“The wildest of all the wild animals,” Rudyard Kipling wrote in The Just So Stories, “was the cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.”
Even today, nine millennia after its first members were domesticated, and more than 600 years after the invention of the cat flap, the species manages to project an air of indifference to its surroundings.
For a majority of cats, however, this is just an act. Researchers have found that they tend to prefer the company of humans to food, catnip and even the smell of their fellow cats.
Three academics led by Kristyn Vitale Shreve, a PhD candidate in animal behaviour studies at Oregon State University in the US, took issue with the many scientific
