Your Cat Invented A Language For You, And ONLY You

Soot has four. One at the back door, one at the fridge, one when I come home, and one at five in the morning that I would describe in court as harassment. For years I filed all four under the same word. Miaowing. Then I spent a fortnight writing down which one came when, and they are not the same sound and they never were. Here is what makes that strange. Two cats who live together barely miaow at each other at all. They sort things out with scent, with posture, with the tail, with who moves first. Kittens miaow at their mother and then mostly stop. The adult miaow survives in one place only, and that place is pointed at us. It is not their language. It is a second language, learned for a foreign audience. In this one we go through the whole repertoire. Why your cat has three or four distinct miaows rather than one: a cat produces a sound, you react, and whatever got the reaction gets repeated, so over years the two of you converge on a small private vocabulary. That is why your cat's demands make sense to you and the neighbour's cat sounds like nonsense. There is no dictionary. The chirp at the window, which nobody has explained — frustration at prey it cannot reach, or an involuntary rehearsal of the killing bite. Both plausible, neither proven. The trill, which is the one you should be flattered by: mothers use it to call kittens to follow, it expects nothing back, and most owners have never once registered that they are being greeted. Then the purr, which does not mean what you think. It happens on the vet's table with a thermometer in, after a car accident, during labour, and in animals that are dying. The better description is not happiness but a state the cat is managing. And in 2009, McComb and colleagues published work in Current Biology on what they called the cry embedded within the purr: in purrs recorded while cats were soliciting food they found a high-frequency component sitting inside the low rumble, close to the cry of a human infant. The ordinary contented purr did not carry it, and listeners — including people who had never owned a cat — rated the solicitation purr as more urgent and less pleasant. The hiss, which is not an attack and never was. It is a request for distance, and the politest version available: a cat that hisses has decided not to use its teeth yet. The bite does not come instead of the hiss. It comes after the hiss has been ignored, usually by a hand that kept going. I'll also tell you what I'm not going to sell you. You will have read that purring heals, that the frequencies knit bone. It comes from a real observation about frequency bands and from lab work on vibration, and it has not been shown to heal anything in a living cat. And if yours is silent — that is a dialect, not a refusal. A cat that gets results by sitting in a doorway and staring never needs the sound, so it quietly disappears. A note on health: a change in voice is a medical sign. Hoarseness, a lost voice, night yowling that never used to happen, or a cat that suddenly becomes far more vocal than it has ever been — thyroid trouble, pain, high blood pressure and age-related confusion all show up this way. That is a call to your vet. I don't diagnose and I never will. How many different sounds does yours actually have? Tell me in the comments, and give me their name while you're at it. I read every single one.