Have you ever noticed whether your cats seem to have a dominant paw? As we humans are either right-handed or left-handed, so we can have right-pawed and left-pawed cats. Left-handedness in humans seems to occur in only about 13 percent of the population, though. Is left-pawedness just as rare?
I started pondering this question when I noticed that Chase always seemed to reach for my hand, for his food, for toys, with his left paw. He’ll reach with his right paw, too, but he seems to prefer his left paw. I wondered if he was one of (what I thought was) the rare left-pawed cats out there, or if cats even had a paw preference like that.
Right-pawed and left-pawed cats actually do exist
According to Petplace, yes, he can, in fact, have a paw preference. Petplace’s article on this also says that male cats are more likely to prefer their left paws, and female cats are more likely to prefer their right paws. So it is, indeed, quite possible that Chase is one of those left-pawed cats out there.
Dr. Jennifer Coates, on PetMD, cites a study that says about 50 percent of cats are right-pawed, 40 percent are left-pawed, and 10 percent are ambidextrous. Compare that to humans, where the vast majority of us are right-handed. For dogs, it’s about a 50-50 split between being right-pawed and left-pawed.
Dr. Coates has both right-pawed and left-pawed cats. She studied her cats to see whether there was actually a difference, and found that one of her female cats is definitely left-pawed. Another one of her cats appears to be right-pawed, but she’s not sure because the cat was wedged between feet at the time he was reaching, so it’s possible he was using his right paw because it was easiest.
Paw preference may be diminished, or non-existent, in cats that are fixed.
Petplace says that paw preference seems diminished in cats that have been neutered. In fact, in tests to determine paw preferences, neutered and spayed cats showed no preference at all. So it’s possible that definite right-pawed and left-pawed cats are generally going to be intact.
Chase is neutered and he does show a definite preference for his left paw, though, so there are a lot of questions I have about this. Is he left-pawed because he’s male? What about the fact that he was neutered at six months? It’s so hard to know, because right-pawed and left-pawed cats are different than right-handed and left-handed people. But then, nobody claimed cats are easy to understand. I can say, with certainty, that I have a left-pawed cat in this house.
