Special behavior
Why cats seek proximity to people who don’t like cats
For some cats, people who don’t like cats are extremely interesting
© Gottfried Czepluch / Imago Images
Some people are afraid of cats or don’t like the animals. But it is precisely these people who find the four-legged friends very interesting – for a simple reason.
The cat from my childhood was generally deeply relaxed. Most of the time he lay in his rocking chair and dozed, hardly noticing visitors.
So no problem for our neighbor Cat phobia that showed up at my mother’s for a coffee party one afternoon. The cat wouldn’t pay any attention to the woman.
We thought. Until the handsome black guy got out of his rocking chair in the middle of the women’s coffee session, headed for a certain person and hopped on their lap. It was the neighbor who was afraid of cats.
Cats seek out people they cannot assess
In retrospect, our pet’s embarrassing behavior at the time was, in retrospect, to be expected. It often happens that cats are attracted to people who don’t want to have anything to do with the animals.
There is a lot of advice on how to behave in order to win the heart of cats. One of them is not to be too intrusive towards the animals and let them decide whether they want to have contact or not. Researchers even found that cat lovers often do a lot of things wrong when dealing with the stubborn animals.
But what should you do if you want to avoid contact with a cat? And why do animals often choose exactly the people who don’t like them to express their sympathy?
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Biologist Dennis C. Turner explains the behavior in an interview with star using the example of a group of people in a room with a cat: “People who like cats show it clearly,” says the Swiss-American, who, among other things, has researched the relationship between people and domestic cats. “For example, you seek contact with the animal or want to pet it.”
However, people with anxiety did not emit such signals. Confusing for the animal. “The cat has to determine – what is wrong with this person?” explains Turner. “That’s why she forces contact.”
The scientist confirms that cats select precisely those people from a group of people who would prefer to be spared from making advances. This is very typical for the animals.
Translated into the times of our family’s legendary coffee party, that would probably have meant not letting the hangover into the living room at all. Then he wouldn’t have wanted to find out what was wrong with the cat-phobic woman from his point of view – and he wouldn’t have jumped into her lap either.
Sources: Dennis C. Turner Institute for Applied Ethology and Animal Psychology“The world“, “The Battersea Way” on YouTube
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