A 23-second clip of a cat growling and yowling has become one of the most-used sound effects over the past three decades. The Guardian traced the clip back to the man who recorded it and got the full story.
We’ve all heard Cheeta the cat yowling, we just don’t know it.
Cheeta was a house cat who belonged to Wylie Stateman, a sound engineer who lives in LA.
In 1988, Stateman recorded an argument between Cheeta, a “remarkably small” half-Siamese void, and her mate, a tomcat named Sylvester.
The 23-second clip made it onto The Premiere Edition, a 20-CD library of sound effects Stateman produced in 1990.
Stateman, called “one of the great recorders of the time” by a colleague, told The Guardian he brought his sound recorder with him everywhere he went for three decades, recording thousands of sounds that have been used in movies for 35 years.
Buddy is also an accomplished sound effects cat.
Cheeta’s yowls are one of his greatest successes. The cranky cat can be heard in Toy Story, Home Alone 3, Les Miserables, Pet Sematary, 101 Dalmations, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Babe, End of Days, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, and many more.
Although it’s difficult to get an exact count, it’s believed Cheeta’s distinct voice can be heard in some 330 films over the years. If you’re interested in learning more, check out The Guardian’s deep dive into the sound effect and its origins.
Buddy the Magnanimous
I went to visit my brother and his family in Washington this past week, leaving Buddy in the care of my mom.
Regular readers will recall that Bud has a bad reputation for trying to maul his cat sitters, which obviously complicates things.
The incorrigible little lunatic.
Sue, his regular sitter, has known Bud since he was a kitten. She’s literally one of the first humans he met, yet that has not stopped him from ambushing and attacking her. Incredibly, she still agrees to care for him in my absence despite his belligerence, though she’ll no longer play with him. She feeds him and gets out ASAP. I can’t blame her.
This time my mom cared for the little stinker. He’s also tried to murder her when she’s watched him on previous occasions, including one incident in which his bites and scratches necessitated a trip to urgent care and a round of antibiotics.
So yeah, the happy news is that he didn’t attack her this time, although she told me every time she came back, he’d be waiting right by the door, and when he saw it wasn’t me, he would sniff derisively before turning and padding away.
They have an uneasy truce, but I’ll take it. You know you have small dreams when you celebrate a trip in which your cat doesn’t try to maul anyone in your absence.
On a tangential note, I had a first phone interview with a wild cat conservation organization this week, and for the first time in a long time, Bud didn’t make a peep.
He’s meowed loudly during other phone interviews, he’s put his butt in front of the camera like it’s his job during video calls, and he won’t shut up at any other time, but the one time when having a cat might benefit me, he decides to be silent. Thanks, Bud. You’re the best.
The Massachusetts law is a significant victory in the quest for a national ban on the cruel procedure, which involves amputating cat toes at the first knuckle
There’s good news today from Massachusetts, which just joined New York and Maryland in banning cat declawing.
The bill, signed Friday by Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, prohibits all declawing surgery except for rare circumstances when it’s medically necessary, like cancer in the nail bed.
Veterinarians who violate the law face fines up to $2,500 and professional discipline if they continue the practice.
Despite its name, declawing is the partial amputation of cat toes, equivalent to cutting off human fingertips at the last knuckle.
Photo credit: Alex Ozerov-Meyer/Pexels
Declawing changes a cat’s gait, causing the animal pain when it walks, and usually leads to early arthritis. It causes cats to stop using their litter boxes, because the act of standing on and shoveling litter becomes painful for them.
Last but not least, it has a profound psychological impact on felines, making them vulnerable by taking away their primary form of defense. Consequently, cats who are declawed are much more likely to bite than those with intact claws.
Most of all, declawing is cruel and inflicts a lifetime of pain on innocent animals, punishing them for doing what cats naturally do.
