I came home from running errands earlier today to find one of my cats sitting so daintily in a pink mushroom bucket hat on my living room chair.
Image: tenprintz
This reminded me of the classic cat meme “If I Fits, I Sits” where people posted photos of cats sitting in different things with some iteration of the phrase written on the photo. Most commonly in these memes, the cat would be sitting in a cardboard box.
Image: Timo Volz
But why do they do this? I had to find out, so I took to Google. According to an article from Smithsonian Magazine, there was a study published in 2021 that dives even further into this phenomenon. The researchers requested people have a regular square, an illusion of a square, and the pieces for the illusion square pointed in the wrong direction taped to the floor. The participating cats sat in the real square and fake square about the same number of times but the fake fake square only about once. While this does demonstrate that they do like sitting in things that can be perceived as square-like, what about the boxes? As it turns out, later in the article it mentions there has yet to be a study on cats and actual 3D boxes. Someone needs to get back to the research lab and work on the question we all need to know!
Image: AI Generated with Craiyon
Once that question is answered, I would also like a few others to receive similar scrutiny. Will cats choose to sit in other containers like the fancy bowl in the image above as often? If given the choice between a 3D box, a fancy bowl, and a 2D square, do cats have a preference between these? And finally, does the resting height of the container play a factor in the cat’s decision making progress? I hope to learn the answers to these someday soon.