10% of Adult Cats Now Severely Curious According to New Study

Baton Rouge, LA- Researchers at the Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine recently announced the findings of a year-long study on feline health, sending shock waves throughout the veterinary community. The key finding of the report, which focused on markers of health and associated mortality rates, was that over a third of adult cats are now curious, with ten percent meeting criteria for severe curiosity.

"We have known for a long time that curiosity rates, even severe (class 3) curiosity, were on the rise," lead researcher and feline neuropsychiatrist Mort Fishman explained. "But to find that in some communities, particularly rural areas with a high prevalence of small rodents and hopping insects, that nearly half of kittens are above the 95th percentile for curiosity was upsetting to say the least."

Veterinarians have been seeing increasing rates of curiosity and related injuries for years, and there has been a significant movement among primary care vets to screen kittens for the condition in order to institute lifestyle modifications and even pharmaceutical interventions as early as possible. The most commonly used marker, the FCI or Feline Curiosity Index, which is a simple index of friskiness-for-volume, allows veterinarians to focus on those cats that are most at risk of complications. But there are some experts who believe that the FCI is a poor indicator of overall health, and its use is fraught with false positives.

"Frankly, the FCI is bullshit," Joni Hasselhoff, a Canadian veterinarian who specializes in curiosity revealed. "It is a sloppy means of screening large populations and worthless when used on an individual basis, especially as a goal. Some cats are simply more aloof, which might raise the FCI without actually equating to higher levels of curiosity."

Even when the diagnosis is clear, there is controversy regarding the management of curious and severely curious cats and kittens. Over the past few years, most veterinarians have fallen into one of two camps: Those who recommend aggressive lifestyle modification in the form of intradomicile containment and those who believe that early drug therapy is more effective in saving lives. Abbott Laboratories brought apathoperidol, marketed as CurioCure, a drug which suppresses curiosity by blocking the neurotransmitter dopamine, to the market in 2010.

Still, a small but increasingly vocal third group endorse a more natural approach. So-called holistic or integrative veterinarians believe that locking a cat inside is unnecessary and that the risks of drug therapy outweigh the benefits. They recommend approaches that combine modalities such as feline massage, acupuncture, and catnip enemas in order to restore a healthy energy balance and replace unhealthy curiosity with more of an adorable inquisitiveness.