I have heard all of these sounds, and I totally understand what they mean in this article.
I'm pretty sure it depends on cats though, but I know exactly what they mean by a cat deploying "an insistent chainsaw-like purr that bears some phonetic resemblance to a human baby's cry". I have known cats that did that.
I think the "chainsaw" comparison was more about the volume. I definitely know some cats who you can hear from across the room which will bring up a chainsaw comparison as a metaphor for loud.
The ones I've had/have (five in total) personally, they meow. And loudly at that. But I did also meet cats that trill and "burst purr" to signal they want attention - IIRC, many of 'em were former street cats unlike my other cats who all were "purely" domesticated.
I would think that they're referring more to the rumbling sound of a small two-stroke engine idling as opposed to a chainsaw running at full throttle while cutting wood. Here in the southeast US, at least, it not unusual to describe the sound of an engine idling as "purring" or even "purring like a kitten."
The article is all of 1000 words and doesn't use the term "chainsaw". Whether this is an incorrect embellishment on the part of the Guardian writer or not, I'm not sure it's necessary to belittle these researchers.
As a new parent, I can confirm that a cat's meow sounds quite a lot like a baby crying from a distance. Damn cat has woken me up in a panic more than once.
one of mine just becomes a pest sitting on near and in-front of me making not a peep but ensuring I literally cannot ignore her. The other just sits and watches
I have had cats basically my entire life. But my current cats was the first time I had 2 cats from the same litter, and it has been amazing. The difference in how they interact from any of the cats I have had in the past is amazing.
In the future we plan on trying to stick with cats from the same litter and not separate siblings if possible.
Just getting two that are the same kitten age (~12weeks) will have many of the same litter qualities... but if you get the runt, they will always be the runt (I think they do better as lone cats).
Some cats have a high level of social interest in other cats, but that frequently means aggression when they meet a new cat which could lead to a cat being driven away. (I have indoor/outdoor house cats and a tack room/outdoor barn cat and won’t apologize because I live on a farm with an 1/8 mile driveway.).
Oh, yes, lol. That makes sense. But they're still vulnerable to injury and disease... and, unfortunately, probably killing a lot of birds and lizards that will struggle with the evolutionary pressure.
But you're probably relying on them for rodent control, right? As a rule, I think all cats should be indoors, but this is a case where it's not so bad if some people get exceptions. Presumably there's plenty of wildlife habitat where small critters can escape your cats without getting in your house!
PAWS insists that you take a bonded pair of kittens instead of a single cat. My best bud growing up came from a pair, but his sister was always aloof.
The notion is that they teach each other not to fight so rough, which is something. We are bad at teaching them. Most of the orneriest little shits I’ve known were singles.
I had one cat that was a single kitten from a feral mother. She was a spitfire. Loved kids, and me, and everyone else could fuck right off. Except my girlfriend, but only on Tuesdays. She had a special hatred of vets. She would probably have lived 2 years longer if she didn’t turn into a wolverine at the doctors office.
I think teaching cats not to play rough is pretty simple but many pet owners don't want to do it. You just replicate what their litter of mate would do.
You immediately escalate, make a new loud noise, and perhaps bop them on the head, then walk away. Domestic animals are smart enough to know that this means they crossed a line. Do a consistently and the line becomes very clear
interestingly, we have a pair of gray rescue littermates who were bonded for ~4 years until we got a third cat (make purebred maine coon) who seemingly broke that bond. to this day, they get along, but everyone needs to keep their space or trouble could break out! :-)
Seconding this. I had a tabby and his tortie sister. Wonderful, social, affectionate. I was 100% a dog person and still am, but that tabby was more 'man's best friend' to me than any of my dogs. I miss him enormously.
One thing they didn't mention was color vision. The immediate ancestors of the domestic cat were diurnal hunters with color vision. In domestic cats they not only hunt mainly at dusk or night, but the entire section of the brain related to color vision is much smaller.
> The immediate ancestors of the domestic cat were diurnal hunters with color vision.
AFAIK, the immediate ancestor has been identified as a wildcat which was most closely related to, and possibly the same subspecies as, the modern African wildcat, F. silvestris lybica, a mostly-nocturnal hunter.
> Why, then, do we consider domestic cats to be loners? ... Although it’s not impossible for two unrelated cats to develop a friendly relationship, a better approach is to bring littermates into a home together.
