00:00Our houses are a really strange place for these tiny apex predators to live 24-7.
00:11A lot of cats are just hopelessly bored.
00:13Felines in general don't do well with confinement.
00:17Cats in zoos exercise a lot of weird pacing behaviors.
00:21A lot of the stuff we see cats do, you know, could be just because they don't have enough activities
00:26for enrichment inside of the house.
00:28I think that box behaviors, though, are really interesting.
00:32The classic example is the Japanese cat, Maru, that we see hopping into boxes and outside of boxes.
00:38And I think that what we see in Maru and cats hopping in and out of boxes is a kind
00:44of classic feline hunting behavior.
00:47This is an ambush performance that we're seeing in nature.
00:51Cats don't chase after their prey like you see animals like wolves and other types of canines do.
00:58They are very hidden, sudden, explosive predators.
01:03Cats like to be inside of boxes because these are sort of secretive, cryptic hiding spots where they can lie
01:09and wait and watch the world.
01:11You see the cats explode out of their hiding spots very suddenly.
01:16And this makes for great little video clips.
01:19But really, it's just a very typical feline hunting behavior.
01:23One of the interesting twists, though, is that we never would have seen these really cool athletic things that cats
01:29can do up until about 50 years ago when cats started becoming more sort of a normal domestic presence and
01:36a standard household pet.
01:37But cats outside, we don't get the opportunity to see them do their very impressive hunting feats as much.
01:45We have to recognize that this is sort of a rare privilege that we have today to have these little
01:50guys trapped inside of our houses with us so we can see all the cool stuff that they just do
01:55as a matter of routine, like explosively hop out of different hiding spots.
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