Happy Pets

Indeed, you can tell a lot by looking at a cat’s tail and ears: if its tail is vertical and its ears are pricked, the cat is feeling confident, and if the tip of its erect tail is kinked, it’s offering you a tentative greeting. When a cat turns its back on you and quivers its tail, it’s sending an unreserved, ‘Please acknowledge me’ plea that may well hark back to a kittenhood invitation to its mother to clean its nether regions. If a cat is becoming annoyed, however, it often indicates its frustration by swishing its tail from side to side and drawing back its ears, and if it becomes really irate, it will lash its tail as fast as it can and flatten its ears completely.

The final in the beginner’s guide to feline communication consists of the various sounds that a cat makes. As we have seen, cats that find themselves in situations of potential conflict often resort to issuing warning growls, hisses and explosive spits, signals that are often interspersed with low wails and harsh snarls. If the conflict escalates, a torrent of ear-splitting yowls and caterwauls may be unleashed, as well as the occasional shriek of pain if a sharp claw sinks into soft flesh. Such unfriendly noises signify both aggression and deterrence, the intention being to make the foe think that the cat will prove such a formidable opponent that it would be wiser not to attempt an attack. At night especially, loud, unearthly wails may rend the air — these are the call-and-response yowls initiated by the vocal invitations of females on heat and the toms’ answering ‘mowls’, although because all of the neighbourhood’s toms are likely to have hot-footed it in the female’s direction, some will be the aggressive noises made by a tom facing down a rival.

The conversational sounds that a cat makes are far quieter, as well as more musical, than those that it produces in response to the crises of warfare or sex. A queen communicates with her kittens using a variety of coos, trills and chirrups, all of which quickly become part of a kitten’s vocal repertoire that it retains when it grows into adulthood. Be it to greet, encourage, chivvy, make a request or simply to express how a cat is feeling, these gentle sounds have many purposes, and each cat’s use of them is unique. To the human ear, the cat’s most familiar sound is, of course, the miaow, or mew, a feline word that has entered the vocabulary of many human languages: mau in Egyptian, naoua in Arabic, myaus in India, mio in China, miaou in France and Miau in Germany, to give just a few examples. Interestingly, most cats miaow more at humans than at fellow felines, which has led some researchers to believe that the miaow and its various nuances may be the cat’s attempt to imitate human speech and therefore to initiate a conversation that humans are more likely to understand than the feline language, in which humans are, of course, near-illiterates.

The feline sounds discussed above are all made consciously, unlike purring, which is an involuntary response. Typically made when a cat is feeling relaxed and contented — while being stroked, for instance — the low, rumbling sound that is characteristic of the purr is generally thought to be produced as the air that the cat breathes in and out passes over a pair of vestibular folds (false vocal cords) in the throat, the sound thereby generated being amplified by the vibration of the larynx as its muscles relax and contract. Despite its general association with contentment, a cat may also purr frantically when it finds itself in an uncomfortable plight, a paradoxical response that may be a feline attempt either to reassure or distract itself from its fear of being a situation over which it has no control. (Caspar, for example, often does this when he’s being examined by the vet, who is not his favourite person, despite the vet’s gentle hands and demeanour, when it could also be a interpreted as plea for kindly treatment.)

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
The Cat’s Powers of Communication, body Language and Vocalization except Scent Messages continue…

• The Cat's Powers of Communication, body Language and Vocalization except Scent Messages
• A litter Tray and its Accoutrements
• Give Your Dog a Dog Kennel
• Toilet-training
• Teaching the Cockatiel to Talk
• Pet Luxury Gourmet, Feline Senses
• Little Bird Taming
• Preparations Arrival of New Cat
• Cat Maternity problems part 1
• Cat Maternity problems part 3

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 3:48 am and is filed under Cages, Cat Litter, Cats, Frontline, Kennels, Kittens, Pets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.