships, but it's only the beginning. She intends to investigate other subtly expressed behaviors in the future, such as tail swishing and ear twitching. Delgado and Gajdo-Kmecová both emphasize that a tumultuous interaction may not always indicate a disastrous relationship.

This is not only about one contact, Gajdo-Kmecova asserts. To put things into perspective, owners truly should look at the varied, multiple interactions in several stages of the cats' lives.

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