How cats control their humans

Never underestimate a cat. Researchers in Britain have analyzed a special “meow” many cats use when they want something right now: Food, toys, an open door. It’s called a “solicitation purr” and combines a high-frequency cry within an otherwise pleasant purr. Insistent meowing might be ignored as annoying, but by embedding the high-frequency sound in a purr, cats can convey a subtle sense of urgency.

According to Dr. Karen McComb, the lead author of the study, “Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom.”

The experiment was difficult to design, since cats won’t exhibit this behavior on demand. Cat owners learned to record the sounds their cats made when asking for food. Normal purring in a non-solicitation context was also recorded. Test subjects, who listened to the recordings, included individuals who had never owned cats. When asked to evaluate what they heard, the ‘solicitation’ purrs were consistently identified as more urgent and less pleasant.

Innate releasing mechanisms: Smiling children, crying babies, soliciting cats

The solicitation purr appears to take advantage of how humans respond to their own offspring. Over the course of human evolution, natural selection has made us especially attentive to certain sounds, actions, and appearances that stimulate us to respond. These are called innate releasing mechanisms, and most of them have to do with survival and reproduction.

When babies cry, there’s a distressing urgency to the sound that’s difficult to ignore. It’s in the interests of the child that we can’t ignore crying. Smiling is also an innate releasing mechanism. We can’t resist smiling back. Smiling helps bond the parent to the child, and so it also helps insure that the child survives.

The solicitation purr uses the urgency of a cry to stimulate us into action. Very clever of those cats to figure this out. They pretty much have us wrapped around their paws. According to Dr. McComb: “If you ask people who own cats what they do when they get up, they say they feed their cats. Even before they have a cup of coffee. Cats are very good at getting their own way.” Personally, I start the beans grinding and the water boiling before I feed my two cats, but they do get to eat before I get to drink.

Cats and their humans

Here are a few comments left in response to this story:

Dogs have owners, cats have staff!
The dog says, “You feed me – You must be a god.”
Your cat says, “You feed me – I must be a god.”
‘Dogs think that they are Human, Cats think that Humans are Cats.’
My goal in life is to be the kind of person my cat thinks he is.

I can definitely identify with that last one. What about you?