Why do cat's meow.....?

Question

have any studies been done on the subject?

Answer 1

Cats have 4 different meanings for "meow". If you listen carefully, you can hear that each meow is different.

    * I'm hungry!

    * I want to go out!

    * Help!

    * I want attention!

Answer 2

Cats meow and vocalize for the same reasons we talk - as a way to communicate. They can make a number of different sounds and variations of the basic "meow" noise, but there isn't any consistent language or meaning for a particular noise. Vocalization in cats is much higher when they live with people than in the wild. In fact, many feral cats rarely meow by comparison to house cats. The reason is that cats that live with people learn that meows are a way to get what they want - and they also mimic their owners, who are frequently talking either to others or to the cat itself.  

Answer 3

According to Dr. Schwartz, kitty conversation falls into three main groups:

Open-mouth: Many open-mouth sounds are defensive or aggressive, including the growl, hiss, spit, yowl and shriek. The message is clear: Don't mess with me.

Open/closed-mouth: These sounds begin with an open mouth and end with a closed one. They include sexual calls and the meow, which may be short, long or silent. Meows can mean different things, but one�"Where's dinner?"�doesn't require a whole lot of interpretation.

Closed-mouth: These noises are more intimate, including the murmur, purr and chirp, often used in greetings and between a mother and her kittens.

We'll probably never understand all of a cat's vocabulary, but it's the fascinating complexity of it that makes cats so intriguing.

After more than 5,000 years of human-feline cohabitation and enough elaborations on "meow!" to fill a dictionary, cats still haven't mastered language. But a Cornell University evolutionary psychology study ---- analyzing people's reactions to feline vocalizations ---- shows that cats know how to get what they want.

"No matter what we like to believe, cats are probably not using language," says Nicholas Nicastro, a self-described cat person who has documented hundreds of different feline vocalizations in the common house cat (Felis catus ) and its ancestor, the African wild cat (Felis silvestris lybica ). His study, which he will describe June 5, 2002, at the 143rd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, in Pittsburgh, "shows that some very effective cat-to-human communication is going on, "Though they lack language, cats have become very skilled at managing humans to get what they want ---- basically food, shelter and a little human affection."

The communication study began when Nicastro, a graduate student, compiled a sample of 100 different vocalizations from 12 cats. No cats were harmed in the experiment, although a few human eardrums were stretched by what came next: He played back the recorded cat calls to 26 human volunteers and asked them to rate each sound for pleasantness and appeal, on a scale of 1 to 7. Nicastro played the same 100 sounds to a second set of 28 volunteers and asked them to indicate how urgent and demanding the sounds were, also on a 1-to-7 scale. He then analyzed the calls to see which acoustic features tended to go with pleasant or urgent meows.

Nicastro, who is a student in the laboratory of Cornell psychology assistant professor Michael Owren, found a clear negative relationship between pleasantness and urgency, rooted in how the calls sounded. "The sounds rated as more urgent (or less pleasant) were longer,". Nicastro says, "with more energy in the lower frequencies, along the lines of 'Mee-O-O-O-O-O-W!' Whereas, the sounds rated as more pleasant (or less demanding) tended to be shorter, with the energy spread evenly through the high and low frequencies. These sounds started high and went low, like 'MEE-ow.'"

An urgent or demanding call "is the kind we hear at 7 a.m. when we walk into the kitchen and the cat wants to be fed. The cat isn't forming sentences and saying, specifically, 'take a can of food out of the cupboard, run the can opener and fill my bowl immediately,' but we get the message from the quality of the vocalization and the context in which it is heard,"

A pleasant or appealing sound might be heard from a cat at the animal shelter if it hopes to be adopted by a soft-hearted human, Nicastro says. "In that context, it would not be to a cat's advantage to sound too demanding. The pleasant-sounding cats are the ones most likely to be adopted, while the demanding ones risk being left behind."

The Cornell study examined the evolutionary process of "artificial selection," which Charles Darwin pondered on the way to developing his theory of natural selection, Nicastro notes. "I was interested in learning how humans have shaped cat vocal behavior by artificial selection, and how cats have evolved to exploit pre-existing human perceptual tendencies. Seven thousand years ago, when we think the ancestors of our domesticated cats began wandering into Egyptian granaries and offering to trade rodent-control services for shelter, it was probably the pleasant-sounding cats that were selected and accepted into human society."

Curious about vocalization in the wild ancestors of the house cat, Nicastro visited South Africa's National Zoo in Pretoria and recorded African wild cats. Their calls were neither pleasant nor appealing, he reports. "Those cats sounded permanently angry. If they were looking for affection, they weren't expressing themselves very well. The first individuals to be accepted for domestication must have been exceptional, but of course that's the point from which things start to evolve."

Having said that, Nicastro turns off the lights in his Cornell office and heads home, where urgent calls for the can opener await. "They're not little people," he observes, "and they're not using true language because, among other reasons, cats do not know the meaning of their own meows. Humans (or at least well-trained cat people) can assign meaning to sounds with various acoustical qualities because, through long association with cats, we have learned how they sound in different behavioral contexts.

"Cats are domesticated animals that have learned what levers to push, what sounds to make to manage our emotions, "And when we respond, we too are domesticated animals."

Answer 4

The most fascinating about a cat's meeow or mew, miow, meew is that this vocalization is directed only to humans. Cats do not meeow to each other - they may hiss, growl, yowl, spit and caterwaul but never meeow.

Usually, a meeow is an acknowledgment of some sort of a polite request. A cat may meeow when she sees you after you reach home from work, as a form of greeting. Of she may meeow to you when you are preparing her dinner to tell you to hurry up please.

And the most heart warming meeow is called the silent meeow. She may open her mouth to meeow but no sound are emitted - thus silent. It is thought that this silent meeow is their manipulative way to act innocent so you will give it to all their whims and fancy.