Can Cats Talk?

One way Nicastro attempted to prove his theory was by analyzing a range of domestic cat vocalizations, playing these back to humans and then screening people's reactions to each type of sound. He did the same using the calls of wild cats in order to compare domestic cat and wild cat "speech".

He recorded more than 100 different meows from 12 domestic cats (2 of them his own), soliciting various sounds from the cats by placing them in different situations (with their owners' help since cats rarely co-operate with strangers). These situations included delaying feeding time, before feeding them, putting them in empty rooms with the recorder, brushing them beyond the animals' patience for brushing and simply recording the contented meows of cats in a good mood.

Nicastro played the recordings to two sets of people. The first group of 26 people was asked to rate each meow in terms of how pleasant each sounded. The second group of 28 people rated the sounds in terms of urgency. He compared people's ratings with acoustical analysis of the meows and found a clear pattern.

"Pleasant" meows were shorter in duration, with higher frequencies and tended to descend in pitch (change from high to low notes). "Urgent" meows were longer in duration, with lower frequencies and ascended in pitch (began on low notes and escalated to higher ones). Rarely was a meow classed as both "pleasant" and "urgent" at once. The highly urgent calls tended to be the least pleasant-sounding while the highly pleasant ones were rated less urgent.

Nicastro suggests that cats may therefore have developed different kinds of calls to "hook into human perception tendencies" and alert us of their mood and needs. He points out the animals have certainly had time to adjust for people since their domestication in Egypt over 5,000 years ago [Note: cats were domesticated simultaneously or earlier in Pakistan]. With their shorter life spans than people, cats have had many more generations to evolve ways of manipulating their owners through their calls.

This theory is flawed because in order to pass on the meow-manipulation skills, those cats more adept at manipulating humans would breed and those less adept would fail to breed. The proliferation of feral cats around the world shows that cats can co-exist with humans very well without manipulating people through their "speech".

Does the ability to communicate with humans provide a clear survival advantage so that good communicators/manipulators survive longer and produce more offspring than poor communicators? Probably not since it is only relatively recently that cats have become house-pets rather than utilitarian animals (rodent controllers). Other researchers admit that it is possible that cats may have co-evolved with humans to better communicate with people, they caution it's easy to jump to conclusions.