Cats rule the internet. And don't be surprised if one day, they rule the world too. It's hard to get your scroll on without coming across cat content, in one form or another.
Just recently, we stumbled upon some interesting research published in November 2025. The quirky study reveals that cats yell more at men than at women. And here's how the experts came to that conclusion...
The researchers "recruited" cat caregivers via social media platforms and mailing lists. Each of the participants had to have cared for their cats for a minimum of 6 months, and the pets had to be at least 8 months old at the time of the study.
"We asked primary caregivers to record a 5-min video of their interaction with their cat immediately upon returning home from work/school using a chest-mounted camera... They were instructed to start recording before opening the door to ensure that the cat's spontaneous greeting behavior upon their arrival was fully captured," reads the paper, published in Ethology: the International Journal of Behavioural Biology.
The caregivers were told to behave as naturally as possible and had to leave the camera rolling throughout the entire interaction phase.
"The only significant finding was that cats used vocal communication more frequently when greeting male caregivers," noted the research team. They added that this could be because female caregivers are generally more verbally interactive, more skilled at interpreting feline vocalizations and more likely to mimic the vocalizations of their cats.
"It is therefore possible that male caregivers require more explicit vocalizations to notice and respond to the needs of their cats, which in turn reinforces cats' tendency to use more directed and frequent vocal behavior to attract their attention," they concluded.
A separate, interesting study conducted in 2023 found that having a cat as a pet is linked to an increased risk of schizophrenia-related conditions - especially if you had a pet cat during your childhood.
A psychiatrist named John McGrath and some of his colleagues at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research in Australia analyzed 17 papers published over the last 44 years in 11 countries to come to that conclusion.
The link between human schizophrenia and cat ownership has nothing to do with the feline's behavior but more likely, say experts, a parasite found in the animals.
"The proposed causal agent is Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii), an intracellular protozoan parasite found in domestic cats," explains the paper. "Infection with T. gondii has been associated with close contact with cats, ingestion of tissue cysts in undercooked meat of infected animals, and oocysts from food or water contaminated by cat feces."
Scientists say the parasite can stay in someone's central nervous system and has been linked to a bunch of physiological changes in the brain.
A third study, published in 2021, pours cold water on the idea that cats couldn't give a rat's behind about their owners. A team of researchers found that felines "mentally track the locations of their owners by their voice, even when they can’t see them."
The co-author of the paper, Dr. Saho Takagi of Kyoto University, and her peers "invited" 50 cats to participate in the study. The animals were played audio recordings of their owners calling out their names. The team observed that when the source of their owner’s voice moved, the cats appeared the most startled.
“These findings suggest that cats are quite concerned about their owners,” Takagi told the Guardian. “They may be watching their owner’s every action carefully, thinking about what will happen next.”
Cats often get a bad rep for not being cuddly and loving enough. They're seen as aloof, and sometimes even arrogant. But experts say the felines are just misunderstood.
“Cats are not people, and they are not dogs,” explains Dr. Carlo Siracusa from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. “Humans hug and kiss. Dogs become very excited and jump around. Cats don’t do anything like that. They are much more elegant. They approach us. They bump their heads. Then they have some contact with us and walk away.”
Perhaps this is exactly what makes them so endearing and keeps human beings hooked... Always coming back for more and more cat content. All. The. Darn. Time...
