The face that launched a thousand trips -- to the food bowl. Researcher say the have uncovered a technique cats use to train humans to reach for the Tender Vittles.
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Cats mix a cry and a purr to score a meal
By Pete Spotts | 07.13.09
House-cat behavior doesn’t exactly draw the big research bucks. Sometimes it takes an observant scientist watching his or her “I’ve got your number” pet to ask the question: What’s that feline’s secret for pushing my buttons? In this case, the “feed me” button.
Enter Karen McComb, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex in Britain. She and colleagues in Britain and the US have found that when cats are angling for a meal, they tend to blend purring and crying in a way that prompts us humans to grab the cat-food can, can opener and bowl to silence the sound.
This blend, which she and her colleagues dub “solicitation purring,” is easier on the human ear than outright meowing, “which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom,” Dr. McComb explains.
You can read a summary of the formal paper at Current Biology’s site. You can read a plain-English version here.
How did McComb and her colleagues zero in on this particular question?
Well, she’s been studying animal communication for years. And, she explains, she gets that kind of wake-up call from her cat. Similar tales emerged as she swapped pet stories with other cat owners.
So she and her team found some cat-owning volunteers, taught them to use sound recorders, then had them record their pets’ purrs.
The team gathered up 50 volunteers and subjected them to each type of purr –normal and “solicitation.” The team replayed both types at the same volume. The volunteers “consistently selected the solicitation purr as the more urgent,” the scientists report. It didn’t matter whether the volunteers were cat owners or not.
The team then built a spectrum of each type of purr by identifying the range of pitches, or frequencies, the purrs contained and how loud each one was compared with its neighbors. In other words, how loud was the “do,” compared with the “re” and “mi?”
How low can you go?
They found that normal purring, which cats generate by activating muscles that make up their vocal cords, has a strong low-frequency component at around 27 cycles per second, or 27 Hertz (Hz). That’s close to the bottom of the range of human hearing.
Mixed in, however, was another pitch, which averaged around 380 Hz — within the range of the cry of a healthy human baby. It was formed by the cats moving air through their vocal cords, rather than by muscle activation alone. But this component was pretty weak.
During the solicitation purr, however, this higher-pitched component became far more pronounced.
To be sure, all cats do not purr equally. This “feed me” tool seems to crop up most frequently with cats owned by singles, rather than those who live in homes with lots of people. Too many folks for the cat to effectively train, perhaps.
While the “feed me” purr certainly lacks the urgency of a crying baby, the team concludes that it contains just enough of the humanly familiar to make the well-trained (by the cat) cat owner take notice.
Update on July 16, 2009:
To find out what the solicitation purrs sound like and how they compare with standard purrs, you can find samples here.
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2. Nikola | 07.15.09
@Nancy: so, are you measuring the harmonics of your cat’s meows, that you can make a blanket statement like that? This study says that depending on what the cat wants, the vocalization is different — and furthermore, that it can train its human if necessary. If your cat didn’t need to train you, terrific. But that doesn’t constitute a refutation of the hypothesis.
This finding would also explain why people have noticed cats purring when they’re hurt or injured — it’s to ask for help.
3. David | 07.17.09
You might find this blog “Please can I have some more?” http://cabiblog.typepad.com/hand_picked/2009/07/please-can-i-have-some-more.html of interest. It’s based on a study published in CAB Reviews, which suggests pets may be able to negotiate with their owners over what, when and how much they are fed. It seems that there are similarities with the way babies manipulate their caregivers over food to ensure attention
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1. Nancy Raabe | 07.14.09
I think all this is nonsense. My cat came to me daily at around 5:00PM because that’s the time he usually got fed. He sat by his bowl quietly looking at me. If he didn’t catch my attention in a timely manner, then he gave a little cry/meow.
And there were many times each day that he came to me, or meowed at me (to say hello) when he didn’t expect or ask for any food. And every night when he came in his door, he meowed and came up to us to give us a cuddle and then promptly went into the bedroom and got on his bed and went to sleep. No kidding.
I think people who do this type of research either don’t have cats, or don’t have very good communication skills with the cats they do have.