Abstract
Simple SummaryAn important activity of modern animal shelters is the development of successful adoption programmes. In this regard, there is a need for reliable tests of individual differences in behaviour to help match the “personality” of potential adoptees with the lifestyle and needs of prospective owners; a companion animal for an elderly person remaining at home requires a different match than a pet for someone who will be away most of the day; a pet kept exclusively indoors in a small apartment requires a different match than an indoor/outdoor pet. In the present study, we repeatedly tested 31 mixed-breed adult cats of both sexes and a wide range of ages in five behavioural tests at a shelter in Mexico City, Mexico. The tests were designed to be easily implemented by shelter staff, and were short and low cost and intended to simulate common situations in a pet cat’s everyday life. We found consistent (stable) individual differences in the cats’ behaviour on all five tests, as well as correlations between their behaviour across tests. This suggests that such tests may contribute to reliably characterizing the “personality” of individual cats and so help increase the rate of successful adoptions. Consistent inter-individual differences in behaviour have been previously reported in adult shelter cats. In this study, we aimed to assess whether repeatable individual differences in behaviours exhibited by shelter cats in different situations were interrelated, forming behavioural syndromes. We tested 31 adult cats in five different behavioural tests, repeated three times each: a struggle test where an experimenter restrained the cat, a separation/confinement test where the cat spent 2 min in a pet carrier, a mouse test where the cat was presented with a live mouse in a jar, and two tests where the cat reacted to an unfamiliar human who remained either passive or actively approached the cat. Individual differences in behaviour were consistent (repeatable) across repeated trials for each of the tests. We also found associations between some of the behaviours shown in the different tests, several of which appeared to be due to differences in human-oriented behaviours. This study is the first to assess the presence of behavioural syndromes using repeated behavioural tests in different situations common in the daily life of a cat, and which may prove useful in improving the match between prospective owner and cat in shelter adoption programmes.
Highlights
The domestic cat (Felis silvestris catus) has been among the most popular pets in the world [1,2]
We previously reported an analysis of data which included a subset of the data presented in the present paper, gathered during the separation/confinement test [29], but here we include further behavioural tests with the aim of identifying a larger range of repeatable individual differences and behavioural syndromes
We first evaluated the consistency across time of individual differences in behavioural responses of adult shelter cats in five different tests, and for all tests we found measures that showed significant repeatability
Summary
The domestic cat (Felis silvestris catus) has been among the most popular pets in the world [1,2]. The cat is a good candidate for the study of individual differences as it is readily accessible and has a rich behavioural repertoire. It is by far the most studied feline species in this respect [3]. Animal personality refers to relatively stable inter-individual differences in behaviour [11,12,13]. When several of these behaviours correlate across contexts, they can be characterized as a behavioural syndrome [12,14,15]. The most common methods used to study individual differences in behaviour in the cat include observation [16,17], owner surveys [18,19] and behavioural tests [20,21]
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