Male cats are lefties

July 24, 12:28 PMScience News ExaminerMeg Marquardt

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Credit: Tilo Hauke (source)

Like their human owners, cats also use a preferred hand to complete complex task. But unlike humans, who are mostly right-handed, felines are split right down the middle, with females preferring the right paw and males favoring the left.

There is a growing field of research concerning the “handedness” in animals. It may seem a nonsensical study pursuit, but experiments have yielded interesting hypotheses dealing with the impact of brain wiring and emotional/physical displays. And it does not only deal with hands. Previous studies have shown that “when dogs are happy and see something they want to approach, their tail wags to the right. When they are frightened and want to run away, their tails wag to the left.” [Discovery]

The other insight is that males of most species tend to be left –handed. Though 90 percent of humans are right-handed, “of the remaining southpaws, more tend to be men.” [Discovery] Testosterone has been linked to left-handedness, something that holds up in animal studies with neutered creatures. No testosterone, no paw preference.

But back to the cats. They were put through three tests by their owners. The first was the complicated task of getting a piece of tuna out of a narrow jar. The point of this test was to see which paw was more likely to be used while the cat was solving the problem of obtaining the fish. The second two involved a toy mouse either held vertically over the cat or dragged along the floor in front of it. For these test, the first paw used to strike the mouse was recorded. Over forty cats were studied, with more than 100 paw choices recorded per animal.

The difference between the sexes was almost an absolute rule. The paper’s abstract states that “all but one animal show[ed] a strong preference to use either their left or right paw consistently.” But an interesting twist was that the strong correlation was only apparent during complex tasks. During simple tests, the second two dealing with the toy mouse, neither paw was used with higher frequency.

Just why the different wiring occurs in males and females isn’t clear. And why it does not translate to humans is even more of a mystery. With cats, though, Deborah Wells, led author of the study published in Animal Behavior, offers a hypothesis. Perhaps the difference is due the manner in which cats carry out tasks, "for example in hunting styles and parental care, and it is possible that these place different demands on motor functioning." [Discovery] If the different sexes approach tasks with opposing mindsets, then perhaps that is why they choose different paws when they launch into action.

More research is needed (for all animals) to fully understand the phenomenon of handedness. In the mean time, please enjoy a video on cat yodeling.