This article sort of undersells this in framing it as a recommendation, but at this point there is so much consensus that cats are indeed very social creatures, that many cat rescue operations have a policy of trying as hard as possible to only adopt kittens out in pairs or with their mother.
The one I’m familiar with didn’t seem to factor in if you had other cats. The problem with pairs is that if one cat ages out, lots of places have rules about only two cats. So you either can’t get a kitten, you have to buy a pure bred, or you get two identical kittens, and hope one is shy and the landlord just thinks they’re seeing the same cat twice.
Don't get why you got downvoted, because IMO it is based on a historical truth - cats have served as pest control for literally millennia of human history and did such a good job at it that they have managed to get humans to take cats with them while migrating towards new areas.
if you live in any urban area us humans have already outdone them by far. and globally excluding islands with no predators it is likely humans are still the leading cause in one form or another (habitat, pesticides, herbicides)
us destroying bird habitat and their food sources are far more an issue then cats but hey lets just focus on cats instead of those.
not to mention in many ares outside urban centres cats are pretty low down on the food-chain and are as much prey as predator so the main reason to keep your cat inside is so it doesn't become somethings meal
if you live in any urban area us humans have already outdone them by far. and globally excluding islands with no predators it is likely humans are still the leading cause in one form or another (habitat, pesticides, herbicides)
us destroying birb habitat and their food sources are far more an issue then cats but hey lets just focus on cats instead of those.
not to mention in many ares outside urban centres cats are pretty low down on the food-chain and are as much prey as predator so the main reason to keep your cat inside is so it doesn't become somethings meal
There’s a theory that the human iris is so small because it helped us in working with canines as mixed hunting packs (nonverbal communication) and that in a way it’s a domestication of humans.
As we push back the date of first contact between humans and wolves that theory becomes more plausible.
I'm carrying the bitter taster genes, which are adapted to alkyloid soils in southeastern Europe. Which means that some of my relatives must have migrated farther back than I know because as far as I'm aware I'm four or five kinds of northerner all mashed together.
We are chock full of adaptations to time and place.
Compare that to a raccoon which they tell you not to let in your house because it might have rabies. Both raccoons and foxes can learn to come around when you feed them but neither one is an animal you can live with, it will attack you or trash your house, either one of which is unusual behavior for a cat.
I read the book Rascal growing up (about a kid who raises a raccoon in Minnesota). Then I worked with a guy who grew up in minnesota, and he had raised a raccoon in pretty much the same way.
Every shelter will provide vaccinations, many shelters will also fix the cats or provide a coupon for an associated vet (so it only costs you the time, and tending to them during recovery, not money). It should not cost $900 in 18 months for a healthy cat (an unhealthy cat, on the other hand, may cost that and much more).
Not sure what your vet bills have to do with any of this, but...
It's true: pets are expensive, particularly pet health care, at least in part because (as with human medicine, but perhaps more absurdly) we've allowed professional organizations to strangle supply for vets, both explicitly by limiting the number of schools/class sizes, and implicitly, by putting onerous requirements on getting into those schools and/or getting certified. I was interested in a second career in veterinary medicine, but learned that there's exactly one veterinary college in the entirety of Western Canada, located in the (lovely, but) cold and remote prairie city of Saskatoon, which accepts a total of something like 80 students per year. Absurd.
> And as for the disturbing claim that your cat would eat you if you died at home and your body weren’t discovered: don’t believe it.
It does happen, and not out of malice. Source: father in law died over the summer, "Garfield" (sigh) was rescued after 3 weeks when FIL was discovered, coroner report mentioned "evidence of post mortem scavenging".
"Garfield" (sigh) is to all appearances just a well adjusted cat, if a bit of a whiner.
It's like few that commented here about the "purr" (people commenting how cats meow and don't purr, how the purr is not like a chainsaw, and so on) bothered to read (as opposed to skim) the article or deploy some basic reading comprehension.
The article begins with saying cats meow to ask for things. It EXPICITLY says that "Anyone who has lived with a cat has experienced their household companion meowing to them, clearly trying to communicate something or other (perhaps “dinner time” or “Help, I’m locked in the closet”)".
When the article talks about the purr, is in addition to that. It even literally starts that section saying "And it’s not just the meow.".
