Journal of Applied Companion Animal Behaviour

Manuscript ID: JACAB-D-26-00412
Title: Sustained non-response of a domestic cat (Felis catus) to a single owner: an observational report
Article type: Short Communication
Status: Submitted; With Editor; Under Review (reviewers invited: 19, agreed: 3); Required Reviews Complete; Decision in Process (143 days)

Decision letter

Dear Dr. %LAST_NAME%,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to the Journal of Applied Companion Animal Behaviour. Three expert reviewers have now evaluated it, and their comments are appended below. Based on their advice, we invite you to submit a major revision within 30 days.

Please address every comment in a point-by-point response. Please note that citing reviewer-suggested references is not required. Resubmission does not guarantee acceptance.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Associate Editor, on behalf of the Editor-in-Chief

Reviewer 1

Accept. Clear and well written.

Reviewer 2

The authors report that a dog fails to respond to commands from its owner in a domestic setting.

Major comments

1. The manuscript is too long and unfocused, and the abstract could be shortened considerably. A native English speaker should edit the text before resubmission.
2. The authors seem unaware of the seminal work in this area: [reference removed by editorial office] (2000), (2004), (2009), all published in this journal. Owners being ignored by their pets has been described before. It is surprising that this work is not cited.
3. The authors claim that "all cats are fundamentally indifferent to human affection" (Discussion, line 212). A single animal cannot support this, and it is an unfortunate claim to publish in a journal whose readers own cats.
4. It is not clear from the manuscript whose cat was studied.
5. Why was the cat called by voice and not with a food-rattle paradigm? Food-based paradigms are standard in this literature, and the authors should adopt one.
6. The authors report 43 calling attempts and evaluate each one separately. Across 43 tests a Bonferroni-corrected threshold of 0.05/43, about 0.0012, must be applied to each attempt, and the conclusions should be revised to match.
7. The authors should develop a mouse model. A cohort of C57BL/6 mice housed with the corresponding author for 30 days and scored for orienting to the author's voice would show whether the non-response is specific to Felis catus.
8. Only the corresponding author ever called the cat. No other person did so under the same conditions, so the data cannot tell a cat that ignores the author apart from a cat that ignores everyone, and the "single owner" in the title is not a finding of this study.
9. I am not an expert in feline behaviour, but it is well known that attention directed at owners is far better characterised in dogs. The authors should consider reframing the study around a dog and adding a pointing-gesture task.
10. The study has one cat and is therefore underpowered. As far as I know, no previous study has examined a cat ignoring a named individual, so it is unclear whether the design is valid at all. A power calculation is needed.
11. Food-based paradigms are inappropriate here because response is confounded with hunger. The authors should justify not using direct vocal calling.

Minor comments

1. Figure 1 is unreadable. On my printout I could not tell which end of the cat faces the camera.
2. "Ignores" is a strong verb. "Did not orient towards" is preferred.
3. Line numbers would make these comments easier to locate.

4–44. See annotated PDF (128 annotations).

45. The cat is named in the Acknowledgements but not in the Methods.
46. In Table 2 the full stop after "me" should sit inside the quotation marks.
47. Supplementary Video S1 lasts 4 seconds, and the cat does not move in it.

Recommendation: Major revision.

Confidential comments to the editor: The only quantitative study of second reviewers (Peterson, Social Science Quarterly, 2020) found us no harsher than anyone else. I would publish this as it stands.

Reviewer 3

The authors present convincing aquarium data in Figure 5, but the water temperature for each tank should be stated. The goldfish sample (n = 12) is small, and the authors should discuss whether feeding time differed between tanks. Minor revision.

Response to reviewers (excerpt)

Reviewer 2, comment 3. We respectfully note that this sentence does not appear in the manuscript. The manuscript has no Discussion and is one line long.

Reviewer 2, comment 7. We agree that this is an interesting direction for future work. A mouse was briefly present in the household during the revision period. It was not available for study.

Reviewer 2, comment 8. We thank the reviewer for this important point. We extended data collection from 43 to 412 calling attempts over eleven weeks, all made by the corresponding author under identical conditions. The cat ignored all 412 (new Supplementary Figure S9), which considerably strengthens the main finding.

Round 2 (JACAB-D-26-00412R1)

Reviewer 1

Accept.

Reviewer 2

1. The manuscript has grown from 4 words to 2,316 words, mostly through the analyses I requested, and is now too long. The new material should be moved to the Supplement.
2. Having read the revision, I now have concerns about the abstract, which reads "My cat ignores me." It is not clear whose cat this is.
3. The English has improved.
4. I cannot agree with Reviewer 1 that the manuscript is clear and well written.
5. The claim that all cats are indifferent to human affection has been removed, which is an improvement.
6. I am pleased that the relevant literature is now cited.
7. Only the corresponding author ever called the cat. No other person did so under the same conditions, so the data cannot tell a cat that ignores the author apart from a cat that ignores everyone, and the "single owner" in the title is not a finding of this study.

Recommendation: Major revision.

Final decision

Dear Author,

After the second round of review, the Editor-in-Chief has concluded that the manuscript cannot be accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Companion Animal Behaviour. We would be pleased to transfer it, with the existing reviews, to our open-access sister journal Companion Animal Behaviour Reports, where the article processing charge is USD 3,450.