Aside from New York, Maryland and Massachusetts, a few dozen cities and counties have banned the procedure, ranging from places like St. Louis, Missouri, to Austin, Texas, and eight cities in California, including Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The feline laid waste to entire restaurants and food stalls during his rampage through the city, sending residents running for cover.
NEW YORK — The island of Manhattan was brought to a standstill this week after a massive and menacing wildcat was seen stalking the streets.
The first reports came in Wednesday afternoon after panicked callers told 911 dispatchers a “yuge gray tiger” had barreled into Gray’s Papaya on Broadway and 72nd, gorging itself on the eatery’s famous hot dogs.
Social media posts timestamped an hour later showed clips of the terrifying felid running full speed toward an Atomic Wings, where it tore through the entire inventory of chicken and hamburgers.
“Holy [bleep], that’s not a tiger, that’s a kaiju!” one TikTok user said in a video uploaded to the popular social media site.
The TikToker’s footage showed the gargantuan cat emerge from the Atomic Wings, hot sauce dribbling down the fur on its chin, and belch with such force that car alarms began shrieking in a three-block radius.
“We’re receiving reports that the colossal cat’s name is Buddy, and he escaped earlier Wednesday from an apartment where some lunatic was illegally keeping him as a pet,” Fox News’ Brett Baier told viewers. “A law enforcement source says the man has been taken into custody as a person of interest, and will likely face charges of harboring a dangerous wild animal.”
Detectives were seen escorting the cuffed man, who screamed incoherently that Buddy is allegedly “just a house cat.”
“He invented a laser that increased his size 70 fold!” the deranged man shouted as news cameras followed the detectives from the squad car. “He’s a wimp! Rustle a paper bag! Bring out a vacuum! You’ll see!”
New York Mayor Eric Adams dismissed the man’s claims as “the rantings of a clearly insane person,” and assured residents that the so-called Buddinese tiger would be “swiftly caught and dealt with by the brave men and women of the NYPD.”
“You’ll be able to make your dinner reservations, folks,” Adams said as an interpreter translated his words into American sign language behind him. “In the meantime, keep your doors and windows locked, and don’t cook anything pungent. This is a hungry beast who has eaten his way through dozens of restaurants.”
Police had set up a trap in midtown, with more than 900 pounds of roast turkey and baseball-size Temptations to lure the rampaging tiger.
The ill-fated turkey trap.
But the plan went horribly wrong on Thursday evening when the tiger approached.
“This beast is truly gargantuan!” ABC reporter Stephan Kim whispered during a live broadcast. “Each footfall seems to shake the earth. Look! The concrete is cracking and spidering beneath his paws as if it were brittle ice!”
The Buddinese Tiger stopped, sniffed, then launched himself at the pile of turkey, not even registering the tranquilizer darts fired by NYPD snipers stationed on top of nearby buildings until one hit him in the buttock.
The vicious cat roared and looked as if he would take down the building where the offending officer stood until he was distracted by the smell of Peruvian food wafting from a nearby Pio Pio.
“Arroz chaufa!” the tiger yelled, turning his enormous frame and stomping off into the distance.
City leaders admitted they’d underestimated the threat and had officially requested the National Guard, which was being mobilized late Thursday evening.
But an NYPD detective, speaking on condition of anonymity, said authorities were beginning to reconsider the claim that the rampaging animal could be a house cat.
“One of our officers called him a ‘good boy’ in a last, desperate attempt to save his own life when he was cornered by the beast,” the detective said. “To his surprise, the tiger pounced on him, licked his face, then went on his way, repeating ‘I’m a good boy!’ Maybe there’s some truth to this claim about the size-increasing laser.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene of Georgia siezed on the story, posting a message on X claiming credit for “warnin’ ya’ll about these space lasers.”
“One of these lasers has turned a cuddly little house cat into a terrifying tiger,” Greene wrote. “So who’s a conspiracy theorist now?”
Tiger attacks are a real danger in rural India, where the big cats kill people and livestock. To protect the species, the government pulls off a difficult balancing act aimed at minimizing inter-species conflict.
