Understanding your cat’s meow
<p>Do you understand what your cat says to you?</p>
<p>You probably think you do. And you probably realise that a cat "talks" with its whole body - the ear angle, the back arch, the slow blink, the knead. You can't grasp a cat's intentions without knowing what it's doing with its body.</p>
<p>Scientists have delved into feline body language. They've found, among other things, that "Blinking is like a kitty kiss."</p>
<p>But cats have voice language too. That vocabulary of meows, trills, chitters and wails that can be mysterious but that clearly isn't random.</p>
<p>Well, scientists are looking into that too. A team of Swedish researchers led by Susanne Schotz has begun studying how voice, intonation and speaking style - both human and feline - influence the way the two species communicate with each other.</p>
<p>The Guardian put together a video on some of the common cat sounds and what Schotz says they mean. For example, the "trill-miaow" that is a friendly greeting; the purring that means "I pose no threat".</p>
<p><img width="500" height="333" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/21602/shutterstock_149489063_500x333.jpg" alt="cat meow"/></p>
<p>Which all seems elementary, but Schotz plans to dig deep into how cats vary their intonation in certain contexts, and how humans interpret those sounds. The result will be a "prosodic typology of cat vocalisations" that'll be presented on a science website.</p>
<p>But the scientists will also study how cats interpret the sounds, styles and patterns of human speech.</p>
<p>The aim of this project is humane, not trivial. It may lead to a better quality of life for cats and other pets.</p>
<p>"Understanding the vocal strategies used by humans and cats in human-cat communication will have profound implications for our understanding of how we communicate with our pets in general, and has the potential to improve the relation between animals and humans within several fields, including animal therapy, veterinary medicine, and animal sheltering."</p>
<p>I wonder if this study will help us know whether there's a universal cat-to-human language - a set of sounds that mean the same thing no matter who the person is and who the cat is. Perhaps we'll have a deeper understanding of the meow, a sound that adult cats use only with people and not with other cats.</p>
<p>As I understand it, some scientists so far think that cats shape their meows to what works for them - what gains a human's attention, gets it fed and meets the other needs that humans fulfil for them. The sound itself is an adaptation of a kitten's alerting cry to its mother.</p>
<p>So in that respect, when you talk to your cat and when your cat meows at you, you're both using a rich private language (or dialect or accent) that you've invented between yourselves. But does that language share characteristics with the way other human-cat pairs communicate? Perhaps we'll know in time.</p>
<p>The more we understand them, the better we'll be able to treat them.</p>
<p>Do you have a cat? Is it well behaved? And what do you generally do when it meows?</p>
<p>Please let us know in the comments below. </p>
<p><em>Written by Nick Barnett. First appeared on <a href="http://Stuff.co.nz" target="_blank"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Stuff.co.nz</span></strong></a>.</em></p>
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