rbid any manipulation of feeding times or food choices. The feral cats were observed at their normal feeding time over a period of fivedays. The indoor cats were observed at many different times during the day when theywere eating. This was also done for five days. It was not possible to induce the indoorcats to eat at a regular time during the observation period. The behavior of interest was head shaking while feeding. Head shaking wasdefined as a vigorous shaking of the head from left to right. The shake from left to rightonly had to occur once in order to be recorded. Initially, the head shake was defined ashaving to happen twice, but was changed. This was because the behavior of interestturned out to be more rare than expected. Behavior was recorded as either being presentor not present. The number of times that it occurred was also recorded.ResultsVery few instances of the head shaking behavior were observed in any of the cats. However, it was slightly more common in the feral cats than in the indoor cats. Only twoinstances of the behavior were observed in the indoor cats, while six were observed in theferal cats. The results are presented in Graph 1. These results support the hypothesis. The cats that did exhibit the head shaking behavior tended to do so most frequently wheneating canned cat food. The behavior was only observed once when a cat was eating drycat food, in one of the indoor cats. The cats were observed for a total of approximately 5hours (1 hour per day). The feral cats were observed more regularly and for longerperiods of time than the indoor cats. The feral cats tended to eat less than the indoor cats,but ate for longer periods of time. All of the indoor cats ate small amounts of food severaltimes during the day (probably many more times than could have been observed andrecorded by a single observer). The indoor cats ingaged in another behavior that wassimilar to the head shaking behavior. At t...
