Have you ever wondered what your cat is actually saying when it meows? In this episode, we sit down with Jonathan Losos, Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, to explore the fascinating science behind feline communication.
Transcript:
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Joining me now is Dr. Jonathan Losos. He’s the author of The Cat’s Meow, and he’s also a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Losos, it’s so great to see you. Thanks for joining us this morning.
Jonathan Losos, Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis
Delighted to be here, Jeff.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
And this is Posy. So, Posy, say hello to the audience. She’s a two-year-old kitten.
And behind you is Nelson.
Jonathan Losos, Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis
This is Nelson. He’s nine years old, and he’s a good boy sometimes.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
He’s a good boy. Well, Posy, she’s got tortitude. Well, thanks for joining us, Dr. Losos. And I’m going to see how long Posy sits here. I don’t know. She’s a little, she’s got tortitude.
I guess I love you, Posy. Here she goes. Okay.
Anyway, we’re going to talk about The Cat’s Meow, which is the subject of your book. It’s also the subject of a lot of the research you do. And this is a fun story for me.
I think it’s a fun one for the audience. But let’s start with the origination of the meow, because I think a lot of people don’t know that this is something that has been developed over many, many generations of cats.
Jonathan Losos, Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis
Well, so when I first got into studying cats and writing a book on cats, I went into that, well, let me step back a step. Almost everyone who lives with a cat knows that the cat meows to you, that it’s trying to communicate. And so I went into this project thinking that, well, that’s how cats interact with each other.
And that by meowing at us, they’re welcoming us to the cat network. But it turns out that that’s not true because cats don’t generally meow to each other to communicate. They hiss, they snarl, they make other noises, but they don’t meow, except mothers and their kittens.
But once they grow up, they stop doing that. And so the fact that they meow to us is a trick that they picked up during the domestication process as a way of communicating with us.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I mean, I didn’t know that. And being a cat, a newer cat owner, I’ve had cats for about 10 or 12 years, never had them before, had gerbils and hamsters. Thanks, mom and dad.
I would love you very much. But in all seriousness, I picked up on that some level of communication, but there’s a difference, I guess, in how they communicate and the different types of meows they have. So not all meows are the same.
Jonathan Losos, Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis
Absolutely. And again, people who live with cats know that they make different meows in different contexts. And clearly they’re trying to tell us different things by the way they meow.
But the question is, is there a cat language that we just need to decipher? And there was actually a researcher about 20 years ago now who decided to investigate that. And what he did was he did a project where he went to people’s houses and met their cats, and then got those cats to meow in several different situations.
One was the cat was being stroked very nicely, very pleasant situation. Another was the cat was stroked backwards, so annoyed. The third situation was you put a cat in a room and close the door and the cat wanted to get out.
And lastly, the cat was put in a novel place it had never seen before, specifically the researcher’s car. And then in each of those contexts, he recorded meows from each cat. And so he had some number of 20 some cats, each of them meowing in four different situations.
And so his idea was that if there is a cat language, that they should meow the same, each cat that was being petted nicely would meow in one way, and when they were upset another way, and so on. And so then he analyzed the data. And first thing was clear, just listening to the meows, there was no consistency in context.
The meows that they made were different, even in the same situation from cat to cat. But he tested the idea by getting volunteers to listen to the cats, the recordings of the cats. They put a headphone on, and the listeners said, which context is it?
Is it being stroked nicely, backwards? Is it locked in a room, et cetera? People had no idea.
They were no better than guessing. And so that indicates that there is no universal cat language, that they use a particular meow for a particular situation. But then another researcher added one more step to the experiment.
She added a fifth… No, I’m sorry. When the researcher…
The researcher added one more thing to the experiment. She added one more person listening to the meows, and that was the person who lived with the cat. And when they played the cats’ recordings back to that person, that person was very good at saying, oh, Chester is hungry now, or Oliver wants to get out of the room.
And so it appears that there’s a private language that cats and their people somehow negotiate that particular meows mean different things. That language varies from one cat and person to the next, but somehow they develop this private language. And how that happens, we really don’t know.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Well, I want to go back to something you said, and that is… I want to break it all down, but something in particular, how does the cat learn to meow? Because you said that the mother cat may meow with its kitten, but how does it know to meow to me, or to meow to you, or to meow to somebody else in the household?
How does it instinctively know that?
Jonathan Losos, Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis
That is a great idea. It’s a great question. So kittens make a very…
the kitten version of a meow is a mew, kind of mew, and the mother will meow back. And that’s just evolved over millennia. That’s how kittens and mothers, as they’re developing kittens, have that.
What has happened is that they have evolved to use that same communication system to retain it into adulthood and direct it towards humans. And presumably, the way that happened was that when the cats were first being domesticated somewhere in the Middle East, those cats who started doing that got more food, more pets, more security. And so they had more kittens, and individuals with those traits proliferated, and so it became more common.
So it’s an example of evolution. We don’t think about evolution and domesticated animals, but evolution is part of the process. And so they evolved that trait, presumably because it was good for the cats, that they sort of manipulated us in a way.
They found what we liked, and they went with it.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Well, I mean, anybody who’s a cat owner, you’re certainly a cat owner with Nelson, knows that cats do their own thing. They don’t come when you call. They are creatures, very unique and very independent creatures.
