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Hiss & Tell: Cat Behavior and Beyond
Welcome to "Hiss & Tell" a cat podcast where we delve deep into the fascinating world of feline behavior with your host, Kristiina Wilson, MA, CCBC, a professional animal behaviorist with years of experience in understanding our feline friends.
Each episode of "Hiss & Tell" features insightful discussions with a diverse range of guests, including leading veterinarians, renowned social media cat personalities, dedicated researchers and scientists, talented cat photographers, experts in cat behavior and training and so much more.
Join us as we explore a myriad of topics, from decoding the complexities of pet loss to unraveling the mysteries of feline health and behavior. Discover the latest research findings, practical tips for training your cat, and heartwarming stories that highlight the unique bond between cats and their human companions.
Whether you're a seasoned cat owner, a feline enthusiast, or simply curious about the inner workings of our purring companions, "Hiss & Tell" is your go-to podcast for all things cat behavior. So grab your favorite feline friend, cozy up, and let's embark on this enlightening journey together!
Hiss & Tell: Cat Behavior and Beyond
Feline Feelings: Love, Loss, and the Science of Attachment with Dr. Jennifer Vonk
Ever wondered what goes on in the minds of our feline friends? Join me as I sit down with Dr. Jennifer Vonk, a trailblazer in comparative and cognitive psychology, to uncover the mysteries of animal cognition and behavior. From her journey transitioning from human cognition research to studying a variety of species like orangutans and domestic cats, Dr. Vonk offers enlightening insights. We tackle the misconceptions of cats as aloof creatures and highlight their surprising ability to form deep social bonds with humans, despite their non-social evolutionary origins.
Our conversation takes a heartfelt turn as we explore the emotional connections between humans and animals, particularly through the lens of attachment and empathy in those with borderline personality disorder and autism. Sharing personal stories and research findings, we challenge common stereotypes, revealing how cats showcase affection just as deeply as dogs. We also navigate the sensitive topic of pet owners' decision-making processes during end-of-life moments, examining how empathy and emotion regulation play critical roles.
Get ready for a journey into the intricacies of pet ownership, animal grief, and sensory perception in cats. Hear about the distinct behaviors of cats following the loss of a companion and the challenges in understanding their emotional responses. Our discussion extends to the importance of recognizing sensory cues and the cognitive abilities of animals typically perceived as solitary. Whether you're a cat enthusiast or simply curious about animal minds, this episode promises to enrich your understanding and appreciation of the emotional lives of animals.
Hi and welcome to Hiss and Tell. A Cat Behavior and More. Podcast hosted by me, Kristiina Wilson, animal behaviorist. My guest today is Dr Jennifer Vonk, a comparative and cognitive psychologist whose research explores the cognitive abilities of animals, from primates to bears and, of course, cats. Her work sheds light on how animals perceive, think and solve problems, helping us better understand the evolution of intelligence and behavior in the animal kingdom. Let's jump right in. Hi and welcome to Hiss and Tell. I am your host, Kristiina Wilson, and with me today is Dr Jennifer Vonk. She is a comparative and cognitive psychologist at Oakland University, which is in Rochester, michigan, not Oakland, california. Welcome, jennifer. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and your education and then, I guess, what led you to include cat cognition and behavior in your work?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, so it's probably kind of a roundabout route. I did all of my schooling in Canada, so I grew up in Ontario. I did my undergraduate degree in psychology at McMaster University and I had thought at the time that I would go into counseling because I liked talking to people about their problems, and I don't think that would have been a good direction for me. I had also really always wanted to work with animals, but I of course had thought about zoology and veterinary school and I just I'm too squeamish to do anything invasive and I don't think that I could deal with all of the emotional aspects of the animals that you couldn't save. And so I had sort of given up on working with animals and thought about psychology in the way that people normally do as a more clinical, applied field. And then I took a course in animal behavior and realized that I could marry both of those things and pursue my interests and just study behavior and how animals think.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I took a long route to it because I ended up doing my master's in human cognition and studying memory, and then I did my doctoral work with Suzanne McDonald, who did a lot of behavioral work at the Toronto Zoo and she was wonderfully flexible and basically said you can study any animal that you like. And so I studied orangutans, which had always been my favorites, and so I studied non-human primates for a number of years and then, just through working at zoos and sanctuaries, just had opportunities to work with other species, and I'm sort of greedy, like I want to work with everything and anything that I have access to and that I can think of. An interesting question for um and cat.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I'm a cat lover, I have cats at home, so how many do you have? I have eight, and they are all kind of fat and fluffy, all boys. So it's very active wow, eight boys that's. I have a lot of follow-up questions for you on that one, but carry on sorry, yeah, so I just, I mean, I probably fell into working with cats, mostly from first working with bears and then just becoming really interested in animals that weren't group living animals because I think comparative psychologists have studied group living animals almost exclusively, especially with regard to social cognition, and I feel like we're missing half of the hypothesis.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:So we think that living in a social group has led to a lot of evolution of complex cognitive abilities, like theory of mind and being able to read emotional cues, but without knowing that non-group living animals can't do those things. We can't really say it's because they've evolved to live in social groups and domestic cats are just super interesting because they've evolved to live in social groups and domestic cats are just super interesting because they have evolved from a non-social past. Basically, they haven't evolved to live in groups, but they are now living in human households and interacting with in my case and in your case, I guess multiple other cats and with humans and with other species, and so it's a really interesting chance to see how their cognition differs from other domesticated animals that have evolved for a social lifestyle.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:And so they're really interesting from a theoretical point of view, but also I mean I just I love finding out more about them because I mean I love all animals but cats are you know, as a cat owner, kind of close to my heart.
