I purr pretty well for a 40 year old man. My cats always nuzzle my neck whenever I start purring. Cats are amazing creatures. We have two dogs and two cats.
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.
>I love cats but some of them absolutely do decimate local bird populations in the local neighborhood when they are left out unsupervised.
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 estimate that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually. Un-owned cats, as opposed to owned pets, cause the majority of this mortality. Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals.
The thing I always wonder is, in habitats where birds would normally have to deal with feline predators, how is the domestic cat worse than that? Any birds in environments that have feline predators would already be adapted to avoidng cats, unlike say, small Australian fauna.
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.
>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.
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.
Last time I looked, which was a while ago, there were over 9 million cats in the UK. I suspect a similar number for the US, proportionally, so I can't see any way that the wildcat population could ever rise that high. Domestication brings safety and an ever increasing population, not just for humans.
The first result on Google for "how many birds are killed by domesticated cats" is a scientific article from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
An article is as good as the data that supports the research.
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
Lower bound but pretty confident in accuracy - Have eyes on all catflap traffic, some accelerometer/position data (a cat collar tracker, not a cat tracker!), and observation thus far supports the conclusion that he stages all kills in his "abattoir" area unfortunately underneath the couch regardless of their eventual disposition - pretty common behavior
The last rabbit we had at home ran around on its own.
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.
Our neighbors had bunnies escaping because they developed a friendship with wild hares. Seems similar when a dog develops a friendship with a coyote and start misbehaving going on the hunts with them.
My cat only very rarely manages to get chipmunks and mice, but he doesn't usually kill them, generally alternating between cuddles and grooming and beating them savagely to make them jump and run. He's scared of birds after being mobbed by robins and crows.
Is he interrupted in his cuddles and beatings? Cats are much like the kind of psychopaths you'll find in the intelligence services, as portrayed in movies. They'll torture their captive, play with them to train themselves (and possibly for fun, who knows?), and it seems your cat likes to play good cop too. At the end, if the captive's heart hasn't already given out, they'll kill it.
Goodness. How big are the rabbits in your area? The ones here are so large that I imagine that A) a cat could not catch them and B) the rabbit would disembowel the cat with its rear feet. I've seen rabbits do impressive things to small dogs and snakes. I wouldn't want one near my cats.
Living on a farm, I've seen some fairly impressive semi feral tom cats. When they're young and they hunt a lot they develop muscle on every inch of their body, once had one who was quite tame, his back muscles felt like a bag of marbles, they were that well developed.
I'd have no doubt he could've taken a rabbit especially given the ambush nature of their hunting.
I watched a documentary many years ago on cats (in the UK). It featured a study looking to measure the number of animals killed by house cats (or just "cats" in British English, strays are incredibly rare, "house cats" are those that never leave the house). One house cat, in Devon if I remember correctly, had the most kills in the study - an order of magnitude above or something like that - and so the cameras paid his owner a visit.
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.
Smaller cats will catch the baby rabbits, but a larger cat has no trouble catching and eating adult rabbits in my experience. The largest thing I've seen a cat catch was a grouse. Turkeys are too large. Weasel like things seem to be too fierce.
They don’t want to catch a turkey. We’ve had turkeys kill medium sized dogs and they’ve put holes in the side of the feed man’s truck with their claws.
My grandfather used to keep a couple of rabbits in the barn to run off the rats! He swore that rabbits naturally hated rats and would fuck them up if they could get near them.
That’s impressive. On my mothers farm, the turkeys run the show followed by the geese. But neither one of them will ever bother the rabbits. It’s interesting watching the hierarchy.
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.
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.
We adopted two kittens late last year, and thought it would be nice to let them outside to run around and explore nature. We used to have an indoor cat that lived in apartments his whole life, and I always felt a bit guilty since he wasn't very happy and would always try to get outside.
