CatMeows: A Publicly-Available Dataset of Cat Vocalizations (2020)

Well, with my cat in the childhood the translation was easy. Two meows (probably learned from "mama" = mom) meant that the cat wants attention from my mother. A single long meow meant that the cat wants to walk outside (well, this was specifically trained by meowing at the cat at appropriate times). A short meow meant either food or play, depending on the room where the cat is in.

I don't doubt that dogs are smarter than cats, but dogs are far more social and are motivated to learn by that social connection. Cats can also be trained, but it's a lot more work to keep them motivated.

Cats do communicate a lot, but it's physical and sometimes subtle; eye contact, body rubbing, head butting, contextual waiting, and so on. Our cats very rarely meow unless they haven't been noticed, or, with the Norwegian, when she wants attention and she has a toy in her mouth she wants to play with - she loves playing fetch with toy mice.

Cat IQ depends on the cat. We had an incredibly stupid cat who liked nice but was dumb as a rock, and would mostly sit in the kitchen staring at the far wall and looking a bit dreamy. She didn't really meow at all. Or do much of anything else.

We had a couple of high IQ cats who not only knew how to communicate they were also super-social, and made it very clear to us and to visitors what they did/didn't want.

Now we have a mid-IQ cat who is quite vocal and quite good at communicating, but we have to make more of an effort than with the previous two.

While cats mostly do just meow (as much as you can say a dog mostly just barks)... my cats definitely do have variances to their meow depending on their needs or wants.

When we stayed in an RV while the house was being built, I had to put my fat boy Percy into the shower stall with the doors closed while the dogs ate otherwise he would annoy them (with headbutts) into not wanting to eat. He developed a habit of going into the stall on his own and meowing when he wanted to be fed because we always put him into the shower when food would appear for the dogs.

Even in the new house, he jumps into the tub and meows the same way when he wants to be fed.

He meows a different way when he sits at the gate or at the top of the stairs, as if for permission to interact. If you don't acknowledge him, he won't hop the babygate or come down the stairs. If you do respond, he trills a happy chirp and trots along.

He developed a whine meow where he basically is saying "I need attention now." Most recently he did it because a towel fell into his water bowl and he couldn't drink out of it.

That counts as 'food, water, walk' to me.

Oskar also has various different behaviors associated with meow types for things that get him the response that he wants. But both cats are Sphynxes and they are unusually talky... I doubt I would have gotten as much from other breeds. But they do clearly communicate what they want from you once they find a way to get that to come across.

What I experienced with my cats is they don’t seem to care about learning you, rather they expect you to learn them and their signals.

They have the intelligence to communicate but it’s typically on their terms.

Also here’s an example of a cat learning to speak with language buttons: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pvgfI9P377U

Do you guys not trim their nails? No scratching when they aren't sharp.

I also follow my cat while asking questions! It's almost always food, water, catnip or litter.

Regarding the water: he won't drink chlorinated water. In his previous home, he developed urinary stones because they didn't figure this out. Cue a BS prescription diet sold by "vets". Nope, he just needed fresh, non-chlorinated water.

>For example, if the balcony door is open and cold air is coming in (my cat doesn't like cold), my cat sometimes takes me to first to the fridge and then leads me to the balcony door

That is an extraordinary level of symbolic communication for a cat!

I don't think it's completely random, not some of the time, anyway. That's not to say that it's deliberate, though, either. There's a number of videos in which she'll barely touch or just hover her paw over a button, pause for a while, take it away, and then proceed to push a different button.

Watch the older videos, not the newer ones.

AFIACT, the videos are a kind of progress log for demonstrating the cat's learning in different concepts. The older videos focused on [demonstration of] learning of more "core" concepts ("food", "water", "pets", "outside", etc.); but since these concepts are now fully "taught", the owner seems to feel no more need to film the cat communicating these simpler core messages, except when they form an interesting sequence or larger idea.

Instead, the newer videos focus on learning of more fringe concepts — ideas that "come up" less often — and so progress is slower in these.

(Note that, watching the videos chronologically, the number of buttons the cat has available grows quite a bit over time. I think the owner thinks that the cat now understands the general concept of associating things-to-be-communicated with presses of word-buttons, and so feels that they can now feed them new concepts faster.)