Communication is The Best Policy

If animals could speak the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow, but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much. ~ Mark Twain

Every creature living on planet earth has its own unique way of expressing themselves, i.e., to communicate. Communication in a broader sense is the art of delivering messages to each other and vice versa by signals, behavior, body language, gestures, writing and speech. Let’s see the interesting way cats convey their wants and needs to us humans. Domestic cats have their own way of communicating with humans. Research has shown that wild cats in Africa – which later evolved into domestic cats – don’t have this special skill. However, regarding the domestic cat’s ancestor, a recent study said :

The domestic house cat is descended from the Middle Eastern Wild cat, uncovering proof of how and when cats first came to supervise so many homes for humans. The DNA of 979 cats throughout the world were analyzed and found that all feral and domestic cats today have a common ancestor: the Near Eastern Felis silvestris. Cats were first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, an area stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, and then cats were transported around the world by humans. The earliest archaeological evidence for cats and people living together was found in Cyprus, dating to 9,500 years ago.

Domestic cats have a long relationship with humans, traced all the way back to when farmers began growing grain 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Farmers recognized that cats would prey on rodents who ate their crop, and through this situation there developed a mutually beneficial relationship between our two species. You see, cats and people have been communicating pretty well now for 10,000 years.

In 2002, a psychologist from Cornell University, Nicholas Nicastro , compared hundreds of “meow” vocalizations from domestic cats (Felis catus ) to African wild cats (Felis silvetris lybica ) and his research proved that the difference between their vocalizations were in accordance to whether they were trying to communicate with humans. For instance, when cats demand to be fed, they express a different “meow” then when they are in an angry mood. Thus, based on my own experience at being a longtime cat-lover, I can tell their moods not only from their different meows, but also by a wide range of kitty lexicon including their body language and gestures – headbutts, how they wag their tails, et al. – right on down to the different ways they purr. Please see YouTube video below for the hard evidence.

Posted in YouTube by TheCatsPyjaaaamas

The research showed that there are indeed significant differences in the two different types of cats’ abilities to communicate and it all centered on their exposure to humans. The African wild cats were only capable of expressing the unpleasant meow vocal range. They don’t produce the soft swaying meows like domestic cats. Furthermore, cats love to observe and study how we – humans – express our emotions and communicate our feelings to each other and with other creatures. And the clever little devils are taking notes because our cats really know how to push our buttons to get what they want. They have been learning from us all this time. The proof of this statement is available in the YouTube video below.

Posted in YouTube by klaatu42

"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."