A real study:
Domestic cats (Felis catus) prefer freely available food over food that requires effortTwenty domestic cats (11 male, 9 female) between 1 and 10 years old (average age: 5.1 years, SD: 3.1 years) were enrolled in the study. … Six of the 20 cats had previous experience with using a food puzzle.
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Three cats (2 female, 1 male) who refused to consume any food from the puzzle during training were withdrawn from the study for their safety. Cats that successfully completed the training were then exposed to the testing protocol.
The best way to win is to not play at all.
One of the cats in the study is Baba! BABA IS CAT. Also, there’s an Orion, which I misread as Onion. I wanted to name the guy Orion at one point, but Katt pointed out people would misread the name in exactly this way.
We did not find strong evidence for contrafreeloading; instead, cats preferred to eat the food that was freely available with no required additional effort. This was true when looking at both the overall population of cats, and the behavior of individual cats across trials.
Well, yeah. Good to get it tested, though!
In fact, the strongest predictor of amount of food eaten from the puzzle was the amount of food eaten from the tray.
I could be misreading it, but there’s a table that says which food source each cat went for first at each trial. The four cats that were considered “contrafreeloading” (preferring the puzzle source as much as the free source) all went for the free source first most of the time. To me, it looks like these cats grabbed all the free food then only did the puzzle to get extra food. I’m not a veterinary scientist, though.
Male cats are more prone to obesity (Lund et al. 2005) and may be more food motivated in general.
Our study (n=2) confirms this.