have lots to say It will come as no surprise to cat lovers that our feline companions have a way of communicating with us which, even if falls short of actually being a language, is very successful in manipulating us so that the cat gets what it wants. Nicholas Nicastro, a Cornell University researcher, thinks the vocalizations domesticated cats make in the presence of humans are a learned behavior, the result of an evolutionary process begun five to 10 thousand years ago when Egyptians first took cats into their homes. Nicastro is careful not to call the way cats talk to humans ‘language.’ Instead, he says, the various vocalizations “show that some very effective cat-to-human communications is going on. Cats have become very skilled at managing humans to get what they want -- basically food, shelter and a little human affection.” To conduct his study, Nicastro recorded 100 different vocalizations from 12 cats. He played back the recorded cat calls to 26 human volunteers and asked them to rate each sound for pleasantness and appeal on a scale of one to seven. He then played the same 100 sounds to a second set of volunteers and asked them to rate how urgent and demanding the sounds were. The sounds rated as more urgent were longer and more energetic, along the lines of “Mee-O-O-O-0-0-W!” Sounds rated as more pleasant and less demanding tended to be shorter, with the energy spread evenly through from beginning to end, like “MWW-ow.” The first call “is the kind we hear at 7 a.m. when we walk into the kitchen and the cat wants to be fed,” Nicastro explains. “The cat isn’t forming sentences and saying, specifically, ‘take a can of food out of the cupboard, run the can opener and fill my bowl immediately,’ but we get the message from the quality of the vocalization and the context in which it is heard.” A pleasant or appealing sound might be heard from a cat wanting to be stroked, or from a cat in a shelter awaiting a rescue by a soft hearted human. Nicastro says, “In that context, it would not be to a cat’s advantage to sound too demanding. The pleasant-sounding cats are the ones most likely to be adopted, while the demanding ones risk being left behind.” Nicastro’s study examines the evolutionary process of “artificial selection.” He says, “I was interested in learning how humans have shaped cat vocal behavior by artificial selection, and how cats have evolved to exploit pre-existing human perceptual tendencies. “Seven thousand years ago, when we think the ancestors of our domesticated cats began wandering into Egyptian granaries and offering to trade rodent-control services for shelter, it was probably the pleasant-sounding cats that were selected and accepted into human society.” Curious about vocalization in the wild ancestors of the house cat, Nicastro visited South Africa’s National Zoo in Pretoria and recorded African wild cats. Their calls were neither pleasant nor appealing, he reports. “Those cats sounded permanently angry. If they were looking for affection, they weren’t expressing themselves very well. The first individuals to be accepted for domestication must have been exceptional, but of course that’s the point from which things start to evolve.” “Cats are not little people,” he observes, “and they’re not using true language because, among other reasons, cats do not know the meaning of their own meows. Humans (or at least well-trained cat people) can assign meaning to sounds with various acoustical qualities because, through long association with cats, we have learned how they sound in different behavioral contexts.” “Cats are domesticated animals that have learned what levers to push, what sounds to make to manage our emotions,” Nicastro says. “And when we respond, we too, are domesticated animals.” |
