Over 10,000 years of cat domestication learned to meow to get exactly what they want from their human servants. Now researchers in Turkey have found that cats greet men much louder than women – and this could be another way they manipulate us into getting the attention they deserve.
The new study reveals “cats' ability to classify related individuals and modulate their responses,” said study co-author. Kerman tooPrincipal Investigator of the Animal Behavior and Human-Animal Interaction Research Group at Bilkent University in Turkey. “This shows that cats are not automata and have cognitive abilities that allow them to live adaptively around humans,” he told Live Science via email.
“Both the public imagination and the scientific community have for a time viewed cats as loners with little need for social connection,” Kerman said. However, “cats are more social than previously thought. They do not interact with people solely for food. They actively seek out social contacts and form bonds with their caregivers.”
Greetings are a key part of communication as they help strengthen bonds between indoor cats (Cat) and their people, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Nov. 14 in the journal. Ethology.
To learn more about how cats greet people, researchers equipped 40 cat owners with cameras. They were asked to videotape the first 100 seconds of their interaction with the cat after returning home. Participants were asked to behave as usual so that they could capture typical interactions. The researchers then analyzed the footage to assess whether certain behaviors were associated and whether different demographic variables influenced the cats' behavior.
Nine people were excluded from the study for various reasons, but videos of the remaining 31 participants showed that the cats were much more vocal to men than to women when their humans first entered them. “No other demographic factor had a significant effect on the frequency or duration of greetings,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers then took into account various factors such as the animals' sex, breed status and the number of cats in the home, but found that the sex of the individual had the only significant effect on the cats' vocalizations.
The researchers speculate that this may be because women tend to be more active in their interactions with their cats and are better at interpreting their cats' wishes. On the other hand, men may need a lot more prompting before they pay enough attention to their cats, the researchers in the study suggested.
The team also suggests that cultural factors may have influenced their findings. Previous studies shows that people in different cultures interact with cats differently – and that this also influences how cats interact with people. In this case, the participants were in Turkey, and perhaps men in Turkey are less likely to chat with their cats, the team writes. “However, this interpretation remains speculative and requires further investigation in future studies,” the team wrote.
The team also found that the meows and other vocalizations did not fit into a specific behavior pattern—that is, these vocalizations were not a sign of a specific emotional state or need.
The team acknowledged that the study had several limitations, including a small sample size and participants from a single region. The researchers also noted that the study did not take into account other potentially important factors, such as how hungry the cats were when their humans returned, the number of other people in the house, or the length of time the animals were alone. Previous studies suggested that cats respond differently to people—for example, by purring and stretching more—when they are separated for longer periods of time, so the results do not necessarily show that cats always meow more at men.
“One important next step is to replicate the results in different cultural contexts. This will help us understand how generalizable the results are,” Kerman said.
Dennis Turner The director of the Institute of Applied Ethology and Animal Psychology in Switzerland, who was not involved in the study, said he was impressed by the team's results.
“I liked the authors' speculations about the reason for this finding, and I suspect that men were either less attentive to cat vocalizations on other occasions or responded differently (more or less strongly, with a different vocal frequency) to greeting vocalizations than women,” he told Live Science in an email.
“Much of my team's research [h]For example, women talk to cats more and are more likely to stoop down to the cats' level to interact with them, he noted.
However, cats likely do not have a preference for men or women, Turner added. Instead, he agreed with the researchers' view that meowing more frequently toward males is a sign of cats' social flexibility.
