Purring is a love language no human can speak
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Watching our cats interact with our baby when we brought him home was a beautiful thing. The dogs were very curious and would lay beside his crib each night but the cats would actually try to help us.
They would alert us whenever the baby cried or became fussy. Now that he’s 3 years old, the cats follow him around everywhere and they will come upstairs to the master bedroom to tell us when he wakes during the night and each morning. They’ll meow at us until we go downstairs. Of course we have monitors and motion sensors and such but it’s cute watching the cats communicate.
It’s the complete opposite of what I learned as a child watching “Lady and the Tramp.”
This is it. It makes me so sad seeing online people claiming cats are vengeful, aggressive, selfish animals. Cats have a huge variety of personality and so, yes, some of them are vengeful, aggressive and/or selfish. However, once an average cat trusts you there is a very special kind of bond between you guys that I only experienced with a long term human partner. Cats are amazing, amazing creatures. Obviously I don't know what's going inside my cat's brain, whether he actually experiences what we label "love", but his behavior is oftentimes consistent with it. Every morning I wake up my cat next to me and I feel so lucky to have experienced a cat's love in my lifetime. I'm so thankful to our neolithic ancestors to have domesticated and introduced these quirky, lovely little mammals in our lives.
My grandparents’ cat was like this. Very friendly to all people but when left outside would usually have a bird killed within a half hour.
Not disagreeing per se, but every time this comes up on HN or in other public discourse, I ask for sources. Specifically, there is a statement that I see used regularly (including from the Audubon Society) that makes claims on the order of "billions" of birds killed every year by domestic cats.
The question isn't whether cats will hunt a bird or rodent, but to my thinking whether their impact is any greater than say the risk of birds running into windows, etc. Feels a bit like when we blame the cow for burping (IE: doing what it does naturally) as the cause of global warming while we continue to drive around in our carbon-belching cars.
We've had 3 birds hit our windows in the 12 years I've owned this home. To combat that, I made sure all the windows had blinds. It hasn't happened since.
My one neighbor's cat kills more than 3 birds per month in the warm seasons. I haven't been able to combat that unfortunately.
But I did build a dry stack retaining wall that has allowed the chipmunk population to have a bit of refuge. They are slowly growing in numbers. We had scores of them until the neighbors moved in next door. Within months they dwindled to less than a dozen. My wife and I used to love to sit at our breakfast table and watch them scurry around the yard and patio. Our neighbor's cat ruined that for us.
I shouldn't have to spend $5k+ to prevent cats from killing chipmunks, but I'm always willing to do whatever I can to improve something rather than just complaining about it.
We have to keep in mind that this is an article based in google search and bibliography and is just a very raw estimate. Bibliography studies mostly the worse and special cases. There is a risk into taking the worse cases as a sample of the global situation.
Is a guess, much better than having none, but still a guess. Don't overthink it
I can understand the damage inflicted by cats in environments that never had a very efficient bird predator like cats (e.g. New Zealand and other islands). But in North America there's the Bobcat, Lynx, Ocelot, Margay, and Jaguarundi. Even without the domestic cat, birds would still get eaten in sizable numbers by cats. Sure there are a lot more domestic cats out there, but without civilization there would be a lot more wildcats out there eating birds.
Maybe the impact is simply that outside house cats exist in numbers that are not supportable for a normal wild predator due to the fact that house cats have meals provided by humans to sustain them. So house cat numbers don't reach an equilibrium with their prey the way a wild cat could. Either way I suspect that the impact on bird populations by domestic cats is often overstated.
That's exactly it. The density of house cats is orders of magnitude larger than the density of wildcats would be.
> Either way I suspect that the impact on bird populations by domestic cats is often overstated.
Why?
Total 106
--------------------
Bird 3
Red Squirrel 1
Chipmunk 9
Rabbit 11
Vole 59
Deer Mouse 23
You sound way too confident in it's validity unless you've put a camera on the cat and check the full recording every day...
