Qwhen it comes to communicating with pets, most of us can’t help but talk to them as if they were children. Sharp and sugary tone, short and often interrogative sentences. Dogs like it, and now we find out, cats like it too. It proves it the study of an ethologist, Charlotte de Mouzon, of the University of Paris Nanterre, just published in the journal Animal Cognition. A feline behaviorist, de Mouzon has decided to devote his attention to human-cat communication because it is a very neglected subject, as if cats were indifferent. But is not so.
Talking to cats like children? Why not
As a first step, de Mouzon confirmed what most cat owners already know: that is when we turn to our feline friends we start talking as if we were entertaining a newborn. A habit of de Mouzon herself with her two kittens, Mila and Shere Khan.
But cats, like dogs, really respond more to this baby-talk directed to them? Hence the study, conducted on 16 cats, conducted in the dormitory of the Alfort National Veterinary School, just outside Paris: the room was transformed into a makeshift animal behavior laboratory full of toys, a litter box and places to hide.
The reaction to the baby-talk
The study evaluated the reaction of the furry ones to hearing the pre-recorded voice of the owner or a stranger. Ten out of 16 cats showed little responsiveness when they heard a stranger call their name. On the contrary, when the master’s voice called them, they pricked up their ears, dilated their pupils and began to move around the room. This is enough to prove that cats understand perfectly when “their” human is speaking.
Not only that, cats perfectly distinguish whether a sentence is directed at them or at someone else. In the second part of the experiment, in fact, the cats showed an increase in their reactivity when they heard the master’s words addressed to them versus those addressed to another adult. Conversely, no changes were noticed when it was a stranger who changed the tone to talk to them instead of another person.
Cats understand, and they have learned to respond
It is not surprising, therefore, that the human tone varies according to the person to whom the speech is directed, for example when talking to a child or a dog. Or with a cat. “But no one had ever wondered if the felines understood this,” explains Dr. Charlotte de Mouzon, coordinator of the study. The answer is yes.
But this communication is not a one-way street. In fact, cats also modify the way they “speak” for us. Adults hardly ever meow at any creature other than humans, for example, and their purrs seem to have evolved a high-frequency component that evokes the cries of babies, just to better attract our attention.
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