Karin Bruillard reports Catcam videos reveal cats don’t sleep all day. (Just some of it.):
What does a cat do when nobody’s looking?
One way to find out is to set up a pet cam to spy on kitty at home. Another way is to put little video cameras on cats’ collars, set the animals loose and examine hours and hours of footage.
That’s what Maren Huck did. Huck, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Derby, in the United Kingdom, recruited 21 English felines, 16 of which tolerated the Oreo-size cameras enough to count as participants in this project.
Indoors, Huck said, most cats’ No. 1 activity would almost certainly be sleeping. But these cats’ lives were recorded when they were outdoors, and they had a higher priority: Their top activity was “resting” — not sleeping, but not exactly up and at ’em. Another preferred pastime was “exploring,” which Huck said amounts to “sniffing at plants or things.”