Can Cats Recognize Their Grandparents?
Some felines and many other animals can likely sniff out their kin—but what they think of them is another matter.
Heartwarming videos of animal reunions abound, from dog siblings who met again as adults to a rescued elephant reconnected with her mother in Thailand.
But do animals really recognize their relatives? We decided to pair Jomar Borromeo's question to Saturday's Weird Animal Question of the Week with Tugba Avsar's more specific query "Do [domestic] cats recognize their grandmother or grandfather?"
Since they wouldn't have it any other way, we'll start with the cats.
Feral cat colonies, on the other hand, are "based around multigenerational cooperation between females—grandmother, her daughters, [and] their kittens." Male cats are not involved in raising young.
But "once separated from their mother, kittens seem to lose their memory of her quite quickly, and generally fail to