Cats make a variety of sounds to communicate with people and animals around them. Meow, directed primarily at humansis a call for attention (or food), while hissing or growling in cats or other animals indicates stress and hostility. But what about the noise of quiet chatter? Cats Sometimes made into prey?
“It’s very difficult to say exactly what’s going on, but it doesn’t seem to be communicating with us or with other animals,” the cat behaviorist said. Mikel Delgado He told Live Science. The independence of cats makes them particularly difficult to study in the laboratory, so there are no current studies directly investigating this behavior. However, cat owners and researchers have come up with a number of possible explanations for this adorable chatter.
“One hypothesis is that it’s frustrating behavior,” Delgado said. “They can see the prey, but there is a barrier between them.” Much like the way people growl or growl when upset, these unusual vocalizations could simply be an expression of certain feline emotions. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be a negative experience,” Delgado said. “It could just be excitement.”
However, there is no scientific evidence for this theory, and designing an experiment to test the hypothesis will not be easy. “First you have to know under what circumstances they are talking and what they are doing it for,” Delgado said. “But obviously showing the emotional response of cats will be more complex, and you may have to include some physiological measures of stress, such as stress hormones.”
Another idea is that cats open their mouths to enhance their sense of smell. He explained that perhaps “they are trying, by opening and closing their mouths, to get air into where they have what is called the vomeronasal organ or Jacobson’s organ.” Jonathan Lososan evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and author of “The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savannah to Your Couch(Vikings, 2023). Located in the roof of the mouth, this sensory organ acts as a second nose and enables cats to smell chemicals that are different from those detected by the nose alone.
By directing airflow toward this organ, chattering could help cats obtain more sensory information about their environment — but again, designing a study to effectively test this hypothesis would be very difficult.
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One possible explanation for cat chatter has more scientific support: imitation. “Some researchers have noticed Margai (Leopardus weidia small, spotted wild cat from South and Central America, made a call when it was trying to hunt a group of small monkeys. “They claimed that the sound was similar to the sounds the monkeys themselves make” and that local indigenous people said that predators often made sounds like those of their prey To attract her.
Cat chatter bears some resemblance to the chirping of small birds, a typical prey of domestic cats (Felice’s cats) – So cats can use this noise to attract prey.
But apart from this single observation in the footnotes, there are no other reports of mimicking behavior in wild cat species, and for the weasel, this lack of information about the wider cat family represents a real barrier to studying this behavior in domestic cats.
“Most kittens have not been well studied, and we don’t know much about them, including… The ancestor of the domestic cat is the North African wild cat“The key to understanding domestic cats is to have a better understanding of wild cats so we can know whether their behaviors are inherited from their ancestors or have arisen since domestication.”
Nowadays, the reason why cats chatter remains a mystery, but Delgado suggested that cat owners themselves can provide vital information to help uncover the cause. “We need to understand what animals (or toys) and cats are talking about and whether this is something they do outside and inside the home as well,” Delgado said. Survey of cat owners [about] “What do they notice and whether their cat chatter will be interesting.”
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