Body Camera Study Reveals What Cats Do When Nobody's Looking

Cat owners have a lot of questions about their feline companions, such as why do cats like boxes?, why are they afraid of cucumbers?, and do they understand their own names? While some of these questions have been answered by science, the matter of what cats do when their owners aren't around has remained murky. To get to the bottom of the mystery, a pair of scientists in the UK strapped video cameras to 16 cats and monitored their behavior.

Their study, co-authored by behavioral ecologist Maren Huck and animal behaviorist Samantha Watson and published in Applied Animal Behavior Science, was meant to be an assessment of the portable video technology. As Huck told Science in an interview, the experiment also revealed some surprising data regarding cat behaviors. One big takeaway was that cats may not be as relaxed and lazy as they're often stereotyped to be. When the cats in the study were allowed to wander freely outdoors, they were highly alert and engaged with their environment.

The study also presents evidence against the idea that cats don't care about their owners. The videos showed that the cats, when home, tended to follow their humans around and liked to be in the same room as them. You can see the behaviors that were recorded in the video below.

Though similar experiments have been conducted on different animals in the past, there haven't been many studies that use body cameras to observe a range of cat behaviors. This may have something to do with the nature of the subjects. When the researchers attached cameras to 21 cats, five of them either tried to shake or scratch them off. One cat began swatting her son when she saw the camera on him. For now, the secret lives of these more finicky felines remain a mystery.

[h/t Science]