July 28, 2026 – Andy is in OurLittleCorner today.

Pet Peeve

The other day I was poking around on the Internet and came across an article by Margherita Bassi posted on Smithsonianmag.com that caught my attention:

Bassi begins her article with this:

It’s not uncommon for a cat to lick another cat. Owners with multiple cats probably see the behavior, called allogrooming, in their home, and everyone else witnesses it in their social media feed. The behavior might seem friendly, but new research suggests sometimes it’s more sinister than it might appear.

As an owner of multiple cats (Ono and Choco to be exact), I was curious about why I’ve never witnessed any of the “allogrooming” that multiple cat owners supposedly often see. Even though Ono and Choco spend much of their time hanging out together, they never get within tongue-licking range of one another. Admittedly, they do frequently get within claw-striking distance, but that’s only for fleeting seconds at a time.

The “new research” that Bassi refers to was done by Morgane Van Belle, a veterinarian at Ghent University, who along with her colleagues analyzed allogrooming behaviors from videos solicited from 53 two-cat households. The results, which were published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, indicate that a cat grooming another cat may not always signal mutual affection; under the right circumstance it could be a passive-aggressive maneuver to establish dominance.

This got me wondering if cats that are not into the allogrooming scene, like mine, could be engaging in other kinds of passive-aggressive maneuvering. Van Belle’s use of cat videos in her research prompted me to dig into my archive of videos and photos of Choco and Ono to do a little of my own research to see if I could detect any behavioral patterns suggesting passive aggression between the two cats.

What I found was shocking. For years we had assumed that our dear lovable Choco was being traumatized by a domineering, aggressive Ono. Upon close scrutiny, the evidence suggests something else. The following short documentary video I put together shows what I found. See what you think.

My hope is that owners of non-allogrooming cats will find this video helpful for recognizing signs of passive-aggression before it’s too late. Too late for what I’m not sure, but there must be some intervention strategy that can stifle such behavior before it becomes a lifestyle choice as it has with Ono and Choco. Let me know if you have such a strategy ; maybe the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science would be interested in publishing it.