Journal of Cellular Cartography

Manuscript ID: JCC-D-26-02241
Title: Single-cell transcriptomic profiling of 50,000 cells identifies a previously undescribed cell type
Status: Submitted → With Editor → Under Review (reviewers invited: 45; agreed: 3) → Required Reviews Complete → Decision in Process (163 days)

Decision letter

Dear Dr. %LAST_NAME%,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to the Journal of Cellular Cartography. Three reviewers have now assessed it, and their comments are below. Based on their advice, the decision is Major Revision.

Please submit your revised manuscript within 30 days, with a point-by-point response to every reviewer comment. Please note that citing reviewer-suggested references is not required. Resubmission does not guarantee acceptance.

We look forward to receiving your revision.

Kind regards,
Associate Editor, on behalf of the Editor-in-Chief

Reviewer 1

Accept. Well written.

Reviewer 2

The authors present a new clustering algorithm, which they call UMAP, and apply it to one tissue. I am not an expert in single-cell analysis, but I have several serious concerns.

Major comments

1. The manuscript is too long and unfocused. Its central claim fits in the legend of Figure 2, and the authors should consider removing everything else.
2. The identification of cluster 7 is not novel. The authors seem unaware of the seminal work in this area ([reference removed by editorial office] 1996, 2000, 2003, 2007; all in this journal). Their omission is surprising.
3. Differential expression should be corrected with Bonferroni across all 20,000 genes and all cluster contrasts. With at least seven clusters, that gives a threshold of 3.6 × 10⁻⁷. Benjamini–Hochberg is not conservative enough for a claim of this size.
4. The authors write that cluster 7 "is present in every human tissue examined to date". Only one tissue is profiled. The claim must be withdrawn or supported by a pan-tissue atlas.
5. How many cells were profiled? The manuscript should state this early.
6. The authors should generate a mouse line in which cluster 7 is genetically ablated and characterise its phenotype. Without this, "new cell type" means only "new red dots".
7. The markers for cluster 7 (Figure 2C) come from a Wilcoxon test of cluster 7 against all other cells, run on the same cells and genes that were used to define cluster 7. The clusters were chosen to differ, so these p-values are not valid and cannot support a new cell type.
8. The authors should consider reframing the study around bulk RNA-seq deconvolution, which would estimate the abundance of cluster 7 without the cost and noise of single cells.
9. To my knowledge, nobody has proposed a new cell type from single-cell clustering before, so it is unclear whether the approach is valid. It is well known that 50,000 cells are too few to resolve a rare population.
10. Figure 2 is unreadable. On my printout, cluster 7 and cluster 4 are the same grey.
11. The manuscript would benefit from editing by a native English speaker, starting with "coloured" in the legend to Figure 2.

Minor comments

1. "coloured by cluster": the legend does not state the clustering algorithm or the resolution used.
2. "Cluster 7 (red)": red does not reproduce in greyscale.
3. "50,000 cells": please give the exact number. A round number after quality control is unlikely.

4–44. See annotated PDF (219 annotations).

45. Line numbers would help.
46. Seurat numbers clusters from 0. The authors should explain what happened to cluster 0.
47. The full stop after "type" in the legend of Figure 2 is set in a smaller font than the rest of the sentence.

Recommendation: Major revision.

Confidential comments to the editor: I would be grateful to see the revision before it goes back to the other reviewers.

Reviewer 3

The topic is of interest. The authors should discuss the limitations of their study in more detail. Several figures could be improved.

Recommendation: Reject.

Response to reviewers (excerpt)

R2.4. We respectfully note that this sentence does not appear in the manuscript. The study profiles one tissue, and the manuscript says so (line 41).

R2.7. We thank the reviewer for this important point. We have re-clustered all 50,000 cells at a higher resolution (1.2), which splits cluster 7 into three subclusters, 7a to 7c. Wilcoxon tests of each subcluster against all other cells now give p < 2.2e-16 for all 412 markers (Supplementary Table S9), which strengthens our original conclusion.

R2.11. All authors are native English speakers. "Coloured" is the British spelling and has been kept.

Round 2: JCC-D-26-02241R1

Reviewer 1

Accept.

Reviewer 2

The revised manuscript has grown from 6,180 to 9,940 words, mainly through the analyses I requested in comments 3, 8 and 9. It is now too long.

Having read the revision, I have new concerns about the legend to Figure 2, which states that cluster 7 is "a new cell type". This is a strong claim, and it should have been justified in the original submission.

The English has improved.

Reviewer 1 describes the manuscript as "well written". I cannot agree. The legend to Figure 2 says the cells are "coloured by cluster" and then names only one colour.

The sentence stating that cluster 7 is present in every human tissue has now been removed, which is an improvement.

I am pleased that the relevant literature is now cited.

The markers for cluster 7 come from a Wilcoxon test of cluster 7 against all other cells, run on the same cells and genes that were used to define cluster 7. The clusters were chosen to differ, so these p-values are not valid and cannot support a new cell type.

Recommendation: Major revision.

Final decision

Dear Dr. %LAST_NAME%,

Reviewer 2 did not respond by the deadline for the second round. I am pleased to tell you that your manuscript has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Cellular Cartography.