Do Cats Avoid People Who Are Unkind to Their Owner? Third-Party Evaluation

People evaluate others even in situations that have nothing to do with them. Watch someone ignore a person in need, and your impression of them drops. Do non-human animals do the same?

Dogs showed avoidance

Earlier research with dogs used the following procedure. The owner tries and fails to open a transparent container, then asks the person sitting nearby for help. In the Helper condition, that second person helps open it. In the Non-Helper condition, the actor refuses and turns away. A third, passive person sits on the owner's other side.

Both people then offer food to the dog. Dogs avoided food from the person who had not helped their owner—interpreted as evaluating people from third-party interactions.

Cats did not replicate it

Chijiiwa and colleagues (2021) applied exactly the same procedure to pet cats. After watching their owner fail to open the container and ask for help, cats were offered food by the helper, the non-helper, and the neutral person.

Cats accepted food equally from either person. No tendency to avoid the non-helper appeared. The authors concluded that no evidence was found that cats evaluate humans on the basis of third-party interactions.

This is not a story about cats being aloof

Reading the result as 'cats do not care about human relationships' is premature. First, there is the question of whether the cats attended to the scene at all; sustaining attention in an experimental setting is difficult for cats.

Second, cats clearly use social information in other situations. They locate food from a human point (do cats follow human pointing?), adjust their behavior toward a novel object based on their owner's emotional reaction, and respond only to their owner's cat-directed speech (does cat-directed speech get through?).

An evolutionary reading

Third-party evaluation is valuable to animals that cooperate in groups. Knowing who is cooperative lets you choose your next partner. Dogs descend from group-hunting ancestors and were selected within cooperative work alongside humans.

The cat's ancestor, the African wildcat, hunts alone. There was little need to track reputations within a group. That difference plausibly shows up in the results (which is smarter, cats or dogs?).

What this means for owners

If cats do not evaluate third-party behavior, then the only route to a relationship with your cat is your own direct interaction with it. How someone else treated the cat matters less than how you have treated it.

Concretely, that means pairing the name with good things, not forcing handling, and always providing an escape route—direct experience, accumulated (can cats be trained?). The full picture of feline social cognition is collected in can a cat's IQ be measured?.

Social judgment in humans

Human third-party evaluation appears from infancy and is regarded as a foundation of sociality. IQ tests, by contrast, measure the discovery of abstract rules rather than social judgment (EQ versus IQ). The free NekoIQ IQ test measures four non-verbal domains in 20 questions and about 10 minutes. Results are estimates for self-understanding and are not a substitute for an official intelligence test.