Sociality of Cats toward Humans Can Be Influenced by Hormonal and Socio-Environmental Factors: Pilot Study

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Cats are the most widely kept companion animal in the world. Various factors influence the sociality of cats. Here, we investigated whether the hormonal status of cats, and the age at which they began living with a human, affected their behaviors toward humans. The results showed that male cats that began living with a human earlier had more contact with humans. In addition, males with lower testosterone levels had more contact with humans. The results of this pilot study suggest that testosterone levels and the timing of when cats begin living with humans modulate affinity behavior of male cats toward humans. ABSTRACT: Individual differences in the sociality of cats are influenced by inherited and environmental factors. We recently revealed that hormones can make a difference in intraspecies social behavior. It remains unclear whether cat behavior toward humans is modulated by hormones. Therefore, we analyzed the relationship between cat behavior and their basal hormone concentrations after spending time together with human experimenters. In addition, we analyzed the relationship between cat behavior and the timing of when the individual cats began living with a human because the sociality of cats could be dependent on their developmental experiences. The results showed that male cats that began living with humans earlier had more contact with an experimenter. In addition, individual male cats with low testosterone levels were more likely to interact with an experimenter. These findings of this pilot study suggest that the sociality of male cats toward humans is affected by testosterone and the age at which they begin to live with humans.