In his memoir, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, legendary tiger hunter (and later staunch conservationist) Jim Corbett described how he and his men arrived to find a ghost town when they tracked a man-eating tiger to a rural village.
Every door was closed and locked, shutters were closed tight, and despite the fact that it was harvest time, not a single person was working the nearby fields.
The people who lived there had good reason to be petrified. The infamous Champawat tigress had killed more than 430 people by that point, including a young woman from the village just a few days earlier. Usually the tigress would vanish from an area after a kill, frustrating locals and hunters by popping up virtually anywhere in a 50-mile radius, but for some reason she stuck around the village and sat on the outskirts at night, keeping the local people awake with her calls.
Corbett’s famed hunt of the “demon of Champawat” happened in 1907, and although it might sound like a problem from the past, it’s current reality for people in parts of India, Nepal and, to a lesser extent, the sparsely populated mountain forests in eastern Russia.
In Garwha and Ranchi, two towns in eastern India about 215km (133 miles) apart, “villagers have stopped using forest routes to reach markets and are reluctant to leave their homes for work,” the Times of India reported on Monday.
That’s because hungry tigers have been on the prowl, demonstrating little fear of people as they help themselves to livestock. Between Jan. 1 and Jan. 6, the tigers killed and ate three cattle and a buffalo.
Tigers require large, contiguous tracks of land measuring in the hundreds of square miles. India and Russia have both set aside massive preserves for the apex predators to increase their numbers in the wild. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
So far they’ve eluded camera traps, but forest rangers say they believe there are two tigers because of the distance between Garwha and Ranchi, which is almost three times the typical tiger range.
In places where big cats live in proximity to humans, especially farmers, the government pays compensation to the owners of livestock killed and eaten by the predators.
There’s also a separate, more controversial compensation program for the families of people killed by tigers. Recent court cases in the country have hinged on the cold calculations of attaching monetary value to human life, and whether families are owed compensation if their relatives knowingly entered tiger preserves.
For India, it’s part of a delicate balancing act between conserving the country’s national animal and one of nature’s most beloved species, and avoiding the ire of people who are impacted by their presence. When big cats prey on livestock, if the government does not address the situation, locals will eventually take matters into their own hands and try to kill the apex predators. That usually doesn’t work out well for either side.
On average, about 60 people are killed each year by tigers in India, according to government statistics. There’s been a sharp increase in victims in recent years, with tigers taking 110 human lives in 2022 and 83 in 2023, although it’s not yet clear why.
As for livestock, a 2018 study by wildlife biologists with the Corbett Foundation documented 8,365 reported instances of big cats killing cattle, buffalo and other animals between 2006 and 2015. That works out to about 830 per year, with tigers responsible for 570 livestock kills on average and leopards responsible for the rest.
To reduce the number of inter-species conflicts, the government of India has relocated thousands of families away from the country’s 27 tiger preserves in addition to compensating farmers for their losses.
A tiger cub on a preserve in India. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
On a tangential note, this is another reason why the persistent claims of big cats stalking the British countryside strain credulity.
To paraphrase wildlife conservationist Egil Droge of the University of Oxford, when big cats live in an area, you know it because the signs are everywhere — massive and unmistakable pug marks (paw prints) on the ground, trees left with deep gauges by males marking their territory, and dung also serving as a territorial marker.
“I’ve worked with large carnivores in Africa since 2007 and it’s obvious if big cats are around. You would regularly come across prints of their paws along roads. The rasping sound of a leopard’s roar can be heard from several kilometres,” Droge wrote in a 2023 post about alleged big cat sightings in the UK.
Last but not least, big cats eat. A lot. A reliable supply of large prey animals is necessary to support even the smallest of breeding populations, and felids of all species are known to go for easy meals — in this case livestock — when the opportunity presents itself.
Still, the idea refuses to die, and there are still regular reports from people who have seen large cats and insist they’re not our domesticated friends.
