Studies show most of us are pretty bad at interpreting our cats’ moods. A research team in Australia wants to change that.
Cats are constantly telling us how they feel, but many of us aren’t listening.
We’re not talking about chirping, trilling and meowing, although those are some of the ways our cats try to communicate with us.
While they might seem protective of their own thoughts and feelings, cats are actually transparent, and they can’t lie.* Their tails, ears, whiskers, facial expressions and body language all broadcast a cat’s mood.
The question is, are we picking up that broadcast?
In The Conversation, the University of Adelaide’s Julia Henning introduces us to a quiz she designed to answer that question, and invites us to take it.
The goal: to correctly assess each cat’s mood. What I liked most was that we’re asked to evaluate videos — clear, well-lit high resolution clips — instead of the low resolution stills that are often used for quizzes like this.
Sir Talks-a-lot
Henning has been studying the human-cat communication issue because when we misread cats, there’s a good chance we’re stressing them out. Henning and her team published the results of a study in September in which 368 participants from Australia were asked to evaluate a series of clips human-feline interaction.
It turns out they didn’t do so well at reading the signs that a cat is agitated, stressed or doesn’t want to play.
“For videos of cats who weren’t playing and were showing subtle negative cues (such as sudden tension in the body or avoiding touch), participants only recognised the negative cues about as well as chance (48.7%),” the authors of the study wrote.
Even when study participants correctly read a cat’s ears, tail, whiskers and body language, some of them indicated they’d do things that would unknowingly make a cat more agitated and stressed. A classic example is trying to pet a cat’s belly and misinterpreting their derpy way of trying to block you as a playful gesture.
Did you know? Approximately 96% of Buddy’s communication is related to yums.
In the paper, which was published in Frontiers in Ethology, Henning and her colleagues lay out the case for making sure we — the people who take care of cats — are sensitive to what our little buddies are feeling.
It’s not just about strengthening the bond, although that’s an important part. It’s about reducing stress and miscommunication, and increasing quality of life.
Cats are incredibly sensitive to our actions and moods because we are the most important living beings in their lives. We feed and house them, and we’re their pals. If we’re constantly subjecting them to play they don’t like or overstimulating them, they get stressed, and stressed cats can become depressed, sick or resentful cats.
If we want to make sure our buddies live their best lives, we have to understand what they’re trying to tell us.
(*) Except when it comes to food. When food is involved, these innocent, cute little furry creatures become master manipulators and can convince anyone they’re starving.
Note: The first version of this story linked to the study page twice when the first link should have pointed to the quiz. It’s fixed now, and email subscribers can follow the link through this version of the story. Apologies for the error.
Goodall spent the better part of seven decades with the chimpanzees of Tanzania. Her discoveries were so profound, they forced the scientific community to reevaluate what separates humanity from other animals.
As I’m sure most of you have heard, Jane Goodall passed away Wednesday of natural causes. She was 91.
Goodall’s work was revolutionary and her career was extraordinary. It’s difficult to imagine now, but when Goodall first pitched camp in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park in July of 1960, the scientific community knew virtually nothing about great apes.
Goodall wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms. Being female and photogenic were the first two strikes against her in the eyes of the establishment.
She was self-taught, didn’t have a degree (she later earned a doctorate at Cambridge), and perhaps her biggest “sins” involved empathy and an attitude more buttoned-up scientists saw as anthropomorphizing the animals.
Goodall with a Gombe chimpanzee. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Goodall gave the chimps names (a no-no at the time among scientists), carefully observed and recorded their family trees, worked out the obtuse — to human eyes– social hierarchy of primate troops, and witnessed behavior that no one had ever seen before.
She saw friendship, love and loyalty among the chimpanzees, witnessed a bitter war between the Gombe troop and a splinter group, followed families over generations, and saw one chimp die of a broken heart after his mother passed away. (I recommend Goodall’s 1990 book, Through A Window: Thirty Years With The Chimpanzees of Gombe, and the 2002 follow-up, My Life With Chimpanzees, for anyone who wants to read more.)