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
I think people tend to overestimate the desire of most cats to spend time outdoors, because as humans we ascribe human motivations to cat behaviors. So we see the cat repeatedly try to go through the door, and we think of this as persistent behavior that reflects a high degree of motivation to go "outside". But "outside" is not a concept that a cat really understands. They understand doors well enough, and they might be frustrated and upset by not being allowed to go through them. But, as you mentioned, there's actually a lot more for them to be frustrated, upset, scared, and injured by outside than there is inside.
This behavior always reminds me of book "The World Without Us"[0] in which the author points out that, of all our domesticated animals, cats would definitely survive due to their excellent hunting skills in a world without humans.
—
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us
So why shouldn't felus catus be part of general ecosystem? Species have emerged for any number of reasons, including symbiotic relationship with other species. And sometimes new species hunt birds.
A cat must live the life of a cat, not the life of a doll. And yes, life sometimes is risky, and there is death in life, and there is dirt and half mice. We better learn to deal with it instead to keep running towards an hyperpuritan, hypersensitive society, unable to stand the minimum amount of frustration or to make anybody happy.
To help birds, we plant trees and dense shrubs and wild hedges full of biodiversity and fruits and insects. We build nestboxes. We build ponds and birdbaths. We stop pruning like obsessed. We put seeds in winter. We know that birds and hedgehogs trive in areas full of cats. If they find any minimum refuge, this is unavoidable.
If there are none of that things around, is not cat's fault. Build it. Children need to be exposed to free animals to turn into healthy people.
The dead cats don't bother me as much as the dead birds. Introducing just one cat can completely change an entire ecosystem. Outdoor cats are a threat to global biodiversity.
I know it makes you feel better to allow your cats outdoors but please recognize that it affects the ecosystem on a larger scale.
The danger depends a lot on the area and month. There are more factors involved
Some ecosystems are resilient. Some wipe actively any cat. Some should ban entirely cats while in other places removing cats could in fact harm the birds by the rodent population explosion. It changes also if the bird is migrating or not, if is young or not...
It's my yard. It's not an ecosystem. It's my cat's one job to threaten my yard's biodiversity.
Birds are noisy. At 4:30 in the morning. Anything that wakes me up at 4:30 in the morning is a problem that needs to be dealt with immediately with whatever level of violence is necessary to stop the squawking.
You get all chirpy in my yard, you deal with Mr. Tiddlesworth. Same with the squirrels that get on the roof. Die!
Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson estimates that 30,000 species per year (or three species per hour) are being driven to extinction. Compare this to the natural background rate of one extinction per million species per year, and you can see why scientists refer to it as a crisis unparalleled in human history.[..]
I think my link speaks of a larger scale and humans are the super apex predator.
But in a smaller setting, there is a certain hierarchy of prey and predator. Cats are predator to birds. It is natural. Humans are not predators of soil or eco systems. Synthetic fertilizers are not even part of the natural eco system and are artificially introduced to destabilize the natural order.
I often think of Mao’s sparrows. Human were the destabilizers. Beyond a certain point, excess of vegetation caused more birds and rodents. Their population explosion was artificial because birds migrate and go in search of food sources. The demise of the sparrows was also due to an artificially induced agent, humans.
Think GMO mosquitoes. What could go wrong? Except mosquitoes are food source for amphibians..who are eaten by reptiles..enjoyed by raptors etc.
Humans are not part of this eco system but we have stylised ourself to be the super apex predator. As human population explodes, we are wiping out entire species at a much faster rate and replacing them with more of us. This is when trouble sets in…this is where we are..
We need insects and birds and fish and other mammals to know their place in the food chain and thrive so we can eat the end product as we can’t synthesize food ourselves.
All creatures need good soil, water and sunlight for survival because only plants can synthesize their own energy. None of us can eat soil or water or sunlight or any of the natural resources. It needs to be converted into calories by plant life through the magic of photosynthesis.