Kristiina Wilson:I get it, and you're preaching to the choir, I think, and to the listeners of this podcast. Of course you're preaching to the choir, but I mean, when I was looking through your research, I was so jealous because I was like, oh my gosh, you got to work with non-human primates and you get to work with bears. I love bears and now that we live out in the country, we have bears all over the place and, and you know, raccoons and coyotes and bobcats and like all these animals that come right up to our windows and all our cats get to watch them and it's hilarious seeing their reactions, or lack thereof, to these animals, which is really interesting to see.
Kristiina Wilson:it's. It's so cool to me that you have this career where you don't you're not pigeonholed to one species, and I think that's really lovely, because I think often we do get pigeonholed in science into one particular species or one particular type of behavior, so it's nice to see that that doesn't have to be the root.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, I mean, and it's nice when people appreciate diverse interests, because I think there is a bit of a cost where you maybe don't become as expert at something like.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:it's always a huge learning curve, working with a new species, of just figuring out, like what motivates them and what can they do morphologically and what are their sensory capacities, and so I always feel a bit of a fraud when talking to anyone about any particular study in one species, because I have studied so many different species but I haven't studied one so extensively compared to other people that really specialize, and so I think it's just it's a different skill set. I mean, for me it's very satisfying because I am interested in these kind of broader questions about what aspects of the environment shape how animals behave and think, and I think you can only do that by comparing different species. Yeah, so it's nice, but it is. There are definitely times where I'm a bit envious of people who just know everything about their animals.
Kristiina Wilson:I get it, but I think I think everybody in academia suffers from a little bit of this imposter syndrome you know, even even if you are one of those people who's like I know everything about dolphins, or I know, for me, it's just there are so many unanswered questions and so many things that are interesting, that the one thing I love about academia is its flexibility.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Like I could decide not to study animals and just study humans if I wanted to. I could study human children if I wanted to focus just on development. So there is that flexibility. Development so there is that flexibility, and so I tend to just try to take advantage of every opportunity that I have to work on something and to collaborate, and so it's just an opportunity to learn something new all the time.
Kristiina Wilson:I think that's so exciting. And that leads me to also talk a little bit about your work with humans on attachment styles and how you've kind of married that with studies about attachment styles and companion animals, and how did you come to that work?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, I guess it started with a doctoral student that I had back when I was a assistant professor at Southern Mississippi and she had primarily wanted to study individuals with autism, and we're always interested in that.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I think if we have any interest in what shapes cognition, just because of the differences in theory of mind and that's always been speculated to be so important to distinguishing human cognition from other species, and so it's kind of a nice test case of individuals that don't maybe have the same kind of theory of mind as neurotypical individuals, and so we were interested in children with autism, but we didn't really have the capacity to study them. So we were looking at just how children developed theory of mind in terms of their verbal abilities and social cognition. Gaze sharing and attachment came up as maybe an important predictor in how children learn to read those cues, and so once we embarked on that project with her for her dissertation, it just kind of naturally led to other questions for me where I am also really interested in personality.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I'm really interested in borderline personality, and those are people that struggle with their interpersonal relationships and attachment to humans, and so I was kind of interested, just from personal experience, about whether people were maybe getting something from their interactions with companion animals that was missing or more challenging in their interactions with other humans, and I think that's true for individuals on the autism spectrum and individuals with attachment issues, whether it's borderline traits or something else, and so that, and being interested in theory of mind and empathy, it just was a way to bring it all together by looking at animal-human interactions and those aspects, those specifically human-individual differences.
Kristiina Wilson:Right, that totally makes sense. And specifically a couple of your papers that touched on many people with BPD having less of a connection to animals.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, I mean that's not what I hypothesized and I think it. I mean, I guess there was kind of complex patterns of avoidant or anxious attachment to humans that predicted a lack of empathy to humans. But in some of the studies and now I guess I can't remember what's published and what's not- it's always hard.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I know. But I have found in some of those data sets and I think study one of that published study maybe wasn't replicated in study two that what usually seems to be the case is that people high in borderline traits some of my data sets have shown typical empathy with animals but less empathy towards other humans.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:So it's not necessarily that they have greater empathy for animals, but their empathy for animals is more intact, it seems. So that seemed consistent with my hypothesis, which would be that people may have stronger relationships to animals if they have that particular set of traits. But there's also just kind of emerging work looking at whether people's attachment to humans is actually correlated with their attachment to pets, and I just collected data on that with multiple pets in the household with attachment styles to humans and multiple pets.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:So it's not analyzed yet because we just closed data collection last week, but someone just conducted a meta analysis on that with like 12 studies, because there isn't a lot and right they don't seem super highly correlated. So that is interesting. It could be there sort of a trade off, because it does seem like people with autism typically people designate as an important trait of autism, like lower levels of empathy and so I was always fascinated with the fact that a lot of people on the spectrum are actually studying animal welfare, really interested in animal welfare.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:And if you don't have empathy, why would you care about welfare of other beings, necessarily? So my thinking was always not that it's really like a deficit in empathy, it's just maybe it's expressed more easily with animals, like maybe it's easier to understand their emotions in some ways where human cues are very subtle, and so I'm really interested in that kind of work. But I don't have access to a large number of people, you know, with a clear clinical diagnosis. I've kind of been looking at subclinical levels of those traits in the population.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:So, yeah, I think there is a lot that we don't know about attachment to animals. It's really interesting.
