Tell-Tail Fear Behaviors in Kittens: Identifying the Scaredy Cat
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Identifying when kittens are in fearful emotional states is crucial to protecting welfare, preventing behavioral issues, and ensuring caretaker and researcher assessments are accurate. Research is needed to confirm if kittens have fully developed fear responses similar to those of adult cats when they are in situations that evoke fear. To assess which behaviors kittens show when they are avoiding novel and startling stimuli, kittens (5 to 8 weeks old; n = 46) completed trials involving exposure to such stimuli, alternating with blank control trials. Trials were separated into immediate responses (during a short stimulus presentation or equivalent control period), and delayed responses (after stimulus removal). Mixed regression models, with litter and kitten as random intercepts, were used to model durations and frequencies of behaviors. Across both time phases, kittens displayed significantly longer durations of arched back, piloerection, freezing, and tail tucking, shorter durations of eating, and greater rates of putting their ears back during fear trials compared to blank trials. During stimulus presentations, kittens displayed significantly shorter durations of retreating to a hutch and greater rates of flinching, whereas after stimulus removal, kittens displayed significantly longer durations of crouching and shorter durations of upright tail. Responses were also affected by kitten coat color, sex, and being mother-reared. Thus, fear behaviors in 5-to-8-week-old kittens are fully developed and similar to what is observed in adult cats. These results allow for accurate identification of fear in kittens, with the goal of improving research on kitten fear development and kitten welfare.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".