So without a balanced eco system, we are all toast. It is like cutting the trunk of a tree while sitting on the topmost branch. We will fall. And the tree dies. A cat eating a bird is doing its part by staying within the confines of the role it is meant to play. Humans disrupt the balance. We are not meant to replace all the small order species beneath us.
Your neighborhood didn't get a cat, you did. Your neighbors shouldn't be expected to take responsibility for limiting the damage your cat does.
The solution is not to make the world fit cats, the solution is for you to take personal responsibility for the animal you decide to host at your house. If you can't keep that animal at your house, then don't get an animal. It's simple.
Nobody would suggest if I buy a hyena that eats dogs that people should start putting their dogs in hyena proof armor so as to accommodate the preferences of the hyena owner and the inclinations of the hyena.
Why shouldn't the answer be don't own an animal that can't live happily while co-existing with the ecosystem around it? And if that's the case and you want a cat anyways, why shouldn't we require people to build/fund infrastructure to offset the effect it will have?
I mean yeah, it's irresponsible to let people go outside, drive cars, play sports, consume media by personal choice, engage in romantic relationships, climb stairs and ladders, drink alcohol etc. Yet we still generally feel the quality of life improvements outweigh the quantity of life decreases.
Consider also that humans confined to an indoor environment have much more environmental enrichment available in books, television, internet, games etc. The only environmental enrichment available to cats indoors are really terrible simulacra of nature (strings, balls, furniture) and many of these are only available when people are available to play.
We're talking about a species that spends 2/3rds of its time napping. I've watched outdoor cats and their behavior (when not hunting, which not all cats do) is very similar to indoor cats. They nap, they wander around, they find another napping spot, and so on. They probably spend less time interacting with humans or other animals than indoor cats do.
I recently got a new kitten and we decided it'll be an indoor cat (though I'm harness training her so she can go out on walks). I've had several cats over the years die because they were allowed outside (one got hit by a car and one I think got locked in my neighbor's crawlspace/basement though we never found her). I personally haven't had many of my outdoor cats bring me birds, but where I live now we have bird feeders and don't want the birds preyed on.
Edit: I forgot about the outdoor cat I had that I left at home when I went off to college. It got run over by my neighbor because it was sleeping under his wheel and he didn't notice.
>Is this an American thing or something? Almost all the cats I've ever known were outdoor cats in the UK.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd never allow my cats outside.
Not for ecological reasons, but because I live in a flat on the fourth (that'd be the third floor in the UK) floor of an apartment building in NYC.
If my cats got out of my apartment, they'd have to go down three flights of stairs and then wait for someone to open two separate doors in order to get out into the street.
Once on the street, there are many hazards for cats, not least of which are automobiles.
Having been to London, I imagine that there's a similar dynamic there as well.
As such, I'd say that it's more about urban/suburban/rural settings than different countries.
Yes, our cats have always been indoors; our next door neighbor's cats have been outdoors. One of them was killed by a coyote and left on our front lawn for my daughter to find.
Police officer's commit domestic violence and adultery at a rate far higher than other non-LEO civilians. Some of us who have experienced it first hand may talk about it in jest to help alleviate the anxiety and other problems it has caused.
My aim wasn't to offend anyone. Well unless you're a cop that commits domestic violence. They should probably be offended.
It was a tactless analogy, but a strong analogy nonetheless.
There were a few things that bothered me in that statement.
"what did you expect to happen" blames the victim.
"Police officer is as likely to engage in domestic violence as a cat is to kill a bird outside" is not a strong analogy. I think almost all young cats would kill birds outside. It's a far cry form "a far higher rate".
As a rhetorical device, it falls flat because it argues for something obvious by comparing it to something obscure. It would work better the other way - if you were on a thread talking about domestic violence and comparing it to cats killing birds.
Men commit violence at a far higher rate than women. But it's still lower than the "what did you expect" threshold.
A quick search can't find anything to validate the claim of police officers committing adultery more than other roles. Ironically tech and entrepreneurs rank highest among men in most polls, along with trade workers
It’s ridiculous the lengths people go to inject their politics into their every post. Also sometimes cats just get out and run away, not everyone is letting them outside. In fact I’d wager that’s almost never the case.
