There’s a new paper in Current Biology (click screenshot below, pdf here, and reference at bottom), which shows that, using standard methodology for measuring attachment to staff (“owners” in the vulgate), both kittens and adult cats are as attached to their staff as are human babies and d*gs. The paper is very short—two pages if you don’t read the supplementary material—and you can peruse it below. There’s also a good summary of the results in Ars Technica by Jennifer Oullette.
Initially, 70 kittens between 3 and 8 months old were tested for their degree of “security” using the Secure Base Effect test (SBT). As Jennifer notes, it’s done this way:
The felines spent two minutes in an unfamiliar room with their owner, who sat on an X in the middle of a circle marked on the floor and could only interact with their cat when the animal entered the…
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