Her first major contribution, in October of 1960, not only fundamentally challenged our assumptions about animals, it forced us to change the way we regard our own species.
Goodall, observing the chimpanzees from a distance despite the rain that day, watched as a male she named David Graybeard repeatedly dipped blades of grass into the Earth. Curious, Goodall approached the site after Graybeard left, grabbed a few blades of grass and imitated what she’d seen the chimp doing.
She was astonished when she pulled the grass out and the strands were covered in termites. David Graybeard had been eating. He was using a tool to eat!
Goodall at Gombe in the early 1970s. The primatologist secured unprecedented access to the chimpanzees by gaining their trust. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The discovery was huge because scientists believed tool use was, at the time, limited to mankind. We build and use tools, animals don’t, the thinking went.
When Goodall reported her findings to her mentor, anthropologist Louis Leakey, his prompt response indicated the gravity of her discovery: “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
Goodall never stopped working with the chimpanzees of Gombe, and today her formerly humble camp has become a permanent compound where researchers — all inspired by Goodall’s story — continue to study our genetic relatives.
But in her later years, Goodall became known for her activism just as much as her work as a scientist. She traveled constantly, engaging audiences on the subjects of animal conservation, respect for nature and understanding our place in the natural order. It’s a job that has become more necessary than ever as relentless human expansion, habitat fragmentation and human behavior push thousands of species toward extinction.
Credit: The Jane Goodall Institute
We lost Frans de Waal, the famous primatologist, in 2024. Now we’ve lost Goodall, and Sir David Attenborough is less than six months shy of his 100th birthday. We’re going to need people to pick up where they left off, and the job is much more difficult than it looks, requiring expertise, charisma and the ability to connect with audiences who know little about the subject matter.
But that’s a problem for another time. For now, let’s remember Jane and appreciate all she’s done over the span of an incredible life and career.
Positive contact with our furry friends releases happy chemicals for both human servant and feline master, improving their bond.
Happy Cater, uh, unday!
We’ve got no immature cat humor for you today, but I thought PITB readers might be interested in this essay from The Conversation, which despite its ominous title actually goes into some detail about research showing the positive effects of bonding with a cat.
Affection between you and your feline friend results in a burst of oxytocin — the happy brain chemical — for both of you.
But crucially (and here’s where I feel validated for constantly preaching this), your cat enjoys the benefit only if the little one is securely attached and is not forced into interaction.
I’ve said it so many times, I feel like a broken record, especially because the web is saturated with articles that ask “How Can I Make My Cat Like/Love Me?“
And the answer, of course, is that you can’t.
That’s part of what makes cats so awesome. We have to earn their trust and affection, and a major part of that process is respecting our cats’ feelings. That means we let them come to us, we stop petting them when they’ve had enough, and we don’t prevent them from leaving when they decide they want to lay on the couch or the floor instead of our laps.
Credir: TIVASEE/Pexels
Cats grant us benefits beyond oxytocin boosts, of course, and the linked article goes into that as well. It’s well worth a read, even if you’re an old pro at cat whispering.
President Buddy: Not Funny!
It’s obvious I model President Buddy’s behavior after a certain someone in addition to dialing his own traits up to 11, but in the wake of recent news, a story I’d written no longer feels funny.
Not because it was offensive, but because satirizing current events just feels inappropriate with all that’s been going on, from our extreme polarization and political violence, to the sad state of global affairs.
At the same time, I spent quite a bit of time making another denomination of Cat Dollars, and since there’s no longer any satirical story for it, I figured I’d share it here.
President Buddy sure does like seeing his portrait everywhere. This time I skipped the powdered wig and gave him a more modern appearance:
Meowster Money and Meowster Delicious are the treasurer and secretary of yums, respectively. A thousand cat bucks is a lot of cans! (Or snacks.)
In the meantime I’ve been working on some designs I hope to turn into t-shirts and possibly other things like prints. They range from a regal-looking lion to a jaguar roaring in the night with a retrofuturistic feel. Watch this space for more details in the near future!