Kristiina Wilson:Anyway, sorry, back to cats. I could talk about this other stuff all day, but I don't know that the listeners of a cat podcast want to hear about it. So there's often the stereotype that, like, cats are really independent and aloof, and I read that in a lot of the intros to a lot of the studies that you are an author on. What does your work actually tell us about a cat's ability to kind of form relationships and understand people, and is that a fallacy?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I think so. I mean, unfortunately, we mostly have kind of one direction of the relationship. We have people's attachment to their cats and less studies on cats' attachment to humans. Krista Vitale has some nice work about, you know, cats preferring social interactions with humans to other forms of enrichment.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I think a number of studies, like my master's student, mariah Galvin, did several years ago, showing that cats were sensitive but it was pretty subtle effects to emotion cues, but only when given by their caregiver and not a stranger.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:And they do tend to look more towards their caregiver during a conversation, especially more positive one, more positive behaviors when the owner is happy, and so I think they are picking up on aspects.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I mean certainly living with eight cats, I mean our cats have strong preferences between my husband and I and they're extremely affectionate. So I mean I firsthand, I'm always baffled that people find cats aloof. Um, I do think that they're. They haven't evolved to try to find a place in a group setting where I think they may be less inclined to appease us compared to dogs, because dogs have been bred to perform certain tasks and communicate with us and they haven't. So their, their kind of need to please the human or communicate with the human is different, um, but they obviously have been selected, especially certain breeds, for enjoying human companionship, liking to to be near us, like liking to be handled or petted, and so I do think that anyone who has been around cats doesn't have that perception. But there are people that maybe just have never really become familiar with them that maintain that kind of mistaken perception.
Kristiina Wilson:Yeah, I agree and I think I think so much of our understanding of companion animals is based on the dog, like you said, and then we kind of try to extrapolate for cats, based off of the dog, and they're so different both in their reactions and and their older living styles.
Kristiina Wilson:You know cats are also not pack animals like dogs are and I just think their communication styles like everything is really kind of like a 180 from each other, that I think that's also where a lot of people get confused, as they're like well, this cat's not acting like a dog and I don't know.
Kristiina Wilson:I used to hear that a lot about our cat steve who passed. Who's this guy back here who, like, inspired all my work with cats and people loved him, and? But they would always say like oh, he's like a dog, like I love Steve, he's so cool, he's like a dog. And I'd be like he's actually not like a dog, but like okay, if that's what you need to say. Um, so I always found that kind of verbiage really interesting from people who were like I'm'm not a cat person, but I like Steve, he's like a dog Okay.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Kind of annoying, I mean anything. I actually kind of think that, in comparison, cats, when they choose to be around us, it's more about affection and companionship, where dogs are very food motivated. So I always find it kind of funny that people are like my dog loves me. Dogs love us more than cats do. Cats are aloof because I'm like you know, I have cats that could care less about treats and even really fussy with their food, but they, you know, are rushed to greet us when we get home and spend all of their time near us, to like be very, very interested in being rewarded for everything, which isn't isn't the case with cats. It seems more intrinsic out of some kind of desire for companionship. So for me and maybe I'm a little biased too, I love dogs too, but I'm, you know, I'm in the cat camp. So I I feel like that could be seen as evidence that cats are actually more pure of affection compared to dogs. So, and also, they're not trained to, you know, be near us in the same sense.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:They haven't been like evolutionarily sculpted or bred for those things, and yet they're still choosing to spend time with us and, you know, seeking out humans, even strays and feral cats, and you know, to some extent that's because there are food sources near humans, but that doesn't seem to always be their primary motivation.
Kristiina Wilson:That's true, I totally agree. Once again, you're preaching to the choir.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:It's an easy audience. It is, it is.
Kristiina Wilson:Cats are great. The end, end, end of the podcast forever. So you've done several studies about grief and bereavement and end of life decisions. What led you to those particular topics, or were those grad student topics as well?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:no, no, I mean those. That was really my own interest, and probably this this is. You know. I always say that the old research is me. Search doesn't really apply to studying animal cognition because most of the topics I study have nothing to do with me.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:It's just interest in the animals. But in this case I think it does come from the fact that we have had quite a large number of cats and so over the years we've had to make these decisions, unfortunately, fairly often. And I do find that, even you know, my husband and I are very aligned on most things, but there are definitely differences in our approach to when to make those decisions.
Kristiina Wilson:And.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I just was curious about what kind of individual differences there are that predict how people weigh different factors when making these decisions, because I mean, there's no right or wrong necessarily, there's no rule. Everything's kind of specific to each case and they're always going to be challenging decisions, and so I was especially interested in this idea of empathy and is the empathy really about concerns for the animal and their suffering?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:and it's really hard to tease those things apart, because I think I'm being very kind to the cat if I'm ending their suffering earlier rather than letting them suffer, but at the same time, like I also suffer when my cat suffers, because I have a letter of empathy for them. So am I really focused on my own feelings or the well-being of the cat? Like? It's hard to tease those apart, and so that's what I was interested in doing initially, and then it's just. Many other questions have arisen from that initial study.