As for the purr, they don;t refer to the "satisfaction purr" cats do when you pet then (or sometimes the agitated purr they have when they're stressed), that you knee-jerk assumed it does. The article links to the relevant research where they describe those "solicitation purrs" and the audio analysis they did on them:
"Here we report how domestic cats make subtle use of one of their most characteristic vocalisations — purring — to solicit food from their human hosts, apparently exploiting sensory biases that humans have for providing care. When humans were played purrs recorded while cats were actively seeking food at equal amplitude to purrs recorded in non-solicitation contexts, even individuals with no experience of owning cats judged the ‘solicitation’ purrs to be more urgent and less pleasant. Embedded within the naturally low-pitched purr, we found a high frequency voiced component, reminiscent of a cry or meow, that was crucial in determining urgency and pleasantness ratings. Moreover, when we re-synthesised solicitation purrs to remove only the voiced component, paired presentations revealed that these purrs were perceived as being significantly less urgent."
> As for the purr, they don;t refer to the "satisfaction purr" cats do when you pet then
Before today, the only sort of "purr" I'd ever heard anyone refer to is a "satisfaction purr". What your quotation describes as a "solicitation purr" is what I reckon most people would call a "meow" or maybe a "yell". One of those cases where colloquial v. scientific uses of a word diverge rather severely, I guess.
>is what I reckon most people would call a "meow" or maybe a "yell"
Again, no. They refer to a different kind of purr that cats do when asking for something, distinct from a meow. A purr that most people might not even have noticed as it occurs next to (and between) meows.
And this special purr also has an embedded higher frequency component similar to a meow, as they explain, that they had to amplify and do some signal processing to hear properly.
It's funny how people are not willing to read the study (or read carefully), but would rather assume that scientists (and even worse: scientists studying cats) don't know what a meow and a purr is, and just use the terms incorrectly!
Hell yeah they are. cats have had darwinian pressure for thousands of years to be comfortable around humans(perhaps this needs to be phrased more generically? comfortable in clans?). It is not much compared to dogs. But as a counter example try raising a bobcat kitten as a house cat. Domestic cats are very amiable in comparison.
Note that this appears that I have raised a bobcat, I have not. but I have heard stories from them who have.
Cats aren't domesticated... they are wild animals who choose to cohabitate with people due to a symbiotic relationship. Grain storage drew mice, mice drew cats, humans realized cats were keeping mice out of their grain... didn't murder all the cats.
Your cat will cohabitate with you with no social interaction at all if that's how little effort you put into it. If you want a relationship with your cat, you have to spend time with it and learn to speak cat.
78 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadall the ones i know go miaow.
> Scientists at the University of Sussex have shown that that bears some phonetic resemblance to a human baby’s cry.
have these "scientists" ever heard a cat purring, a chainsaw, or a baby crying? three sounds that could not be more different!
I'm pretty sure it depends on cats though, but I know exactly what they mean by a cat deploying "an insistent chainsaw-like purr that bears some phonetic resemblance to a human baby's cry". I have known cats that did that.
Similar to my cat (he is a loud purrer) who makes a Puurrrr-hurrr-purrr-urrrr kind of ebb and flow in the same way babies go WAAAAA-AAAA
The ones I've had/have (five in total) personally, they meow. And loudly at that. But I did also meet cats that trill and "burst purr" to signal they want attention - IIRC, many of 'em were former street cats unlike my other cats who all were "purely" domesticated.
Yeah, these people seem like they've never had cats before. Purring does not mean hunger.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(09)...
I have had cats basically my entire life. But my current cats was the first time I had 2 cats from the same litter, and it has been amazing. The difference in how they interact from any of the cats I have had in the past is amazing.
In the future we plan on trying to stick with cats from the same litter and not separate siblings if possible.
But you're probably relying on them for rodent control, right? As a rule, I think all cats should be indoors, but this is a case where it's not so bad if some people get exceptions. Presumably there's plenty of wildlife habitat where small critters can escape your cats without getting in your house!
Why?
The notion is that they teach each other not to fight so rough, which is something. We are bad at teaching them. Most of the orneriest little shits I’ve known were singles.
I had one cat that was a single kitten from a feral mother. She was a spitfire. Loved kids, and me, and everyone else could fuck right off. Except my girlfriend, but only on Tuesdays. She had a special hatred of vets. She would probably have lived 2 years longer if she didn’t turn into a wolverine at the doctors office.
You immediately escalate, make a new loud noise, and perhaps bop them on the head, then walk away. Domestic animals are smart enough to know that this means they crossed a line. Do a consistently and the line becomes very clear
One thing they didn't mention was color vision. The immediate ancestors of the domestic cat were diurnal hunters with color vision. In domestic cats they not only hunt mainly at dusk or night, but the entire section of the brain related to color vision is much smaller.