Why does people having different opinion upset you? People claim dogs are also unfavourable. I personally do not like cats but the personality effect is more pronounced among cats because they do not express themselves as much as dogs.
In general I do not like pets or children. If you think they are amazing, great! but know others may not share your opinions.
Not the person you're replying to, but I don't think I'd characterize myself as being "upset", just... disappointed? Annoyed? Most people's opinions of cats as pets are informed by inaccurate, negative stereotypes, while most people's opinions of dogs (even if they don't have one or rarely interact with one) are positively influenced by the "Man's Best Friend" stereotype.
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.
Well, it's not because they have different opinions. It's because to me it feels like one of the greatest things life can offer. Just like most people would consider intimacy with a partner, having children, finding a satisfying career/hobby as great things life offers to us humans, I tend to think having a bond with an animal (cat or dog I suppose, but they're very different kind of bonds) is another thing life has to offer to us. Of course, I don't mean to imply a human is less valid without the love of an animal (or less valid without the love of a partner, child, job etc) but I still do think that some people are missing out on this. This is part that makes me sad. If you truly gave cats a shot and you dislike them, I don't give a shit how you feel about them.
It's cool if you don't like cats but I think the op was pointing out that some people think cats are just vengeful little maniacs. Which some of them are but they have a very wide range of personalities and classifying them all as such is a bit unfair.
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.
You can make the same argument about "love" with cats as with dogs. They're both projections of a human emotion onto a much less intelligent and altruistic creature.
think it's an absurd toxic masculinity "dogs for men cats for women" thing.
Every time our son cries, our cat runs to him - from the time he was a baby to now. We can't decide if it's a maternal instinct to "make sure the baby is ok" or if she just needs to know about everything going on in the house. I like to think it's the former.
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.
I purr to cats as well. I recall visiting some friends who have cats a few years ago and purring to one of them - the cat did a double take and had what seemed to be an expression of surprise on his face - like "a purring human, how can this be?!". Everyone observing noticed his response.
We had inside/outside cats growing up, and they would follow us to school and make it back home on their own. When we were playing in the street or in our backyard, if we hurt ourselves they would go inside to "tell" our parents.
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.
I can't tell you the mechanism by which cats purr. I don't think scientists have figured that out yet. However, I have figured out a mechanism by which I can purr.
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.
I don't think its particularly healthy to be purring, you are most likely causing damage to your vocal chords. The way cats do it are completely different and it causes their whole body to vibrate. You are better off humming to your cats.
I can actually purr very realistically, and my cats appear to be interested when I do, although of course I haven't the slightest idea of what I'd be saying to them:)
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.
Open it up until you’re just barely ‘purring’ on exhale then gently but quickly start to inhale (think of your breath as the bow on a violin). There will be a slight timbre change but cats have that too.
It sounds more like a dragon purring than a housecat but close enough.
I can do what OP was describing on inhale and exhale, and I have a small amount of didgeridoo experience, but I don't think circular breathing works here. Mind you, I'm not GOOD at circular breathing, but my understanding is that it works by using the cheeks to force air through the lips as you are inhaling.
The purring sound here though comes from too far back to make that work, I can't get air to pass through that part.
The sound comes from my throat. Circular breathing involves a continuous exhalation from the mouth forward, but the air in the throat still moves forward and backward, so it doesn't help.
As an australian child I was told is was a special australian thing so please do not puncture my bubble!
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.
My band teacher from middle/junior/high school tried to teach it at different points to any/all that was interested. There was one trumpet player and one sax player that could do it when I was in school.
Practice will improve the result. Same with whistling. I can whistle quite well on the inhale, now. It took me years to get right, simply because we don't make that motion with our face parts very often at all.
This article bothers me, because it feels like it is trying to make this more complicated than necessary.
