Beware the purring cat – Telegraph Blogs

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Pete Wedderburn


Beware the purring cat

You may have seen the news story yesterday, about cats using a specific type of purr to manipulate humans. Researchers found that cats deliberately used the combination of a contented purr with an interjected annoying whine to get what they want from their owners. The study was done by the Centre for Mammal Vocal Communication Research at the University of Sussex. The scientists there look into all sorts of interesting aspects of animal vocalization, including different types of dog growls and the roars of red deer.

The latest study analysed how domestic cats make subtle use of one of their most characteristic vocalisations — purring — to solicit food from their human hosts. When humans were played purrs recorded while cats were actively seeking food at equal amplitude to purrs recorded when cats were just purring out of pure contentment, even humans with no experience of owning cats judged the ‘solicitation’ purrs to be more urgent and less pleasant.

When the scientists analysed the acoustics of the “gimme food” purr, they found a high-frequency component, similar to a cry or a meow. When they digitally remastered the purr to remove this high pitched section, humans no longer felt that the sound indicated any urgency.

The conclusion was that the special demanding purr/miaow combination “exploits an inherent mammalian sensitivity to acoustic cues relevant in the context of nurturing offspring.”

I’d put it in a different way, which might not be appropriate for a scientific journal: cats are manipulative beasts that are adept at working out the best way to get the attention of humans. They know that humans like them more when they purr, so they purr to get the initial attention of their owner. They also know that humans are irritated by the meowing noise, and that if they meow often enough, we’ll take whatever action is needed to shut them up. If they just meowed (without purring), we might remove the noise by simply chucking them out the back door. But the clever combination of purr plus meow means that we oscillate between feeling fond of them and feeling irritated, which makes us more inclined to find a way of shutting them up that’s also kind to them (i.e. giving them food.)

Perhaps I’ve humanised cats a little too much in the previous paragraph: I don’t believe that cats “think” about things in a calculating way, even though they may seem to do this. Instead, it’s more that cats are very skilled at associating their vocalizations with the results that are achieved. Over years, they learn that the purr-meow is most effective, so that’s why it’s used so often.

I learned about a cat’s ability to learn in this way when I owned a cat that discovered that I liked him so much that he didn’t need to bother about the purring part of communicating. He went straight for the full-on meow, and I fed him every time, so he continued to use it whenever he was hungry. After years of tolerating this, I decided that I couldn’t stand his yowling meows any more, so I re-trained him. When he was hungry, I ignored his meows completely. When he stopped meowing, and instead quietly pressed his head against my shins, I fed him at once. After a few weeks, the meows stopped completely. He had learned that a quiet head-press was all that he needed to do to be fed.

Just as cats can manipulate us, so we can manipulate them in return. The question still remains: who is in charge, anyway?

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