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MEOW SOUNDS

Who's in control in your home ...you or your cat? Meow Sounds, the subject of a new study published in the July 14 issue of the journal Current Biology says it's your cat.

Apparently, a type of Meow Sounds is the thing that "controls" you. This urgent-sounding, high-pitched meow, also described as a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry, is difficult to ignore and sufficiently annoying as to spur the cat's human into action.

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Almost every cat owner I meet thinks that their cat is happy when he purrs. While that is often true, cats also purr when they're frightened, sick, and now, according to this research, when they want to be fed. "The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response," said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. "Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom."

Previous research has shown similarities between Cat cries, in prior research, have been shown to have similarities to human infant cries. This suggests that the Meow Sounds, purr-cries, may have their effect on humans due to our sensitivity to cries associated with nurturing offspring. Also, including the cry within the purr could make the sound "less harmonic and thus more difficult to habituate to," McComb surmised.

The idea for the study came from McComb's own experiences with her cat. As a scientist who studies vocal communication in mammals, she decided to investigate the manipulative meow.McComb and her team collected recordings from cat owners of their cats so that the sounds would be those emitted in their natural settig.

The result was that humans, even those who had never lived with a cat before, judged the food-seeking purrs - the purrs with an embedded, high-pitched cry - as more urgent and less pleasant than those made in other contexts. When the embedded cries were removed from the recorded purrs, the human subjects' urgency ratings for those calls decreased significantly. McComb said she thinks this cry occurs at a low level in cats' normal purring, "but we think that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans." In fact, not all cats use this form of purring at all, she said, noting that it seems to most often develop in cats that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners rather than those living in large households, where their purrs might be overlooked.

Findings appear in the July 14 issue of the journal Current Biology.

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