Cats have staff, it's a scientific fact! Updated
Posted by Celia Walter | 14 Jul, 2009Manipulative meow: Cats learn to vocalize a particular sound to train their human companions.
Although perhaps not as jolting as an alarm clock, a cat’s “soliciting
purr” can still pry its owner from sleep. And, when sufficiently
annoying, the sound may actually coerce them from bed to fill a food
bowl.
This particular meow mix—an embedding of her cat’s high-frequency
natural cry within a more pleasant, low-frequency purr—often awakens Karen McComb, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex in the U.K. and lead author of a paper about that sound published today in Current Biology.
“Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt
meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom,” McComb
said in a statement...[More] From The Scientific American.
Updates
Cat Call Coerces Can Opening [podcast]
A study in the journal Current Biology finds that some cat purrs include a high-frequency plaintive component that gets people to do cats' bidding. Karen Hopkin reports.
exact transcript of this podcast:Anyone who’s ever had a cat knows how demanding they can be. Let me out, let me in, give me food, give me different food. The list goes on. But how do these clever kitties convince us to do their bidding? A study in the July 14 issue of Current Biology suggests it’s all in how they ask...[More]From The Scientific American