Cat Talk

For all you cat owners out there, this may be interesting. Non-cat folk may or may not wish to skip this:

Interesting question. Have to admit that for an animal communication guy I don't know a ton about cats. So I did a little looking in animal behavior journals. As per usual for domestic animals, not a whole lot of research has been done. I was able to find that domestic cats do make "meows" to other cats, though relatively rarely. Looks like the general consensus is that there are actually many types of meow, though most are associated with negative affect. Meows vary in tone, pacing, length, amplitude and punctuation.The most common is a "frustration meow" which seems to express low level displeasure or unfufilled need. "Feed me", "pet me", "pick me up", that type of thing. They may also have aggressive meows, hunting meows, and mother to kitten meows. According to Katherine Houpt from Cornell, cats have a subtle but persistent sociality. Given a choice, they prefer to hang out with other cats (though at a bit of distance) and many of their calls serve a function in this environment - primarily spacing, interacting with family, and dominance. There's also a chance that meows have been bred for in recent artificial selection since they offer a pretty good way of interacting with human care givers. Certainly people reinforce meows by trying desperately to shut cats up ("Have some food? No? Want a pet? No? Water? No?! Arrrgghh!!!"). In this context it probably does begin as a kitten's frustration mew that becomes more specialized or given individualized "tweaks".

This is from my wonderful nephew Jason, whose Ph.D. in psychologoy was in animal commuication, though his specialities are primates and birds. However, he and I have shared acquaintance with a number of cats over the years, and known them maybe even too well (a certain Duchess comes to mind!) as his final comments demonstrate.

Of course now I'm wondering how to account for the vocal differences in calicos, Siamese, Persians, and gruff old cats like my own Orange/Anaranjado, who limits himself to one "Waugh!" each morning to bring me down to open the can and is silent otherwise, even to the point of just sitting and looking at a closed door. But since Jason was kind enough to do actual research in response to my query, I'm not going to trouble him with this stuff--I'll just keep spinning my groundless theories (or, hmmm, I actually know how libraries work, too, don't I?)

This whole thing arose from a discussion with redredshoes (in a post I can no longer find) about whether cats meow to each other or use that sound only for humans. According to this, there was some validity in both our ideas.