This is the shameless way your cat controls you

Okay, maybe you're not so surprised by the statement that your cat is controlling you, but exactly what it is controlling you with may still surprise you.

A study has shown that this manipulative signal is particularly annoying for the owners, prompting them to take immediate action. Seriously, if they had a thumb, we’d be in big trouble! Here’s how the cat controls you.

The cat controls you in a tricky way.

Karen McComb got the idea for the study from her experience with her own cat, who consistently woke her up in the morning with a very insistent vocalisation. After talking to other cat owners, she learned that some of their pets used a similar type of call. As a scientist who studies mammalian vocal communication, she decided to investigate manipulative meowing.

“Invitational purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats kicked out of the bedroom,” explains Karen McComb from the University of Sussex to Live Science. Cats lead their owners with a peculiar purr embedded in a meow, which is actually similar to a high-pitched cry. It’s annoying enough not to be ignored, but not as annoying as when the cat howls at the top of its lungs. This is a trick that cats mostly use when they want to fill their tummies.

If you immediately think of babies’ cry, you are not far off the mark. Previous research has shown similarities between this form of cat meowing and infant crying. According to Karen McComb, this purr, which culminates in a cry, is an unscrupulous exploitation of humans’ sensitivity to the sound of crying, which we associate primarily with feeding offspring. Another sneaky trick is that purring mixed with meowing breaks the harmony of the sound, making it harder to tolerate and get used to, which means it succeeds every time they try.

Even those who have never had a cat can take a hint

Setting up the experiments was not easy. While the cats purred and talked around their owners, they refused to behave in the same way in front of strangers. So McComb and her team taught cat owners how to record the sounds their pets make when they are craving food and when they are expressing some other desire or comment. In total, the team collected recordings of 10 different cats.

The researchers then played back these sounds to 50 people, not all of whom had cats. The results showed that even people who have never had a cat noticed the urgency in the purring embedded into meowing. When the team re-synthesized the recorded vocalizations to remove the embedded crying, but left everything else unchanged, test subjects described these sounds as significantly less urgent.

“We believe that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate things if they are effective in eliciting a response from humans,” explains the researcher. She added that not all cats do this trick. It seems to develop most often in tabbies who have a closer relationship with their owners. In other words, when they try to say something, a higher percentage of the time it will trigger some kind of response.