Your Cat Doesn't Really Want To Kill You [View all]

[MerryBlooms]

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For people in the 43 million U.S. households with domestic cats, there's good news: Your cat doesn't really want to kill you.

Recent media headlines like "Your cat may want to kill you, study finds" and "Bad news, your cat probably wants to kill you" suggest that our feline companions have aggressive thoughts toward us. That, like big cats, our mini-cats are predators that want to kill us, too.

It's not the first time cats have garnered a bad rap in the media. Cats do kill birds and small mammals, but the exaggeration of the numbers has been a problem, as Vox Felina blogger Peter J. Wolf notes. And the sensationalist "cats may want to kill you" meme is even worse.

This whole thing started when researchers Marieke Cassia Gartner, David M. Powell and Alexander Wess published an article in the Journal of Comparative Psychology in 2014 called "Personality structure in the Domestic Cat (Felis silvestris catus), Scottish Wildcat (Felis silvestris grampia), Clouded Leopard (Neofelis nebulosa), Snow Leopard (Panthera uncia), and African Lion (Panthera leo): A Comparative Study."

Somehow, a whole year later, the murderous headlines went viral — based on a misunderstanding of what the paper actually reports.

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/11/12/455725899/your-cat-doesn-t-really-want-to-kill-you?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2038