A tablet that plays curated videos for cats can keep visitors engaged, but a 2025 University of Glasgow study found it did not beat traditional toys on visitors’ sense of connection, and it did not show that cats were calmer or better off. Visitor enjoyment was similar across both formats. Whether a cat benefits is a separate question, and the evidence on that is still thin.
What MewTube is and why it was built
MewTube is a tablet application that shows curated videos to cats. A human visitor can adjust playback speed in response to the cat’s behavior, so the person has a role in the encounter while the cat decides how, or whether, to respond. The University of Glasgow team first observed how café cats reacted to tablet and laptop content, then built the system. The concern behind the project was that direct, intense interaction with unfamiliar visitors could overstimulate cats.
What the Glasgow study compared
The study ran for five months at a cat café and was reported in a 2025 University of Glasgow conference paper by Payne, Kleinberger, and Hirskyj-Douglas. It included 28 human participants and 16 feline participants. The core comparison was tablet-based play against traditional toys. The table below shows what the reported abstract supports, and where it is silent.
| Measure | Tablet-based play (MewTube) | Traditional toys |
|---|---|---|
| Visitor enjoyment | Similar to the toy condition | Similar to the tablet condition |
| Visitor sense of connection with the cats | Weaker than in the toy condition | Stronger, as reported in the abstract |
| Visitor confidence that the cat enjoyed the encounter when the cat did not respond clearly | Lower; visitors were less confident the cat enjoyed it | Not stated in the reported abstract |
| Visible feline engagement or choice to disengage | Not stated in the reported abstract | Not stated in the reported abstract |
| Directly measured welfare outcomes, such as stress | Not established by the study | Not established by the study |
The first three rows are the only comparisons the reported abstract makes. The study does not support calling either format “better” for cats, because the four measures answer different questions and only some of them were reported.
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Enjoyment is not the same as feline welfare
A visitor who laughs, feels bonded, or leaves satisfied has had a good experience. That is a human outcome. Whether the cat found the encounter pleasant, neutral, or stressful is a different question, and it has to be answered from the cat’s side: whether it approaches, stays, settles, uses an escape route, or leaves.
The Glasgow findings are useful on this point. Visitors can rate an encounter as equally enjoyable while feeling differently connected to the cats, and when cats gave unclear responses, visitors were less sure the cats were enjoying themselves. For café staff, that means a visitor’s good feeling, or confidence in a cat’s response, is a weak stand-in for the cat’s own state.
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What the Swedish café study observed about cats
A separate 2025 observational study by Hirsch, Navarro Rivero, and Andersson, published in Animals (15(22), 2025), followed 27 neutered cats in one Swedish cat café. The cats were observed in groups of 8–9, across 227 hours over 70 days. The median stay was eight weeks. The findings describe that one café and are not a general estimate for cat cafés.
Cats used height and retreat space
The cats often used elevated structures. When customer occupancy was high, they preferred vertical areas or cat-only rooms.
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Cats were not constantly social
Cat-cat interactions were infrequent, at 0.58 per cat per hour, and 51.9% of them were classified as affiliative. Cat-human interactions were absent during 44.4% of observation time. Cats varied in whether they sought contact with people or avoided them.
Design implications: choice, height, and privacy
The authors recommend complex vertical environments, hiding places, and private areas to support natural behavior and group stability. The practical lesson is that an invitation to play or be touched should be easy for a cat to decline. The following steps follow from that finding. They were not tested in either study.
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- Vertical territory: shelves, perches, and cat trees placed so a cat can watch the room from above without being approached.
- Hiding places: covered beds or boxes with an exit a visitor cannot block.
- Private rooms: cat-only space the cats can use when occupancy is high.
- Visitor rules: no reaching for cats on high perches, and no pursuing a cat that leaves a play session.
Where tablets and toys fit
A tablet and an interactive cat toy are both tools for shaping an encounter, not measured fixes for stress. Within a café, they are best treated as one option among several, alongside the environmental features described above. The tablet used in the prototype is a device category, and the study did not evaluate any particular model.
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What the evidence does and does not establish
- The Glasgow study involved a small number of people and cats in a single café setting, and its findings are drawn from a conference paper abstract.
- The Swedish study covered one café and 27 cats. It does not estimate how typical those cats or that café are.
- Neither study establishes that a tablet, a toy, or a particular piece of furniture reduces stress in cats.
- The sources do not provide a general count or estimate of cat cafés.
- Both studies were published in 2025. Later work may refine or change these findings.
Sources
- Payne, Kleinberger, and Hirskyj-Douglas, “Look What the Cat Tapped In: Exploring Digital Interactive Systems Designed for the Cat Café Experience,” University of Glasgow, 2025.
- Hirsch, Elin N., Belen Navarro Rivero, and Maria Andersson, “Cats in a Cat Café: Individual Cat Behavior and Interactions with Humans,” Animals 15(22), 2025 (PubMed and PubMed Central records).
- American Animal Hospital Association, “Tablets for tabbies: A look at technology, animal welfare, and interaction in cat cafes,” December 23, 2025 (secondary reporting on the MewTube project).
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