Kristiina Wilson:Yeah, so that initial study that you're talking about is one I'm just going to name them in case people want to go through and look them up is empathy and emotion regulation predict timing of end of life decisions by pet owners, which I read through and thought was super interesting, and it found that those with higher reported empathy were more likely to make decisions to euthanize at later stages rather than earlier stages, which was not the predicted outcome, right, and I found that was really interesting too. But I think there's like a whole bunch of reasons obviously that could be. Why do you think that that might be?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I think some of it was in the challenge of framing the questions, because I had tried to and we didn't even analyze this in this paper for that reason. But we had questions about and I mean people where there would be some indication of suffering. So the questions were framed that way. But there were questions about like how early when you find out about a terminal diagnosis or a problem and at what stage in terms of the signs that the animal was presenting a decline in quality of life, kind of separately. But the question I was really interested in was that balance of like how much do you think you prioritize your own needs and the challenges of caring for the pet versus concerns about the pet's level of suffering?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:and their quality of life and the time they have left and and I think, trying to get people to like I weigh this more than that, it just the wording was maybe a little too complicated and some people didn't understand it, so we didn't end up analyzing that in that larger data set, so we ended up focusing mostly on the like how guilty do you feel if you think you made the decision too early or too late or you did too many interventions, and so that maybe is less interesting, because I think it's not surprising people higher in empathy just felt more guilt no matter what.
Kristiina Wilson:Yeah, people feel guilty regardless, because it's just a natural part of the grieving process also is to do that Like well, what if this and what if that? To do that Like well, what if this and what if?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:that and and because you've actually made the decision versus although I think people feel a lot of guilt when they don't make the decision and they wait for the animal to eat, but so it's all difficult I was surprised that people tended to want to extend it if they were higher in empathy and I kind of went against like this maybe positive self perception, where I was thinking, well, I like to make the decisions early because you know I I'm so empathetic or kind hearted, but you know, maybe that's not really how most people see it and they're really thinking that the kindest thing is to allow the animal to have as much positive experiences for as long as possible, and so I think maybe that's what those two things are kind of like the suffering versus the opportunity to have positive moment.
Kristiina Wilson:I think also the fact that you you may be able to, and in certain cases, depending on the illness, mitigate some of the suffering, whether it's through analgesia or through, you know, other methods. I really did resonate with that sentence in the study that said that the results suggest that empathy may be related to the value of life rather than a reduction of suffering, which I think, to me really seems to hit the nail on the head for a lot of people that I have talked to.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, and I think all of those, all of the findings from all the survey studies I've done, have to be qualified in a way that the people that are completing the surveys are people that are really invested in their pets and talking about them and thinking about them, and so we're not really capturing people that would be callous or uncaring or just get rid of their animals as soon as there's the slightest inconvenience, and so all of the data are very much biased towards people that are, you know, pretty invested in their pets, have reasonably high levels of attachment, and even then we do get variance, obviously, in how attached they are.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Even then we do get variants, obviously in how attached they are, and it could be that, you know, people have different levels of attachment to different pets in the household and they may have lost one that they don't feel as connected to personally. But they're still a pretty select, not necessarily representative, group of people doing the surveys and I think they also did tend to be, you know, fairly highly educated.
Kristiina Wilson:So, like you said, they may have been more likely to be able to afford ways of reducing suffering, to extend life and so, yep, exactly, I will say that I was amused by one thing that I could be amused by in the study that revealed that cat owners were slightly more highly educated than dog owners. I just thought that cat people would love to read that and be like, interpret that as, like, I'm smarter, which it doesn't say that at all, but people would be amused by that.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, I mean, that probably also deserves another qualification. So my collaborator Esther Balma in the Netherlands. She is a cat behaviorist.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:And so she has a large number of clients that she deals with that are part of this larger cat group. I forget what she calls them, but they, like very large number of our respondents, were from her group of individuals that seek out a behavioral behaviorist therapists per se for their cat behavioral problems, whereas the dog owners probably largely came from my kind of snowball technique of recruiting and was kind of right. So I think there are other differences between the dog and cat owners, probably other than whether they owned a cat or a dog. Um, but I mean, of course, the paper. We analyze all those differences. Sure, you know that they were reasonably comparable, but I do think that probably is like if we had targeted a group of people that were also seeking a dog behaviorist for their pets, maybe, maybe that would have equaled out.
Kristiina Wilson:Sure.
Kristiina Wilson:I do say all the time especially when I'm talking like to my wife or we're at like a cocktail party and people are like oh, what do you do? You know that like people really who I see as clients are great because they've self-selected in. They're already people who care enough about their pets that they're going to go see a specialist you know outside of, outside of their veterinarian, to to try to work on their cat's behavior. Generally it is, like you said, like a group of well-educated, very well-meaning, empathetic people who self-select into that group. So I can see how that would be. You know, a challenging group to kind of extrapolate more information out of.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, Although I mean, I do think, and it's well-documented there are differences between people who are primarily cat only or dog only owners and, of course, like a more active lifestyle.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:If you want a pet that you can go out running with or walking with like a dog is more suitable, and so it is probable that people who are more introverted or stay at home and maybe have more what we might think of academically inclined interests may be more likely to be cat owners. So there could very well be a real difference in level of education and lifestyle. And also you know a lot of academics work really long hours and so maybe more inclined to have cats than dogs.