She has numerous 150lb+ dogs and they all defer to the turkey and geese. Even the donkeys don’t go near the turkeys and geese The geese can’t really hurt you, but I’d rather fight a 150lb dog than a 60lb turkey.
I'd have no doubt he could've taken a rabbit especially given the ambush nature of their hunting.
They introduced the cat with a shot of him on what looked like a hill with a ledge and him looking over it, and a town out of focus below in the distance. One moment he was there, next moment he just dropped over the ledge, no jump, just dropped. Cut to the owner talking about his cat.
Next shot, the cat is back on the ledge holding a giant rabbit (or perhaps hare) in its jaws, that was comparable to the size of the cat, if not bigger. It was like watching a big cat kill. I'll never forget it, so striking.
I developed a friendship with our horse, but did not seem to be on friendly terms with the neighbors cat. One time I saw them running across the driveway: the cat first, panicking, the rabbit a meter or two behind chasing it.
I don't know about yours, but my cats would not adjust well.
Which is why it's best to keep them indoors or perhaps have a catio so they can experience the outdoors without impacting the local wildlife. It's also better for the cats as indoor cats tend to live longer.
Our kittens learned to hunt very quickly and would bring animals into the house. Lots of lizards, mice, and birds. We got tired of burying dead animals and vacuuming up feathers. Then one of our cats got into a fight and got bitten. The vets think that the bite must have punctured a vein or artery in their shoulder, which caused a huge hematoma that swelled up their chest. They had severe anemia and almost died from internal bleeding, so they had to give them a blood transfusion. They didn't have any cat blood available, so they used dog blood instead. (Apparently that's quite common!) He's almost fully recovered now, but still has a limp that is slowly getting better. The vet bills ended up being over $6,000. Fortunately we had pet insurance, so we only had to pay $1,300.
So we don't let them outside anymore. We were surprised to see that they don't seem to mind too much. They're not begging to go outside and they still seem perfectly happy. We've put a little bit of grass on an internal balcony, and we might try to build a catio enclosure so they can still have a little area to go outside. Maybe some netting like this: https://catnets.co.nz
EDIT: Cat tax: https://imgur.com/a/umQpcvK
This seems like unfounded speculation. Why would they understand doors but not inside/outside?
In general I do not like pets or children. If you think they are amazing, great! but know others may not share your opinions.
Opinions are fine, if they're informed by actual experience, or at least secondhand experience by trusted parties. But I think most opinions about cats are not that, and it's unfortunate. They do the entire species a disservice.
Also, cats express themselves just as much as dogs if not more. They just do it much differently. I can tell what my cat wants just by the way she meows.
think it's an absurd toxic masculinity "dogs for men cats for women" thing.
Plus, this cat wears her emotions openly - much more so than other cats we've had. When she's happy / excited, her fur puffs up. It's the same fur as when they're angry / scared - the tail poofs and the fur along the spine stands up. We were confused at first when she was a kitten, since it's so different from expected. But we learned that the puffed fur combined with intense purring and even rolling seems to be her way of expressing joy & pleasure. It's also absolutely adorable.
One of my cats would wait by the window when I was at school, and when I stayed up too late at night come to "complain" to me to get me to go to sleep.
Unfortunately, that involves a lot of airflow over my vocal cords on both inhale and exhale, so I can't keep it up for long. And the purr sounds slightly different on inhale versus exhale. And my purr is very fast and loud, compared to how slow and relatively quiet theirs can be.
I do suspect that my mechanism is similar to the one that cats use, because I've noted a similar difference in the sound of their purr on inhale versus exhale. But there are lots of other variables, too.
Unfortunately, our cats are kinda freaked out when I purr, so I don't do it often.
If you want to try you need to imitate first the letter "R" as they do in France, which is roughly done by exhaling while keeping the upper rear part of the tongue in slight contact with the rear of the palate. It comes easy to me as I had this "R" pronunciation until about 17 when I started correcting it (with some of the family disapproving). Now do the same but not using any vocal cords, that is, only breath, then repeat also while inhaling. Keeping the mouth barely open helps a lot to give it its particular sound which with practice can become really close to a real cat purring.