Scientists have uncovered the elusive mechanisms behind coat color expression, opening the door to a new question: is fur pigment connected to personality?
When Professor Hiroyuki Sasaki retired, he wasn’t done with science. He just wanted to use it to better understand his cats.
The Japanese geneticist raised more than $73,000 from Japanese and international cat lovers and put together a team, including partners from the US. Then he began the hard work of scrutinizing feline DNA to find out why some cats are orange, and why most all-orange cats are male while virtually all calico and tortoiseshell cats, whose coats have splotches of orange, are female.
It turns out there’s no genetic instruction telling the fur to take on an orange pigment — it’s the absence of a segment of DNA, which governs pigment production, that does it.
In other words, ginger cats are mutants.
Most fully-orange cats are male because the mutation removes the DNA segment in the X chromosome. As males have X and Y chromosomes, they only need the mutation in the single X chromosome for their coats to express in that shade.
Lots of cat lovers swear that coat color and temperament are connected.
Females have an XX chromosomal arrangement, so they need the mutation in both chromosomes to turn tangerine. If the mutation only shows up in one chromosome, you get patches of the color instead of a consistent coat.
That explains why 80 percent of ginger cats are male, and why only one in 3,000 calicos and tortoiseshells are male. A male cat would need an extra X chromosome, XXY, to be born with a calico or tortoiseshell coat. One of the side effects, however, is sterility.
Scientists estimate only one in a thousand male calicos/tortoiseshells can reproduce and pass their unique mutations on.
It’s not just coat color either. The mutation impacts skin and eye color, which is why a ginger cat might have a pink nose compared to the terracotta shade of a void cat or a silver tabby.
Are orange cats really more friendly and silly?
So how does this relate to temperament, and the many people who attest to a particular personality associated with orange cats? Some people say ginger tabbies are more loyal, affectionate and social than cats of other coat colors, but they’re also more prone to doing boneheaded things.
The stereotypes have picked up steam online, where people often share memes depicting orange felines as earnestly derpy, but they may be on to something — or at least, it can’t be ruled out until we know more.
Ginger cats are not the sharpest claw on the paw, according to popular memes.
Because of the missing piece of genetic code, a specific gene, ARHGAP36, isn’t “expressed.” Like so many genes, scientists don’t fully understand everything ARHGAP36 impacts, or how alterations can lead to unexpected changes elsewhere.
“Many cat owners swear by the idea that different coat colours and patterns are linked with different personalities,” Sasaki told the BBC. “There’s no scientific evidence for this yet, but it’s an intriguing idea and one I’d love to explore further.”
Cats and dogs communicate primarily by scent, touch and body language, but human efforts to understand them have focused exclusively on meows and barks. If we want to truly understand our non-human friends, we need to take an approach that considers the other ways animals “talk” to each other.
A few years ago when MeowTalk made a minor splash in the startup world, I was pretty bullish on its potential to help us understand our cats better.
Sure, the app had an unhelpful habit of attributing improbably loving declarations to Buddy, but I thought it would follow the trajectory of other machine learning models and drastically improve as it accumulated more data.
More users meant the app would record and analyze more meows, chirps and trills, meaning it was just a matter of time before the AI would be able to distinguish between an “I want attention!” meow and a “My bowl is dangerously close to empty!” meow.
Obviously that didn’t happen, and what I personally didn’t take into account back then — and should have, given how obvious it is in retrospect — is that cats don’t just communicate via vocalizations.
In fact, cats don’t normally incorporate vocalizations into communication at all. Pet kitties do it entirely for our benefit because they know we’re generally awful at interpreting body language and we are completely useless when it comes to olfactory information.
It’s actually amazing when you really think about how much of the heavy lifting cats do in our efforts to communicate with each other. They recognize we can’t communicate the way they do naturally, so they try to relate to us on our terms. In return, we meet them less than halfway.
