Cats are a relatively timid species, and they especially like to stay in corners. In daily life, cats love to get into cardboard boxes. No matter what kind of box they are, they can "disk" it and play with it. It's so handy that it even plays hide-and-seek with its owner.

Why do cats love to dig into paper boxes? Many people may not know the reason why cats dig into paper boxes. Let’s take a look at the experts’ analysis of this behavior of cats!

Some behavioral biologists and veterinarians have come up with some interesting explanations: Cats may not actually like boxes, but need them.

1. If you are stressed, look for a box

It is surprisingly difficult to understand the mind of a feline. Although cats are not ideal experimental subjects, some people are still keen to study cats. These studies clearly point out one thing: cats can gain comfort and security from enclosed spaces.

There are many reasons to support this view. For cats who live in stressful environments, adding some compartmentalized space, such as a box, can have a significant impact on their behavior and physiology.

Claudia Fink, a veterinarian at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, is one of the researchers looking at stress levels in shelter cats. At an animal shelter in the Netherlands, she divided newly arrived domestic cats into two groups, giving one group a crate and the other one without. She found a significant difference in the stress levels of the two groups of cats. Cats that were given crates adapted significantly faster to their new environment, had much lower stress levels, and were more willing to interact with humans.

When almost all cats encounter a stressful situation, their first reaction is to retreat and hide.

"Hiding is a behavioral strategy that cats adopt when encountering environmental changes and stress," says Claudia Fink. This holds true for cats in the wild as well as for cats living in your home. .

But while cats in the wild will hide in treetops or caves, your cat will find peace in a shoebox.

　2. To escape, find a box

An important point to point out is that cats are actually terrible at resolving conflicts.

To quote from Domestic Cats: The Biology Behind Their Behavior: “Cats do not appear to have developed the same conflict resolution strategies as other more social species, so they may avoid intense encounters by avoiding each other or reducing activity. Fight."

Therefore, cats tend to avoid problems rather than solve them.

In this sense, a box often represents a safe zone, a place where all anxiety, hostility, and unnecessary attention disappear.

3. It’s too cold, look for a box

If you look closely, you may notice that many cats choose other strange places to relax in addition to their boxes.

Some will curl up in the sink, while others like to stay in shoes, bowls, shopping bags, coffee cups, empty egg trays, and other small, enclosed spaces.

Without a box, a sink is fine, or a small corner is fine.

This leads to another reason why cats like small boxes (and other seemingly uncomfortable spaces): they get cold (especially in the winter).

According to a study by the National Research Council, the thermoneutral zone of domestic cats (the environmental temperature range where the individual metabolism of warm-blooded animals is minimum) is 30 to 36 degrees Celsius. Within this range, cats will feel comfortable without producing excess energy. Use heat to maintain body temperature, or expend metabolic energy to cool down. This temperature range is just about 6.7 degrees Celsius above the human thermoneutral zone, so it’s normal to see your neighbor’s cat lying in the middle of the asphalt basking in the sun in the summer.

This is why cats like to curl up in small cardboard boxes and other strange places.

The study also found that the temperature around most cat houses is around 22°C, which is nearly 10°C lower than the lowest optimal temperature for cats.

Boxes are excellent thermal insulation materials. The small space forces cats to curl up or adopt other difficult postures to further help them keep warm.

4. Summary

The reason why cats like to get into boxes is this:

The box provides both warmth and stress relief, allowing cats to hide, relax, sleep, and occasionally surprise the giant bipeds that live in the home.

Cats’ imaginations are not that big either. They have mastered playing with boxes!