Cats are weird.
They are also cute and snuggly and beautiful and evil and they destroy your curtains. Next to the definition of “Chaotic Neutral” in Dungeons and Dragons, there should be a picture of a cat. They do what they want, when they want, and damned if we humans can ever really figure out why.
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They also love boxes. The smaller, the better.
Really, the phrase “if I fits, I sits,” is a bit misleading, because if the box is small, most cats will make themselves fit.
It’s so common a thing that there are multiple subreddits devoted to sharing pictures of cats inside containers. For this article, I’ve chosen pics from r/TheCatTrapIsWorking , mostly because the larger subreddit on the topic has a name that’s NSFW .
Plenty of people have tried to explain the feline love of boxes but only a few actual scientific studies have been done.
Which makes sense; cats are terrible test subjects.
A common hypothesis has to do with cats’ natural hunting instincts.
Felines tend towards sneaking up on prey before pouncing.
They also favor enclosed spaces to call home, as protection against other predators. Basically, if they are in an enclosed space, nothing can sneak up on them.
Of course, a tissue box isn’t quite the same as a cliff side cave, but it could still cause those same evolutionary processes to work.
One environment where you can study felines in somewhat controlled conditions is a shelter.
So researchers from the University of Utrecht decided to see how having a box to hide in affected a cat’s stress levels.
Turns out that it makes a pretty notable difference.
The study selected 19 cats who were just admitted into a shelter, then randomly split the cats into two groups.
The cats’ stress levels were calculated according to the Kessler and Turner Cat-Stress-Score (CSS). Then, half the cats had small hiding boxes put into their enclosure with them, while the other half were left without any additional hiding places.
Over 14 days, the researchers checked the cats’ CSS scores.
By the end of the 14 days, all of the cats scored about the same on the CSS.
However, in the first three days, the cats with hiding boxes showed much healthier stress levels than those without. Basically, having a place to hide allowed them to recover faster from the initial stress of coming to the shelter.
“In summary, the hiding box appears to be an important enrichment for the cat to cope effectively with stressors in a new shelter environment the first weeks after arrival,” the study says.
They say that they intend to continue studying the effect of hiding in boxes on individual cats, as well as those in a group environment.
So when you find your feline squeezed into a box or drawer, remember that regardless of how awkward it looks, they do find comfort in it.
