Cat lovers, rejoice! Your feline friends enjoy your company more in comparison with eating food!

New Delhi: Cats are normally known to evade human interaction. Their dominating demanour often gives people the impression they are the kind of pets that like to keep to themselves unless they want food.

But, after a thorough study, scientists have found that your feline friends actually prefer your company more than they like eating food!

Researchers from Oregon State University in the US took 50 cats from people's homes and a cat shelter and left them without food, toys and people for a few hours.

They then presented them with different stimuli associated with each of those things.

While there was little difference between the cats that came from homes and the shelter cats, scientists found that almost all of them preferred human socialisation to any of the other stimuli on offer.

Only 37 percent preferred food to human interaction, the 'Metro' reported.

"While it has been suggested that cat sociality exists on a continuum, perhaps skewed toward independency, we have found that 50 percent of cats tested preferred interaction with the social stimulus even though they had a direct choice between social interaction with a human and their other most preferred stimuli from the three other stimulus categories," researchers said.

The study was published in the journal Behavioural Processes.

(With PTI inputs)