Cat Behavior and Training

       When you think about the really interesting things that cats do, you probably don’t have sleep on your list.  After all, sleep is really the lack of behavior, and how boring is that?  Actually, sleep is a behavior and even though there’s little movement, some really important things are going on during sleep including physical recovery and important memory processes.      Cats need good sleep to be healthy and happy.  So insufficient sleep can produce distress and even disease.  It’s also true that disturbances in sleep can be a sensitive indicator of underlying medical or behavioral problems.

       Most of us have the impression that cats sleep their lives away. It seems when they aren’t eating, fighting or playing they’re fast asleep on some high perch. Cats do sleep a lot, at least more than the 7 or 8 hours that we people sleep. But when we look carefully at cat behavior we see that not all their time is spent sleeping. 

       The average cat living indoors or in a laboratory setting does sleep a lot; at least, compared to their human companions.  Carefully done laboratory studies of cat sleep indicate they sleep anywhere from 11 to 16 hours a day, or roughly 46 to 67% of the time. It also means they are spending a good 8 to 13 hours doing other things.  Kittens and very old cats, like human babies and old persons, tend to sleep more than adult cats. Cats also sleep in many short bouts scattered throughout the day instead of one long sleep period like people. These many short cat naps probably lead us to think that cats sleep more than they really do.

       More laboratory research shows that how much and how well a cat sleeps depends on a lot of things, such as the light cycle (the more dark, the more sleep), how much the cats are fed and how often (more food and more frequent feeding leads to more sleep), the presence of other animals and people (the more people and animals that are around, the less sleep) and how stimulating the environment is to the cat (the more things there are to see and do, the less sleep).

       We can expect that indoor pet cats, cats having outdoor access and cats living outside are going to be affected by these same variables and so their sleep is going to vary depending on their living conditions.  Cats going outside, for example, may sleep less because when they’re outside, they’re awake doing what there is to do. Cats living inside without other people, animals, toys or things to watch, like windows or aquaria, may sleep a lot.  This may be due to sheer boredom. We’ll talk more about sleep problems in future blogs.