Kristiina Wilson:I think that's so interesting. A lot of my clients are like psychologists, psychiatrists or, like you said, academics of some other kind.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:And obviously they're cat people.
Kristiina Wilson:So that's really interesting compared to dog owners to euthanize. How much of that do you think might be due to the fact that cats tend to show their pain and illness like later on in the process than dogs, as we all know that cats are masters at hiding pain and illness because they're predators, but they're also prey, so it can be really hard to figure out that they're in pain until they're really really in pain.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, I think that that probably is the best explanation for that. I think it's also possible that people are you know one, they're a little better at probably reading dog behavior than cat behavior. People may be interacting a little bit more with their dogs in more physical activities where it would be more obvious if a dog was lame or like if they weren't interested in their treats anymore.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Like you know, if a dog stops eating, it's probably more profound than cats, who are notorious picky eaters anyways, I think it probably does take longer for cat owners to pick up on the fact that there's something wrong.
Kristiina Wilson:Yeah, yeah. I also really want to talk about the responses of domestic cats to the loss of another companion animal study. Can you just give a little summing up of what that study was and what?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:you found. Yeah, I mean, when I began my studies of animals, I was really interested in how abstract their thinking is and what kind of concepts they could have for things that don't necessarily take on physical form. And so the concept of death obviously is one of the most abstract ideas we can have, like the sense of finality of it and whether our entire being is gone when our body passes away and what that means. And so it's really hard to study in animals because you can't present them with visual stimuli and ask them to discriminate. They're just other cues to things without really understanding what their concept is.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:And so I think people really avoided studying how animals think about death. I mean, there were always some anecdotal kind of single reports of animals responding to death, but if the literature is probably 90 percent non-human primates and dealing with how mothers respond to the loss, of an infant and there's very little else out there.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I mean, when I started the study I thought there was nothing, and then I came across the study by Walker et al, which I don't know how I missed. And then Shada et al published their paper while I was already collecting mine, I think. And so still there were only two other papers looking at how companion animals responded when another animal died open topic that, I think.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:For years I wanted to study more, in the way that I studied concept formation, as I'd done with apes, and not really knowing how to do it properly. But then, once I got into doing more survey research and cat animal interactions, I thought, you know, the best thing would be to actually study how behavior changes, but in order to collect data from a large number of cases, like the survey, technique is obviously the most effective in asking people what they'd observe. So it's not perfect, because we don't actually have measures of behavior before and after, which would be preferable. But we have a much larger sample and some of it was just driven by the fact that, as a cat owner and having had to make decisions, losing several of them over the years, we were always a little bit sad that it didn't seem like our cats responded very much Like we didn't really notice, and not that we wanted them to be devastated, but you kind of want to feel like the death of your other pet has meant something to everyone in the household.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:And our cats. We didn't really notice strong responses, but I knew from talking to other people that people felt their animals responded very strongly, and so I just thought you know what, like why don't I just ask as many people as I can find to answer questions about this and see what the majority kind of thoughts are? And I was pleasantly surprised that so many people felt like they had observed kind of noticeable changes, just, and you know, as a scientist, obviously, however the data turned out, it would be interesting, yeah, but there is a part of me that feels a little bit, I don't know like I feel like it does kind of feed into the idea of you know, cats are more socially inclined than we think like they actually do care about their companions and absolutely talk a lot about like, what if we died?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:like would they care? Would they be sad, would they think about us, or would they just be happy if someone else came along and fed them and would they curl up in those people's laps and purr, just the same?
Kristiina Wilson:You know, I mean it's a really interesting question that I don't really know the answer to, and so I would just ask yourself how do they react when you guys go away on a trip for an extended period of time and then come home Like Are they happy to see you, are they excited? How do they act with their sitters while you're gone? How does that work out?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I mean, I have had some wonderful cats that are very friendly with other people that I think would adjust fairly. They're wonderful with us and affectionate, but I think would also be super sweet and affectionate to anyone that came and fed them. And there are others that clearly have their person preferences that I think you know probably would be slow to warm up to someone new.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:And we the last five cats we've adopted have all come from homes where their owners passed away so we've also witnessed on that side of it how quickly they've accepted us, and so it's kind of like you know, it's a double-edged sword.
Kristiina Wilson:It's like well.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I love that they're suddenly attached to us, but a little bit sad for their former owners.
Kristiina Wilson:Well, I would say that I don't think that acceptance and even loving you guys means that they're not necessarily thinking about their previous family and their home. And obviously some of that is anthropomorphizing, because we can't know. But again, going back to the cats as predators and prey, I think we have to be careful to remember that it's not necessarily safe for them and their little lizard brains to to think about necessarily showing emotions, especially that would be that would weaken them. So but but I've noticed in our house when we've had especially this guy when he died and he was the head of the house, it really it threw everybody off. Three cats had to go on prozac because they were having, you know, intercat aggression problems. There was serious anorexia in the house, like real depression. It was rough and the cat we have named Pam, who was his girlfriend, did not come out of the bedroom where she had always laid with him for a year.
