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Snotnose [soylentnews.org] writes:

To cat lovers, a litter box is a necessity. But not to scientists [scientificamerican.com]. A team of researchers decided to investigate litter boxes as records of behavior: the pre-squat scratch, the whirl, the precise geometry of the bury

To cat owners, a litter box is a nuisance. But to scientists, it’s a trove of information. A team of researchers at Nestlé Purina PetCare decided to investigate litter boxes as records of behavior: the pre-squat scratch, the whirl, the precise geometry of the bury.

The scientists built a painstaking dictionary of these gestures—a full “ethogram,” or catalog, of species-specific behaviors—and then identified the distinct moves in feline bathroom habits: grooming, digging, sniffing litter. “We landed on 39 different behaviors that cats do in a litter box, with the understanding that depending on their satisfaction with the litter box, the environment and the dynamics around them, those behaviors will shift,” says Ragen McGowan, director of digital and AI product development at Purina and one of the authors of a paper published recently in Applied Animal Behaviour Science on the development of Purina’s AI-powered litter box monitor. “We realized this ethogram could be a window into their health.”

And Imma gonna leave a link to where I found it, on Fark [fark.com]

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