The science of cats and boxes...

[PoliticAverse]

Across the internet, felines’ beguiling fluidity and vaguely psychopathic tendencies spark a mixture of adulation and fear. Internet cats vibe, LOL, lust after cheeseburgers, and vaguely resemble the Führer. But it’s perhaps cat booty, and the spaces it parks itself in, that commands one of the most interesting and best publicized cultural memes of all. In April 2017, the phenomenon of cats moseying into boxes took over Twitter with the hashtag #CatSquare. And last week, a new study plumbing the depths of the cat-box phenomenon went viral, spawning thousands of likes and a stream of cat-stanning coverage. “I can’t believe how much attention this is getting,” Gabriella Smith, a behavioral biologist who led the study at Hunter College, told me. The allure of the boxed cat is perhaps a kind of entrapment in its own right—time out of our days, space taken up in our brains, while the felines are none the wiser. Humans have cohabited with cats for thousands of years. But we still can’t tell exactly who is domesticating whom.

For all the hype that box-cats command, scientists still don’t fully understand why felines both big and small so fervidly flop their keisters into anything and everything. And because cats are generally uncooperative study subjects, humans have had a hell of a time trying to suss it all out. “We can’t get into those little brains,” Mikel Delgado, a cat-behavior expert at Feline Minds, a cat-behavior consulting group, told me.

Read the rest at: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/cats-climbing-into-boxes/618858/