© Mikel Delgado/UC Davis
When cats were offered the choice of readily available food in a tray or working for it using a simple puzzle, cats most often chose the free food.
When given the choice between a free meal and performing a task for a meal,
cats would prefer the meal that doesn't require much effort. While that might not come as a surprise to some cat lovers, it does to cat behaviorists.
Most animals prefer to work for their food — a behavior called contrafreeloading.
A
new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine showed most domestic cats choose not to contrafreeload. The study found that cats would rather eat from a tray of easily available food rather than work out a simple puzzle to get their food.
"There is an entire body of research that shows that most species including birds, rodents, wolves, primates — even giraffes — prefer to work for their food," said lead author Mikel Delgado, a cat behaviorist and research affiliate at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. "What's surprising is out of all these species cats seem to be the only ones that showed no strong tendency to contrafreeload."
In the study, Delgado, along with co-authors Melissa Bain and Brandon Han of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, provided 17 cats a food puzzle and a tray of food. The puzzle allowed the cats to easily see the food but required some manipulation to extract it. Some of the cats even had food puzzle experience.
"It wasn't that cats never used the food puzzle, but cats ate more food from the tray, spent more time at the tray and made more first choices to approach and eat from the tray rather than the puzzle," said Delgado.
Comment: This is one possibility, but as Dr. Gaby pointed out in her article, it's the recombination of different viral sequences that could produce superbugs rather than variants of the same.