A thought just occurred to me. I know we’re talking about domestic cats, but does the same hold true for, you know, if I go out in the wild and I run into a leopard, or not that I’m going to run into a leopard, or like a lion, I go to the zoo and a lion. I know sometimes, doctor, when I blink, you know, like that, and my cat will blink back, but I’ve gone to a zoo, and actually the lion has blinked back at me.
I don’t know if I’m reading too much into that, but, you know, are they, in a way, using the meow, or is it just the roar, and they’re like, yeah, I’m going to eat you, regardless.
Jonathan Losos, Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis
That is a great question, and lots of different ideas are running through my head right now, so let me say a couple of things. Number one is that there are actually 45 or so species of cats, wild cats, and most people don’t know that. They know lions, and tigers, and leopards, and so on, but there are lots of little cats, and no one’s ever heard of the cod cod, or the bay cat, or the Jeffrey’s cat, but lots of them in South America, Africa, and Asia.
All of the small cats meow, but the big cats don’t, because they have a different throat structure that allows them to roar, but not to meow, so that is one difference between big cats and little cats, but all the little cats meow, but we don’t know why they do it. They don’t communicate with each other, as far as we know. Another thought that comes to mind is, I’ve talked to zookeepers, and this gets back to your observation about the big cats blinking, which most people know that that one way to be friendly to cat is to look at and go, and if it does, they’ll do it back to you, if it’s a friendly gesture, and I didn’t know that big cats do that, but I’m not surprised, and the reason is that if you ask zookeepers about big cats, they will say, if you can look at your cat and know why it’s doing something, or why it’s behaving as it is, you can look at a big cat and figure out what’s going on in its head, to some extent, because all cats share many similarities. A cat is a cat in many respects, no matter whether it’s your house cat or a lion, but having said that, there is one big difference, and that is most cats live a pretty solitary life. Other than mothers raising their cubs, they go their own way.
The big difference in the wild is lions, which live in prides, for which they’re famous for, which are composed of related females, a mother, her daughters, their daughters, and so on. The males, when they grow up, they leave, but the females stay, so they’re all related, and they’re very friendly to each other. They groom each other, they lie next to each other, they play with each other, they will nurse each other’s cubs, and so they’re very social, which is unusual for cats.
House cats are like that. When you have a bunch of cats living in one place, as often happens when people are feeding unknown cats, they develop into social groups very similar to the prides of lions. They’ll be related females, they’ll be very friendly to each other, nasty to non-related ones, and so house cats and lions are the two cats that that are the exceptions in being very social animals.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Let me ask you, this is not really part of your research, but it just occurred to me. I was telling you in the virtual grooming room how I was kind of new to cats, and they really are perfect pets, and I was just thinking, for maybe older people, maybe if you don’t have, maybe you’re living alone, how good of a pet is it to have a cat? Because many people are now aging in place, they’re living alone, maybe they live in a living community.
It would seem to me, just on what I know, the basics of what I know, that you just have to clean the litter box, feed it a little bit, but basically they can live independently, and they might be a good pet for our elderly Americans.
Jonathan Losos, Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis
Absolutely, cats can make great pets, and I’ve had cats almost all my life, and I’m a big promoter of them. Having said that, cats differ one from the next. The cats have personalities just like we do, and it turns out most animals have personalities, and a lot of a cat’s personality depends on how it’s raised.
That kittens have what’s called a window of socialization from about two weeks to nine weeks that will have a critical impact on how they will respond to humans throughout their lives. If during that phase cats interact with people a lot, and in positive ways, they’re petted, they’re treated well, they could turn out to be very good, loving cats. On the other hand, a kitten, say an unknown cat living in the streets, if it doesn’t interact with people, it will never, very rarely, will they become really friendly cats.
It’s just it gets ingrained into them, and so that is one reason that there’s a lot of variation. The other reason is that at least in in pedigreed cats of different breeds, there is variation in behavior from one breed to the next, and some are more lovey-dovey, and others are more rambunctious.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, they are so unique, but they’re fun animals. I do have another question, and I, forgive me, we’ll have to bring it back, but I, you know, I’m enjoying the conversation, but I’m kind of running close to the time. Let me ask you about your research, and, you know, it just occurred to me that, you know, you mentioned the recording of the cat’s meow and playing it for the different subjects in the study.
Does artificial intelligence play a role? Could we ever get to a point where AI can listen, because AI can hear what we say, and then come up with something? Do you think those large language models could be applied to the research you and others are doing to dissect the meaning of cat, at least on an individual basis?
Jonathan Losos, Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis
People are beginning to explore that, not just in cats, but in dogs and whales, for example, and there’s been so far just a little bit of research on cats, and it’s early days, but I told you before that when people listen to the meows in different contexts, they couldn’t tell what, you know, what context it was from the meow. Well, somebody used AI, and they claimed that there was a slight tell in those meows that the AI could pick out this little part says that the cat is being stroked backwards and doesn’t like it, or is in a room. So, there’s, there is absolutely possibilities that we will learn things that we just haven’t been able to detect using large language models and all the capacities of artificial intelligence.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah, it’s amazing. I mean, we’ve come so far through the evolutionary process. I think it just, you know, adds to it.
Dr. Lau says we’re going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for your great research. Thanks for showing us Nelson.
Look, we look forward to having you back on the program again very soon, sir.
Jonathan Losos, Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis
Well, Jeff, this has been great fun. Always happy to talk cats, and thanks so much.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Thank you.
