FURRY CHILDREN

Confirmed: Women Love Cats And Vice Versa

By Elizabeth C.

THE 83RD ACADEMY AWARDS? All just a bit ho hum. John Galliano's "I love Hitler" slur? Not how I want to start off Monday morning.

Rather, give me cats! --the fuzzy, friendly, manipulative furry children of women.

A study from the University of Vienna and the Konrad Lorenz Research Station has confirmed numerically what we already knew anecdotally: women love cats, and cats love women.

"Female owners have more intense relationships with their cats than do male owners," University of Vienna's Manuela Wedl tells Discovery News.

Consequently, "cats approach female owners more frequently, and initiate contact more frequently (such as jumping on laps) than they do with male owners."

In the study, researchers recorded and later analyzed each exchange between 41 cats and their owners, concluding that the felines and humans strongly influence each other. But extroverted women with active cats enjoyed the greatest "synchronicity," Discover News reported.

""A relationship between a cat and a human can involve mutual attraction, personality compatibility, ease of interaction, play, affection and social support," explains study co-author Dorothy Gracey. "A human and a cat can mutually develop complex ritualized interactions that show substantial mutual understanding of each other's inclinations and preferences."

But of course, we already knew this.