Kristiina Wilson:She would not leave the bedroom. Yeah, and we got a little stuffy that is made, made to like, look like him, and now she sits next to that stuffy all the time.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:interesting, because she that's the kind of thing I heard other people talking about, and that's why I thought it would be so interesting just to get a large number of responses and see what kind of things people came up with. It does seem like staying in spots where the deceased animal used to be, or sniffing those areas or looking for them is one of the most common behaviors that people see. But also like not eating. But the thing is some animals probably eat more, especially if they were subordinate.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Now they have more access to the food and so I think the social dynamic changes and for some of them it maybe changes for the better because they have more attention or more access to food. And I think that's what we saw with the cats in the households where a dog had passed away like maybe they're getting more attention from the owner, so the owner's behavior changes towards them, the social dynamic that. So that's why I'm very hesitant to say it's like grief, because there are obviously other things changing that they're responding to. So it's, yeah, it's that there's so many more directions to go and figure out what's really going on in their minds. But it does seem that highly bonded animals do tend to look for the other one if they suddenly disappear. I would love to know if they respond differently if they know that animal has died, like they've seen the body or they've witnessed the death, versus another animal moving out of the household.
Kristiina Wilson:Right. I mean I can only say from our anecdotal experience that everyone knew that Steve was sick. Obviously they could smell the cancer on him and so the last couple months they would. They were like hugging him and sitting with him and really protecting him, because he was the head of the house and he washed everyone and protected everyone and so then everyone was really caring for him and they obviously knew the jig was up right.
Kristiina Wilson:So no one was surprised when we had the in-home euthanasia, even though we had opportunity for everyone to be in the room and to be there and to spend time with his body. They were all just like, no, we we know, and again anthropomorphizing. But it seemed like they were like we have known, this was coming, not surprising. And I'd seen that same like caregiving behavior in our previous head cat who had kind of taught steve by these same cats when the night before he died and I didn't know he was gonna die obviously, and they all came and like, did the same, like embracing behavior, huh.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:So interesting, and so they didn't investigate the body when they had the chances? No, not at all. Not at all did they seem afraid?
Kristiina Wilson:no, they just it. And again I was out of my mind because this was my soulmate. We had a plan for everything and and part of the plan was the other cats need to be able to come if they want. They're not forced to, but they're able to be there for the whole process and to investigate if they want. And they just were not interested. I think they just knew that he was not there anymore and they were not surprised by this outcome. Interesting how much of that is me? You know, painting that with my own grief and what sounds nice to me? I don't know.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, ours have not been comforting. So when we have one that is sick and it's kind of near the end, I mean they, and I think it may be adaptive for them to avoid because there could be a pathogen or something.
Kristiina Wilson:Yeah, they can be bullying and avoidant as well.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, the bullying thing is interesting. So I've had several FIV cats and they often are the ones the others will pick on and we've often thought, like they must sense it or smell it. Like even when those animals are perfectly healthy-seeming on the outside, they seem to know who has a weakness. But maybe that's because we do have I mean, you also have quite a few, yeah. So I don't know if it's kind of you know it is too many in a household. That's kind of unnatural and so like they're fighting for their place, like they're creating a hierarchy and so they're picking up on any sign of. But maybe if, and maybe because ours were brought into the household at different times, like maybe if they were all raised together we'd see more comforting I, I think it who knows, like the, the current kind of head of our house, kevin, who's like best friends with steve.
Kristiina Wilson:Um, we just brought him in from the street in the city when he was two and now he's like six, so he hasn't been with us for that long, but he has FIV and nobody cares, no one would ever pick on him. He is a big unit. But also because he's like on the juice, you know, he's on prednisone to help with his FIV, so he's just like. But he's like super nice and chill and like everybody loves Kevin, he's super cool. So I don't. Maybe they can smell something in him and they don't care, or it's just not active. You know, sometimes I wonder how much, with FIV and all these associated other diseases kidney disease and other things that cats can get, when do they start showing these like subclinical signs that we can't perceive? But obviously the other cats can. So maybe in your FIV cats they had something else going on.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:It seems likely. I mean because we do have one now that has FIV and he's actually more the bully than the bullied most of the time. He's also a big, big, almost 20 pound orange boy, but our yeah, our other, you know, was Smokey was the one that loved everyone's super friendly, good cat, um. So yeah, it's probably more once they start developing kidney issues or something that we've noticed the change yeah, because I've.
Kristiina Wilson:I've definitely seen our cats. They didn't gang up on steve they, because they all loved him so much, but some of our other cats who have passed from cancer, um, when they started showing the signs, they got bullied hard and it was horrible, like horrible, and we were just like what is wrong with you? What are you guys doing? But it's this idea, I think, of having to push illness out of their community, where they really aren't meant to be living in communities anyway, and then they have somebody who maybe isn't their favorite, so then they're like great, here's an excuse, anthropomorphizing. I shouldn't be doing any of that, but here I am.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:It probably is just chemical cues of threat, Like if there is something like they don't know whether it's contagious or not and if most things are contagious, or parasites or bacteria or whatever, it makes sense for them to ostracize the individual that's carrying that. I mean, so it's probably mostly just instinctual kind of self-protection, Because I mean I don't think there shouldn't be the kind of group cooperative behaviors of this is a member of our group and we should protect and keep them. It should be more sort of individualistic. Like this individual might make me sick. I need to distance myself.
