July 28, 2026 – Andy is in OurLittleCorner today.

Pet Peeve

The other day while poking around on the Internet I came across the title of an article that caught my attention:

It begins 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.

Merriam-Webster defines multiple as more than one, so with our two cats, Ono and Choco, we qualify as “owners with multiple cats.” This made me wonder why I’ve never witnessed any of the “allogrooming” that we 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. Sure, they do occasionally get within claw-striking distance, but that’s only for fleeting seconds at a time.

The “new research” was done by Morgane Van Belle, a veterinarian at Ghent University, who analyzed allogrooming behaviors using 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 ours, could be engaging in other kinds of passive-aggressive maneuvering. Van Belle’s use of cat videos for her research prompted me to dig into our archive of videos and photos of Choco and Ono to do a little of my own empirical 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 sweet lovable Choco was being traumatized by a domineering, aggressive Ono. Upon close scrutiny, the evidence suggests something else. The following short video shows what I found. See what you think.

[Editor’s Note: Keep in mind that both cats are rescue cats and that Ono was on the scene a few years prior to Choco’s arrival. Also, for what it’s worth, Choco now weighs about twice as much as Ono. ]

My hope is that owners of multiple non-allogrooming cats will find this video helpful for recognizing potential 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.