Like most little kids and many adults (at least in private), it turns out that cats also use facial expressions to communicate their food preferences. If you have a cat, you could perform your own study of any changes in your cat’s facial expressions in response to different food tastes like the researchers in the study described. If you have a dog, you also could determine whether he or she uses similar expressions. Perhaps some dogs show similar facial responses but because they eat so much faster than most cats, we normally miss them. Send photos and description of what you discover and I’ll be happy to feature them in a future podcast.
Here’s an abstract of the article that triggered this podcast. If you’d like to read the whole thing and don’t subscribe to the journal it appears in, academic or state libraries should be able to access it for you. Thanks to the magic of the Internet and Inter-library loan, even the smallest local libraries can be gateways to all kinds of information.
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