Cats and Dogs

Pets at home: do cats and dogs really fight like cats and dogs?

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How else to explain why we're still living with that creaky old — and, as it turns out, entirely inaccurate — expression, "They're fighting like cats and dogs. Especially since there's little evidence to suggest cats and dogs have any natural enmity towards each other.

In fact, a new study in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior — one that uniquely looks at the relationship between cats and dogs sharing the same home — suggests they get along just fine. In most cases, cats and dogs in the same household get along famously.

Everyone has a role to play

For the survey, researchers from the University of Lincoln surveyed cat-and-dog households spanning Europe, the United States and Australia. More than 80 percent of pet owners said these classic arch enemies like each other just fine. Sounds a lot like every other relationship, especially when you share the same house — and sometimes have to jostle over the best seat on the couch. Cats however, did show a little more anxiety around dogs than the other way around, which may be understandable considering the size difference between the species.

They were also named, overwhelmingly, as the instigators when conflict did rear its head.

The survey respondents noted that their cats were three times more likely to threaten their dog than the other way around. And in fights, it was the cat that inflicted the most damage.

These are like long-term memories, but they are more complex because they require self-awareness. It's unclear if dogs are self-aware, so for them, these memories are called "episodic-like" memories.

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Episodic memories are usually autobiographical, and are tied to "what," "when" and "where" details, Udell said. Some dogs displayed episodic-like memories in a study published in the journal Current Biology.

Seventeen dogs were taught to imitate humans in a "do as I do" paradigm, and then lie down. For instance, if the human knocked over a bottle, so would the dog before lying down.

After one such task, after the dog lay down, the human completed an extra action, such as touching an umbrella, while giving an unfamiliar command. Then, the human took the dog behind a screen, and waited anywhere from 1 minute to 1 hour before asking the dog to "do it. Some dogs were able to remember and perform the imitation at both time points, although most dogs' performances declined with time between seeing the action and being asked to do it, the researchers found.

Cats vs dogs: in terms of evolution, are we barking up the wrong tree?

The finding suggests that dogs can encode memories unrelated to commands, and can then incorporate them with later orders, as long as the order is given within about an hour, the researchers said. But if you ask them, "Where's the ball? Cats, like dogs, excel at remembering details pertinent to their evolutionary history. For instance, cats appear to have good memories when it comes to hunting, said Mikel Delgado, a doctoral candidate of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also a certified cat behavior consultant.

Alzheimer's models

In two experiments, nearly 50 cats were able to remember which bowls contained food, even after the felines were taken out of the room for about 15 minutes, according to a January study published in the journal Behavioural Processes. These results suggest that cats have short-term working memories that can encode details regarding "where" and "what" for short periods of time, at least when food is involved.

Dozens of dogs, cats and birds seized from Morgan County home

Another study, published in in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science , showed that cats are also good with spatial memory. In the study, the cats had to remember what cups they had already eaten from on a board containing many half-hidden cups. However, older cats made more mistakes than younger cats did, suggesting that feline memory declines with age, the researchers said.

Feline memories

This type of memory may help cats remember where to find prey, and whether they have already patrolled a particular haunt that night, said Delgado, who was not involved in the study. Yet, cats' working memories can be surprisingly short-lived, especially when those memories don't involve food. In a study published in the journal Animal Cognition , 24 cats watched an experimenter hide an object in one of four boxes. The cats had to wait 0, 10, 30 or 60 seconds before they were allowed to find the object.

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