Cats also recognise when their owners are talking to them
Cats notice whether you are addressing them specifically. Unlike dogs, however, they only react to their owner's voice - or they simply don't care what strangers say.
Many pet owners talk to their pets regularly. But do they listen? This is well documented for dogs: Not only are they able to learn and distinguish between a large number of commands, but they can even understand the meaning of some words completely independently of the tone of voice their master or mistress uses. But cats can also recognise that their owners are talking to them by their voice - even if they usually react less euphorically. This is suggested by a study by Charlotte de Mouzon from the Université Paris in Nanterre and her team.
Like dogs, animals mainly prick up their ears when they hear speech that is addressed specifically to them: as with small children, many pet owners speak to their pets in a higher pitched voice and often use short, repetitive and particularly clearly enunciated phrases. However, cats only recognise this type of speech when it comes from their owner. In the case of strangers, the animals do not seem to realise that they are meant - or they simply don't care.
Mouzon and her colleagues discovered this in an experiment in which they played recordings of their owners or strangers to 16 domestic cats in their familiar surroundings. In some of the recordings, the speakers addressed the animals specifically - with a higher pitch and familiar phrases such as "Do you want to play?" or "See you then". In other sequences, the people spoke the sentences as if they were having a friendly conversation with an adult human. The pet owners were present in the room during the experiment, but were not allowed to interact with their pets immediately before, during or after the recordings were played. The researchers used several cameras to record the animals' behaviour and analysed it in detail later on.
The results showed that cats paid more attention when their owners spoke to them in cat-friendly language - but not when they were talking to other people or when strangers addressed the animals. If the cats heard their owners talking to them, they stopped what they were doing for a moment or came running towards their owners.
As their study was only carried out on 16 cats, the results had to be confirmed on a larger group, Mouzon and her team write in the specialist journal "Animal Cognition". However, several studies now suggest that cats, which are considered to be stubborn, also have a very special relationship with their owners. As early as 2013, researchers found evidence that cats can recognise their owners by their voice and react more strongly when they are called by their owners. According to another study cats appreciate human contact at least as much as food. And according to a study published in 2019 by Kristyn Vitale, animals may form a similar bond with their favourite human as infants.
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Cover picture: Shutter Stock / Mea Studio / You might often think that cats only hear what they want to hear.
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