On 10/20/2020 10:48 PM, Tigger wrote:
This has been anecdotaly know for some time (I even read somehting about
zoo workers
doing this to make big cats feel more at ease). But now there's a study!


https://www.sciencealert.com/you-can...king-real-slow


Cats have a reputation for standoffishness, especially compared with
dogs, but if you find your feline friend a little hard to bond with,
maybe you're just not speaking their language. Never fear - new research
has shown that it's not so difficult. You just need to smile at them more.

Not the human way, by baring your teeth, but the cat way, by narrowing
your eyes, and blinking slowly. By observing cat-human interactions,
scientists were able to confirm that this expression makes cats - both
familiar and strange - approach and be receptive to humans.

"As someone who has both studied animal behaviour and is a cat owner,
it's great to be able to show that cats and humans can communicate in
this way," said psychologist Karen McComb of the University of Sussex in
the UK.

"It's something that many cat owners had already suspected, so it's
exciting to have found evidence for it."

I wonder how much that study cost? We could have told them for free.

Jill