Can Cats Talk?

Douglas Nelson, a professor of bio-acoustics at Ohio State University reminds us that cats have evolved different calls to communicate with each other. The communications with humans are modifications of the noises they use among each other.

As well as recording pet cats, Nicastro went to a zoo in Pretoria, South Africa to record the calls of the wild desert cats from which modern domestic cats evolved. These are still being analyzed and have not been tested on humans, but his preliminary findings reveal very different vocalizations. The wild cats have cries which are harsher and less musical-sounding than domestic cats or, as other people have commented, "like cats on steroids".

Strangely, it does not appear to have occurred to Nicastro to record the cries of feral cats - cats which are domestic cats in all but their habits. If feral cats have the same range of meows as their fully domestic counterparts then cat language probably evolved for inter-cat situations and is merely modified for the cat-human situation.

My own experience with rescue cats leads me to conclude that Nicastro would do well to analyze inter-cat communication (particularly that between mother and kitten) for its pleasantness and urgency - and compare their use of body language in cat/cat and cat/human situations - before jumping to any co-evolutionary conclusions!