“So we left the sheep there at the edge of the field and made sure the lady saw us before we buggered off over the fence. Next day, we was in all the papers! A right laugh that was, mate.”
Cats aren’t equipped to use human language and there’s nothing wrong with that. Our feline friends already go to great lengths to communicate in ways we can comprehend. The least we can do is meet them halfway.
I would love it if my cat could talk to me.
Sure, he never shuts up, but if he could speak English I’d know why he meows at the same spot at the same time every morning, or what he wants on the occasions when he’s still meowing insistently at me despite the fact that his bowls are full, his box is clean, he’s had his play time, and every possible need and want of his — that I can fathom — has been met.
Most of all, I’d really like to know he understands I’ll be back soon when I go away for a few days, and my (mostly ignored) pleas for him not to attack his long-suffering, way-too-kind sitter.
Alas, Bud cannot speak. No non-human animal has ever demonstrated even basic proficiency in human language. People will point to examples like Koko the Gorilla and Nim Chimpsky, but there’s a reason why funding dried up for that kind of experiment.
It doesn’t work. It never did.
The scientists who end up taking on dual roles as researchers and parents to the animals invariably serve as interpreters, get too close to their subjects and swear that a gorilla pounding shiny buttons for “food tree food submarine” means the ape wants to have a picnic next to the ocean, or “car fly house car star” means she wants to ride a Tesla Roadster to Mars and start a colony with Elon Musk.
Koko, Nim, Chantek and the other apes who were the subjects of decades-long attempts to humanize them — and teach them language in the process — were ultimately not much different than Clever Hans the horse, who was reading subconscious nonverbal cues from his owner and convinced tens of thousands of people that he could do math and understand spoken language.
Hans had scores of experts fooled until the German psychologist Oskar Pfungst figured out how the horse was coming up with the correct answers.
Regardless of which famous example we’re talking about, no animal has ever mastered syntax, and the best that could be said of their proficiency with language, or lack of it, is that they learned they’d get attention and food when they pounded on a talking board or approximated a word in sign language.
Even if non-human primates were able to learn a handful of words by frequently reinforced association with an object, there has never been any evidence that they are actually using the words as language rather than simply understanding “Pushing the button that makes this sound means I get a treat!” (And yes, there is a profound difference. The former reveals the presence of cognitive processes while the latter is a conditioned response.)
Despite decades of intense effort, no animal has ever demonstrated the ability to use human language. At best an animal bangs on a few buttons and people are left to speculate on the intent. Maybe Fluffy likes the way a certain word sounds. Maybe it’s just fun to hammer on buttons the way it’s fun to pop bubble wrap. Most likely, these cats and dogs know that using a talking board is a guaranteed way to get attention, a treat and a head scratch from their caretakers.
Influencers and their talking boards
TikTok, which spawns inane trends with the reliability of an atomic clock, has provided a platform for people who insist their cats and dogs can talk. Using “talking boards” — elaborate set-ups in which words are assigned to their own buttons — they “teach” their cats how to express themselves in English and provide proof in the form of heavily edited, out-of-context clips that require the same sort of creative interpretation pioneered by Penny Patterson, Koko’s caretaker.
Seriously?
I just watched a video in which a woman claims her cat, named after Justin Bieber, was describing an encounter with a coyote by stomping on buttons for “stranger,” “Justin,” “Mike,” and “stranger.”
The woman says she thought Justin was asleep at the time, but now she believes the orange tabby saw the coyote outside and was still stressing about it well into the next day.
While she’s repeating Justin’s “words” back to him, two of her other cats come by and step all over the talking board. I guess whatever they had to say wasn’t important.
Justin’s talking board has 42 buttons, which stresses credulity well beyond the breaking point. More than half of the buttons are used for abstract concepts.
But forget all that for a moment and ask yourself how our own efforts to decode the meow have been going.
