They fit anywhere, and they're beautiful too

What do cats think about us? You will be surprised
Unlike dogs, feline friends treat us like other cats, animal behavior specialist suggests.

Ever since cats got their adorable claws on us approximately 9,500 years ago, humans have had a love affair with felines. In the United States, more than 80 million cats reside in homes, with an estimated three cats for every dog ​​on the planet. But there's still a lot we don't know about our feline friends – including what they think about their owners.

John Bradshaw is a feline behavior expert at the University of Bristol and author of the book Cat Sense. After watching pet cats for several years, he came to an intriguing conclusion: they don't really understand us the way dogs understand us.

Bradshaw recently shared some of his insights with National Geographic.

How did you start studying cat behavior?

For the first 20 years of my career, I studied olfactory behavior [scent] in invertebrates. I've always been fascinated by this world that animals live in – mainly because of odor, which is the primary sense of dogs. So, in the early 1980s, I started working on dog behavior. Then I quickly became fascinated by cats, and what is their idea of ​​the world compared to what we have.

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What do you do in your research?

A lot of observations – watching groups of cats to see how they interact with each other and deduce their social structure. I see cats in colonies that are free, and in animal shelters, where large numbers will be kept together – you get an interesting dynamic when new cats are introduced.

I also did things a little more manipulative, like studying the way cats play with toys or testing cat behaviors at different times of the day. I also look at relationships with owners, interviewing them and giving them questionnaires to find out how they perceive their cats.

Why did you conclude that cats don't "understand" us like dogs do?

There has been a lot of research on dogs and how dogs interact with people. It is very clear that dogs perceive us as being different from them: as soon as they see a human being, they change their behavior. The way a dog plays with a human is completely different from the way he plays with a dog.

We still haven't found out anything about the cat's behavior, which suggests that they have a separate box they put us in when they're socializing with us. They obviously know we're bigger than they are, but they don't seem to have adapted much of their social behavior. Putting their tails in the air, rubbing themselves around our legs, sitting next to us and seducing us are exactly the things cats do to each other.

I've read articles where you said cats think of us as big, stupid cats. That's true?

No. In the book, I say that cats behave to us in a way that is indistinguishable from how they would act towards other cats. They think we're clumsy: not many cats trip over people, but we trip over cats.

But I don't think they think we're silly and stupid, um