No wonder Buddy sometimes looks frustrated as he meows at me, as if I’m the biggest moron in the world for not understanding the very obvious thing he’s trying to tell me.
“Human, how can you not understand the simple feeling of innerer schweinehund I’m trying to convey here? The cringe is killing me!”
Now the Chinese tech giant Baidu is throwing its hat into the ring after filing a patent in China for an AI system that uses machine learning to decode animal communication and “translate” it to human language.
Machines are designed to process things from a human viewpoint according to human logic, so if Baidu wants to succeed where MeowTalk has not, its engineers will need to take a thoughtful approach with the help of animal behavior experts.
This is a hard problem that encompasses animal cognition, neuroscience, linguistics, biology, biochemistry and even philosophy. If they approach this strictly as a tech challenge, they’ll set themselves up for failure.
Without the information and context clues provided by tails, whiskers, facial expressions, posture, eye dilation, heart rate, pheromones and even fur, an AI system is only getting a fraction of the information cats are trying to convey.
Trying to glean meaning from that is like trying to read a book in which only every fourth or fifth letter is legible. There’s just too much missing information.
Even if we can train machines to analyze sound visual, tactile and olfactory information, it may not be possible to truly translate what our cats are saying to us. We may have to settle for approximations. We’ve only begun to guess at how the world is interpreted differently among human beings thanks to things like qualia and neurodivergence, and the way cats and dogs see the world is undoubtedly more strange to us than the way a neurodivergent person might make sense of reality.
“He grimaced. He had drawn a greedy old character, a tough old male whose mind was full of slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans full of half-spoiled fish. Father Moontree had once said that he burped cod liver oil for weeks after drawing that particular glutton, so strongly had the telepathic image of fish impressed itself upon his mind. Yet the glutton was a glutton for danger as well as for fish. He had killed sixty-three Dragons, more than any other Partner in the service, and was quite literally worth his weight in gold.” – Cordwainer Smith, The Game of Rat and Dragon
An animal’s interpretation of reality may be so psychologically alien that most of its communication may be apples to oranges at best. Which is why I always loved Cordwainer Smith’s description of the feline mind as experienced via a technology that allows humans with special talents to share thoughts with cats in his classic short story, The Game of Rat and Dragon.
In the story, humans are a starfaring civilization and encounter a threat in the void between stars that people don’t have the reaction speed to deal with. Cats, however, are fast and swift enough, and with a neural bridge device, teams of humans paired with cats are able to keep passengers safe on interstellar journeys.
The narrator, who is one of the few people with an affinity for teaming up with felines, hopes he’ll be paired with one of his two favorite cats for his latest mission, but instead he’s assigned to partner with an old glutton of a tomcat whose mind was dominated by “slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans of half-spoiled fish.”
The narrator wryly notes that the last time one of his colleagues was paired with that particular cat, his burps tasted of fish for weeks afterward. But the cat in question, despite being obsessed with fish, is a badass at killing “dragons,” the human nickname for the bizarre entities that attack human ships in space. (The software that allows felines and humans to link thoughts also portrays the “dragons” as rodents in the minds of the cats, stimulating their ancient predatory drive so they’ll attack instantly when they see the enemy.)
We can’t know for sure if Smith’s interpretation of the feline mind is accurate, but another part rang true when he wrote that cat thoughts were all about the moment, filled with sentiments of warmth and affection, while they rapidly lost interest in thoughts about human concerns, dismissing them “as so much rubbish.”
If the mind of a cat is that relatable, we’ll be incredibly lucky. But in reality we’re dealing with animals who evolved in drastically different ecological niches, with different priorities, motivations, and ways of looking at the world — literally and figuratively.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand our furry friends. Research has yielded interesting information about the way animals like whales and elephants communicate, and AI is at its best when it augments human creativity and curiosity instead of trying to replace it.
Even if we don’t end up with a way to glean 1:1 translations, the prospect of improving our understanding of animal minds is tantalizing enough. We just need to make sure we’re listening to everything they’re saying, not just the meows.
Pain In The Bud 