AFAIK, the immediate ancestor has been identified as a wildcat which was most closely related to, and possibly the same subspecies as, the modern African wildcat, F. silvestris lybica, a mostly-nocturnal hunter.
This article sort of undersells this in framing it as a recommendation, but at this point there is so much consensus that cats are indeed very social creatures, that many cat rescue operations have a policy of trying as hard as possible to only adopt kittens out in pairs or with their mother.
us destroying bird habitat and their food sources are far more an issue then cats but hey lets just focus on cats instead of those.
not to mention in many ares outside urban centres cats are pretty low down on the food-chain and are as much prey as predator so the main reason to keep your cat inside is so it doesn't become somethings meal
Cats do, too, unfortunately.
us destroying birb habitat and their food sources are far more an issue then cats but hey lets just focus on cats instead of those.
not to mention in many ares outside urban centres cats are pretty low down on the food-chain and are as much prey as predator so the main reason to keep your cat inside is so it doesn't become somethings meal
As we push back the date of first contact between humans and wolves that theory becomes more plausible.
We are chock full of adaptations to time and place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_(raccoon)
Not really. Depends on the cat.
There's less variation in how cats vocalise with one another.
Vaccinations, neutering, checkups in the first 18 months ran $900 in vet bills. That's $1800 for two kittens.
It's true: pets are expensive, particularly pet health care, at least in part because (as with human medicine, but perhaps more absurdly) we've allowed professional organizations to strangle supply for vets, both explicitly by limiting the number of schools/class sizes, and implicitly, by putting onerous requirements on getting into those schools and/or getting certified. I was interested in a second career in veterinary medicine, but learned that there's exactly one veterinary college in the entirety of Western Canada, located in the (lovely, but) cold and remote prairie city of Saskatoon, which accepts a total of something like 80 students per year. Absurd.
In this case the article contents imply that the answer to the titular question is "kinda" or "at least to some extent".
It does happen, and not out of malice. Source: father in law died over the summer, "Garfield" (sigh) was rescued after 3 weeks when FIL was discovered, coroner report mentioned "evidence of post mortem scavenging".
"Garfield" (sigh) is to all appearances just a well adjusted cat, if a bit of a whiner.
[1] https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
When the article talks about the purr, is in addition to that. It even literally starts that section saying "And it’s not just the meow.".
As for the purr, they don;t refer to the "satisfaction purr" cats do when you pet then (or sometimes the agitated purr they have when they're stressed), that you knee-jerk assumed it does. The article links to the relevant research where they describe those "solicitation purrs" and the audio analysis they did on them:
"Here we report how domestic cats make subtle use of one of their most characteristic vocalisations — purring — to solicit food from their human hosts, apparently exploiting sensory biases that humans have for providing care. When humans were played purrs recorded while cats were actively seeking food at equal amplitude to purrs recorded in non-solicitation contexts, even individuals with no experience of owning cats judged the ‘solicitation’ purrs to be more urgent and less pleasant. Embedded within the naturally low-pitched purr, we found a high frequency voiced component, reminiscent of a cry or meow, that was crucial in determining urgency and pleasantness ratings. Moreover, when we re-synthesised solicitation purrs to remove only the voiced component, paired presentations revealed that these purrs were perceived as being significantly less urgent."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...
Before today, the only sort of "purr" I'd ever heard anyone refer to is a "satisfaction purr". What your quotation describes as a "solicitation purr" is what I reckon most people would call a "meow" or maybe a "yell". One of those cases where colloquial v. scientific uses of a word diverge rather severely, I guess.
Again, no. They refer to a different kind of purr that cats do when asking for something, distinct from a meow. A purr that most people might not even have noticed as it occurs next to (and between) meows.
And this special purr also has an embedded higher frequency component similar to a meow, as they explain, that they had to amplify and do some signal processing to hear properly.
It's funny how people are not willing to read the study (or read carefully), but would rather assume that scientists (and even worse: scientists studying cats) don't know what a meow and a purr is, and just use the terms incorrectly!
Note that this appears that I have raised a bobcat, I have not. but I have heard stories from them who have.
Your cat will cohabitate with you with no social interaction at all if that's how little effort you put into it. If you want a relationship with your cat, you have to spend time with it and learn to speak cat.