You can learn with a straw and a glass of water so no need to find or purchase a didgeridoo, though they are fun to play.
OK, with the obligatory jingoism out of the way: that's quite interesting. And having heard a long note held for some time, I'm embarrassed not to have realized this on my own.
The purring sound here though comes from too far back to make that work, I can't get air to pass through that part.
It sounds more like a dragon purring than a housecat but close enough.
“I don’t think we have any studies that are like, I sat with a purring cat on my broken leg for 15 minutes a day; I healed more rapidly than someone else,”
That may be true, but I guarantee anyone with a cat has been part of a "purr circle." I was sick about a month ago, and all of my cats knew it before I did and made a point to stay extra close and then to pile on me when I finally did go to bed to rest for the day. When one of our cats was near his end, those last few days they held vigil the same as you or I might around someone in hospice. Is the purring therapeutic? Hard to say, but to the cat it clearly holds ritual.
>Nor can experts say, exactly, what purring means.
This is an odd thing for the article author to write, when they then proceed to demonstrate what any cat owner knows - cats purr for a variety of reasons and the human has to interpret based on the context. They purr when they are happy, they purr when they are scared, they purr when someone is sick, they purr to entice you to give treats. Wouldn't surprise me if the frequency is someday found to be different between purr types or some other nuance that might not be obvious. I've observed that a happy purr is often more sustained than a scarred purr.
You might say that the human version of the language is not “purring complete”.
The missus was down in bed with a freshly out of surgery broken leg. It still hurt so we kept the leg packed in cold packs.
Every time she laid in bed with the cold packs, our feline owner jumped on the bed and laid down near the leg, purring. We naively thought she was helping the leg heal.
Until we finally realized she liked the cold packs! She was licking them for some reason, i think until she stopped feeling her tongue. It was funny to watch her tentatively move said tongue in every direction like she was trying to figure out if she still has it.
Later we experimented with ice cubes, ice cream (needs to be plain vanilla, no other tastes on it) and even snow. Our cat just likes something cold now and then!
I can feel it resonate in my body and it feels like a special gift not everybody gets…the love of a feral feline.
I inherited a male cat, now about 4, with a property. He couldn't follow the previous owner because he mostly lives in the woods and there is none at the new place. He is wonderful and amazing. I send videos and the guy tears up when he gets them. One nick name for him is Garage Lion.
Yesterday I had to invent 'cat sticks.' He likes to sleep curled up in my planters and that kills the sprouts. So all the planters but one -- the designated cat planter -- have random sticks now...
My cats purr when they're emoting. They stress-purr when hungry (or vet trips, etc) and regular-purr when fed. I think it indicates an amount of emotion rather than type.
of course, that meant for a stop at another pub that she's welcome at on the way home, for some more special on-the-bar time.
It was always funny to see how the cat used the dog as pillow. If the dog was sleeping curled up and the cat arrived from one of outside trips, he would punch slowly the dog like arranging the pillow and then lay beside the dog, head on his body.
It was the only cat allowed to come closer to him.
They published their “purr center” work in Journal of Neurophysiology long before a pleasure center was “officially” discovered by James Olds and Peter Milner in the 1950s in studies of rats.
I cannot find the citation in PubMed but I recall the year was circa 1948.
Many times the qualities that we find endearing in pets (for example big eyes) are those that remind us of human babies.
My guess would be that humans (maybe subconsciously) preferred cats that could make purring noises and thus being able to purr conferred a selective advantage to cats.
Of course it's all speculative, but I wouldn't even expect it to be subconscious; if you show me an adorable but silent animal, and another cute animal that can express its affection by making some sort of pleasant sound, I'm going to be more drawn to the one that makes a sound.
Unnatural selection.
I can raise the hypothesis here that, the cat being a small animal, it is also prey and the development of low frequency communication between mother and kittens can be quite beneficial in hostile environments. Of course, I can't claim this to be true.
He replied pointedly "They must be stupid then, they do it like this ...." and he started purring just like a cat.
Of course they only purr for what they want when somebody else can supply it.