Kristiina Wilson:Not that I think that they're thinking that through, but I think the mechanisms are there. Yeah, so the one other question I had about this particular study is how many in that study cohort had more than one pet remaining in the house, because I know it touched on like, oh, some people had more than one pet and I was wondering if you ran statistics on that group.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I did, because you asked, but I did asked. So that was something the editor had actually mentioned and luckily we hadn't originally reported that. But we did collect that information and so. I ended up including the number of cats in the household in the analyses, and it didn't predict anything, but so it was 214. That didn't have any other cat at the time of the one cat's death, or 237 participants had at least one other cat. And then the problem is, some of them also had dogs, and so they might have had other dogs and that so on.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:But when we I think I included both the number of cats left in the household and dogs as predictors, it didn't predict anything and I just ran the correlations and the number of other pets in the household at the time of death weren't correlated with any of the outcome behavioral changes. So it is possible if we separate out whether the change was like more or less than the behavior, look at something in a more nuanced way or just categorize them as like an only cat now or there's like one to however many right, as opposed to looking at the linear relationship. Maybe there's something there, but it doesn't seem to have a strong impact.
Kristiina Wilson:Yeah, I, I was just curious because, as we discussed question, yeah, I just like to drill down as far as possible into the data because, I'm annoying.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:We are collecting data right now on zoo animals, so I have a survey out there and I'm super excited because we have 150, some responses already and some people have very nicely responded about more than one animal that they've cared for, and so that's one of the things we're asking about is like are these animals group house? Like it has to be in at least a pair to look at the response of the surviving animal, but we should hopefully get comparisons of like when there was just a pair, like Gibbons, for example like they may be alone, if their partner passes, versus like a small group or a large group, and if they're related or pair bonded, and if they're social species or not.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:So I'm really really looking forward to looking at those data when we have a more complete set.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, that sounds really super interesting and also maybe something that would I don't know help zoos make some change, depending on the the outcome yeah, it's really interesting to me that there aren't more studies looking at how animals have responded, because they often have situations as well when they know that it's coming when an animal is sick and probably going to be euthanized or passed soon. And it just doesn't seem like and a lot of times zoos have those data, they've collected behavioral observations or they've done cortisol levels or something.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:But they haven't disseminated it more broadly, and so I do know some people are collecting some of that data with their animals in Jacksonville now, but it just when I ask about it, like have you looked at this? Like did you study before? After, I think there's just so many other concerns in terms of actually taking care of the animals that you know the collecting data obviously is secondary to all the hard work they do with the day to day care and routines and communicating to the public and other things.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:So again, like I would love to have behavioral data instead of sort of retrospective reports with the human bias spun in. But I think you know a lot of keepers are super perceptive to what's going on with their animals and I think we'll see, if nothing else, there'll be differences in what animals they perceive to have changed their behavior more.
Kristiina Wilson:Yes, for sure.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:The behavioral studies are still sort of like my bread and butter, it's just it's online. Human data is a lot more accessible and a little faster to acquire, but so I guess, like the reputation study is interesting.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:We didn't find any effects that cats were attributing reputation, and there is at least one other study now that also hasn't found that, and so that to me is kind of a surprising result because, like we've been talking about how cats prefer different humans and they also have different preferences for companionship with each other, and so it seems very unlikely that they're not attributing personality traits or characteristics to people or to other cats, like this person is friendly, this person is less friendly, like I.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I think that that's a case where the way we're researching it maybe isn't aligning with their abilities well enough, because I would find it hard to believe that they couldn't do that, and it's possible that they can't because they're not group living animals by nature.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:But dogs also haven't always shown reputation effects the way we've been testing it, like they don't always seem to learn this person is a good cooperator and this person isn't, or this person is honest and this person isn't. So I think those kinds of things, like whether they can attribute those kind of qualities to other beings, is a really interesting question to ask, and I think you kind of hit the nail on the head with a question about, like, how important is it that we're relying so much on visual information and visual stimuli and I think I am working a little bit with a student in the Netherlands Obviously I'm not her advisor, but I'm kind of advising on the project and she's actually looking at how they respond to visual, olfactory and auditory information, and so she's going to have some nice comparisons of how they deal with the sense of other animals when they're stressed versus when they're relaxed, and she's just coding all of her data now.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:So I think those studies are going to be, you know, super important, because I mean my feeling when we did our study, looking at whether they respond differently to a person who's angry versus happy. Of course we're acting out those feelings, but we may not be putting off the chemical cues like the pheromones and things that would really be happening if we're legitimately angry and I suspect that's what cats would be differentiating, not like visually, whether we're tense and so on.
Kristiina Wilson:Yeah, because, yeah, cats don't have awesome vision, but they have amazing sense of hearing and amazing sense of smell, and I just think, yeah, they could treat bag.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, I know it's so crazy.
