In news that should come as no surprise to anyone, it turns out that cats are pretty devious when it comes to getting humans to feed them. The latest research shows that cats have two kinds of purr: there’s the normal happy kind that we all know and love, and then there’s “solicitation purring,” a surprisingly annoying kind used in the morning to get us off our backsides and out to the food bowl:
“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.”
….McComb got the idea for the study from her experience with her own cat, who would consistently wake her up in the mornings with a very insistent purr. After speaking with other cat owners, she learned that some of their cats also made the same type of call. As a scientist who studies vocal communication in mammals, she decided to investigate the manipulative meow.
Domino has recently taken up this behavior too, though it’s not clear why. Around five or six in the morning she suddenly gets all perky and wants everyone to pay attention to her. But the food bowl already has food in it, and that’s not what she seems to be interested in anyway. She just wants attention. There’s obviously something devious going on here, but I’m not sure what.
Anyway. On to catblogging. We recently acquired a new rocking chair, and it instantly became the new bestest thing in the world. Domino doesn’t rock much, but she loves the chair. On the right, Inkblot is watching studiously as Domino crosses his field of vision. You can’t be too careful around these parts.