Despite our status as intelligent, sapient animals, despite the powerful AI algorithms at our disposal, despite the benefit of being able to digitally record and analyze every utterance, we haven’t come close to a reliable method for interpreting feline vocalizations.
Likewise with dolphins, whale song, corvid calls and the sounds made by other animals at the top of the cognition pyramid.
Mostly, we’re learning we’ve underestimated the complexity of our non-human companions’ inner lives, especially when it comes to the kind of multi-modal communication humans also engage in, but only subconsciously. We say what we want with our mouths, while our eyes, facial expressions and body language say what we’re actually thinking.
Likewise, the meow is an unnatural way for cats to communicate, and it contains only a fraction of the information cats are putting out there. It’s just that we can’t reliably read feline facial expressions, let alone tail, whisker and posture. (Studies have shown most of us, even when we live with cats, don’t get measurably better at this. In fact, we’re often no better than people with limited feline experience, but we think we’re better.)
Putting the burden on our furry friends
If we can’t crack a simple and limited system of vocalizations, aren’t we putting unrealistic expectations on cats? The average person has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, yet somehow we expect cats can latch on to an arbitrary number of them, approximate mastery of syntax that has eluded even our closest cousins, and bridge a cognition gap we haven’t been able to bridge ourselves.
It’s all too much.
I’ve had Buddy since he was eight or nine weeks old, and in more than nine years I still don’t know why he makes this praying motion. We may be best buds, but some things just don’t translate.
There’s a simple truth at the heart of this: Cats did not evolve to speak or parse human language, and that’s perfectly fine.
The little ones already meet us more than halfway because they understand we are hopelessly incompetent at reading tail, whisker or body language, and they understand we communicate with vocalizations.
By forgoing their natural methods of communication in favor of ours, cats are already taking on most of the burden in interspecies communication. Asking them to do more than that, to learn many dozens of words and the rudimentary rules of language, seems like laziness, wishful thinking or insanity on our part. Pretending that certain cats are successful is an exercise in the same kind of cynical opportunism that fuels every other desperate attempt by people trying to turn their pets into influencers. People do it because the reward is money and attention.
Worse, it contributes to the spread of misinformation. TikTok’s talking board videos routinely net millions of views, converting a credulous audience into an army of true believers who are convinced that, with just a little effort, their feline pal can shoot the shit with them.
If people want to construct elaborate talking boards in their homes and pretend their cats are expressing themselves in English, who am I to object? It’s not the smartest use of time, but have at it. What I won’t do is participate in the delusion that felines are a few buttons away from being able conversation partners, nor will I pretend these efforts have any relationship to science.
So to the journalists who keep writing credulous stories about these supposedly talking animals: please familiarize yourself with the example of Clever Hans, and please, I beg you to stop promoting these videos as if they’re anything more than wishful thinking. You are doing your readers a disservice for the sake of a few clicks.
Note: Jackson Galaxy isn’t a fan either, saying he’s “got some serious problems” with the talking board trend. Calling it “problematic,” he points out that cats are not only partially domesticated and the only animal species in history to take that step without human prompting, but humans have never selectively bred cats for specific behaviors or to bring out intelligence traits as we have with canines. (Think of sheep dogs or retrievers, who are the products of thousands of years of breeding for well-defined tasks.) There simply hasn’t been a need to breed cats for behavioral traits since the thing humans traditionally valued most about them — their ability to reliably eradicate rodents and protect human foodstuffs — is innate. No one had to teach cats how to hunt or breed them for the task. It’s only in the last two hundred years or so that certain human societies began breeding cats, and they did so for aesthetic attributes like coat patterns. Galaxy also notes that animals do not express emotions the same way humans do. Like monkeys, who “smile” when they’re terrified, felines express joy, anger and fear with their tails, whiskers, ears and body language. It’s not in their nature to tell us they’re happy or scared by padding up to a contraption and hammering on a button.
Top image of “Justin Bieber” the cat credit Sarah Baker.
Pain In The Bud 