Kristiina Wilson:Even if we just pull a churu out of the thing, there's all of a sudden like eight cats in the kitchen and we're like oh no, it was meant for this one cat, and now all of you are here, so so it is, and it's that sound cue Plus then, once you open it, the tiniest little churu molecule that they smell on the other side of the house. It's both of those things. But I think if I just showed them a churu packet that was closed, they'd be like I don't care what. So I have always thought that, even when I was just in grad school, being like, so many of these studies are designed and not just for cats but for many other animals like dolphins and other animals, whose primary sense is not vision, but because, as humans, our primary sense is vision, we just design all the studies for us, and then it becomes a little problematic, especially stuff like mirror self-recognition and other things that make me crazy.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:But well, I've done a mirror self-recognition study in bats. I haven't published it yet and that's one of my fears is that it's just stupid, like people are going to say well, why would you have expected them to respond to their reflection when they echolocate and there wouldn't be a physical object in the mirror, like maybe?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:it's stupid to even tested it, but the facility that was housing the bats had actually contacted me about doing a study there and they thought their bats were responding to mirrors. They asked me to design something, and so that was kind of my foot in the door to do studies with bats, which I also think are fascinating that's are so cool, but I still am kind of like.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:I have data on 19 different bats of different species and we spent a ton of time on it, so I would like to publish it. But it is kind of like, is that just such a badly designed thing? Because it's not really reflecting their actual, you know, the best sensory capacity.
Kristiina Wilson:Yeah.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:So I think we do make that mistake a lot and I think we have with cats, not necessarily known how to test them. Someone just did publish something about them discriminating different scents to it and they actually sniffed, like I think it was the happy scent, like from their human feeling, happy like a scent with different nostril, like they were more likely to approach with our left or right nostril depending on the scent, which I had never thought about.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:So I think we're finally starting to address some of those things. But I mean, if you look at their behavior when they're approaching each other, they often sniff each other before they decide whether to get up next to each other. And you know, when they come back from the vet they act very weird because the cat smells like.
Kristiina Wilson:sometimes it's like they don't even recognize I have a lot of cases like that, where there's intercat aggression following a vet visit because, or especially, a hospitalization. Yeah, because of the smell.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, they look and sound the same, they obviously smell different. And so, even though they look and sound the same, they obviously smell different. And so, yeah, I have for a long time thought that scent is what we should be doing, and even in our study of whether they recognize a familiar keeper, it's just, it's harder to control because scent obviously dissipates and like it can't be contained and like how long does the scent last? And you know where? Visual cues are just easier to manipulate. But I mean, we specifically use the sound of the keeper's voice because I think that auditory cues are also really important and I people have done those cross-modal studies of like you show a picture of a person and play their voice and the animal's supposed to look longer if it mismatches. But those always feel weird to me, because why would they think that the static photo?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:is yeah doesn't have the olfactory cues or anything else. It would be there if the person was there and it's not actually making the sound and so it's a like. It's a good experimental design in the sense of if they have a representation of person, they should think like the vision and the sound and everything go together.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:But it's just like acting them to not be surprised because the voice matches yeah and we don't even know how they represent photographs, like if they see that as representative of the individual, like because there are a lot of animals that don't do picture object correspondence. So I don't know. We toyed around with doing something like that with cats and with owls and we decided just to do the vocal discrimination. So we can't say they recognize the individual or they have an image of that individual, but we at least showed that even exotic cats respond differently to the voice of their caregivers. So that suggests that they do differentiate, they notice who's familiar to them and who isn't, and it's kind of like, you know, the very first step of showing that there's something special about their relationship with their caregiver compared to just any human. And so I, you know those things I'm kind of excited by too, because I think we show that non-domesticated cats may form these relationships too.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:That also goes a long way to undermining the idea that if you're not a group living animal, you don't have social bonds or you don't pay attention to other individuals. And I think we've ignored the fact that you know, cats raise their offspring, like there's territory that overlap, where they have to recognize dominance hierarchies, like group living context isn't the only context where you have to reason about other beings. You mentioned earlier something about the prey predator relationship, I think, and I think that's been super neglected in cognitive studies. So an animal may have to reason about what another animal's intentions are and whether it's a threat or not, and so saying that non social animals shouldn't have theory of mind or reason about intentions is probably wrong. Yes, and I think just because we've been focused too much on do you live in a big social group? So I bears and cats, I think, are just super interesting to study from that point of view.
Kristiina Wilson:Well, thank you so much for doing this. I think it was. I had such a good time talking. This was so interesting and I really loved reading all your research and I just really appreciate you coming on the podcast and telling everybody about your cool research. And do you want to tell everybody your website and how they can find your research if they would like to do so?
Dr Jennifer Vonk:Yeah, it's just JenniferVonkcom, and so there's a list of should be fairly up to date of all my publications there, and also, I think there's still a link on the homepage to this survey where I'm looking at attachment of anyone that has multiple pets cats or dogs in the household is interested in doing it. But, yeah, I'm always interested in hearing people's stories about things like how they respond. In fact, I'd like to start collecting data on how animals have responded to the death of a human in the household that they're bonded with, because I have not seen any literature on that so far. So if I'm looking to collect data, I may hit you up to share with some of your groups.
Kristiina Wilson:Oh, absolutely, I'm totally happy to do so and thank you again.
Dr Jennifer Vonk:It's been a pleasure talking to you too.
Kristiina Wilson:Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review wherever you. Again, it's been a pleasure talking to you too. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review wherever you listen. It super helps For more information and to support our podcast. Check out our website at hissandtellpodcastcom. You can also find us on Instagram at hissandtellpodcast. Also find us on Instagram at hiss and tell podcast. Music provided by cat beats.