“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.
Speaking of cats purring on broken legs, i have an anecdote:
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!
Certified ailurophile[0] here. I've found the gentle hum of purring very soothing, almost like having a hot chocolate on a cold day, or chicken soup. It's very comforting, and I'm lead to believe the specific frequency of the hum is in line with nature and The Universe itself. It has the same frequency of the Omm mantra which is apparently the frequency our bodies emit when we're in full health and homeostasis or in a meditative trance.
There is nothing that has made me at peace more than my little feral kitten that is now 17 and Senior but healthy and no pain sits on my chest cavity when I’m laying down, tucks her paws under her chest, then purrs away squinting.
I can feel it resonate in my body and it feels like a special gift not everybody gets…the love of a feral feline.
Purring is one of the minor technological/genetic innovations in Margaret Atwood's pre/post apocalypse Maddaddam trilogy, though not involving cats as we think of them.
I'm on the side of "vocal tic"; the non-purring cats are intentionally trying not to purr, while purring itself is just relaxed or tired breathing. Sort of like vocal fry in humans.
That's definitely consistent with one of my cats! (Not that it's inconsistent with the other; she's just a better example of this). She's basically constantly purring while awake unless she's making some other sound, and a lot of the time the other sounds she makes seems like they're almost unintentional; she chirps loudly when jumping (almost like a grunt of effort, a habit I've seen in plenty of other cats as well), or if she's running towards something with interest (e.g. running over to hop on the bed when she wants to cuddle) in a way that almost makes it seem like she's just exhaling hard and not bothering to put in the effort to avoid making a sound while doing so. Sometimes if a sound out in the hallway of the apartment surprises her, she'll jump off of wherever she's currently laying down (usually my desk or a couch) and let out this low, rumbly growl that I could totally believe is just a fight-or-flight reaction (she always chooses "fight"; if something falls off a table or something and makes a loud sound, she always runs _towards_ it as if she's expecting some sort of threat she has to defend us against). The only sound she makes that I'm fairly positive is intention is when she meows sweetly in a plea for pity, which only happens when I'm bringing her wet food bowl over to her dining spot, when she's in her cat carrier on the way to the vet and wants to be let out, or when I'm holding her still so we can trim her claws. Her meows are so different from her regular "chirping" sound that it's hard not to conclude that they're mostly just a way to try to guilt us rather than an actual sign of distress; she's quite effective at the "mimic a human baby sound to elicit sympathy" trick.
Cats have a several of those signs. Slow blinking, still tail, etc. Seems like it's very important to signal when they're relaxed and secure and when they're not; likely because they're full of claws and teeth.
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...
It might sound odd but I can purr by exhaling while closing my lips and putting my tongue at a certain position. This has interesting outcomes, such as understanding why cats purr! Yes because I also do it from time to time and somehow I can imagine the situations one might have that need to purr. That's why I was bit puzzled while reading the article because the purring is an understandable act to me, not scientifically but psychologically.
Nor can experts say, exactly, what purring means. Cats purr when they’re happy - but also sometimes when they’re anxious or afraid, when they’re in labor, even when they’re about to die.
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.
my cat is a very mellow lap cat, and has had the fortune of being socialized quite a bit (she has a space backpack that she can travel in, and was a frequent guest at a local pub while they were open). thus, on her last vet trip, the doctor was shocked that she was purring, in a happy non-stressed way.
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.
My family once acquired a puppy and kitten at the same time. For the first year or so, the dog tried to model the cat's behavior. It would snuggle up against you and try to purr. It sounded like a very soft growl.
When I was a kid, my grandparents got a puppy and kitten, the best part of watching them grow together is how they used to be best buddies somehow.
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.
Whenever my cats are purring when I pet them, I make an affirmative 'uhmmmm hmmmm' humming sound, with pitch going up on the uhmm and going down on the hmmm. It's not purring, but my cats seem to get the idea.
There is a “purr center” in the lateral hypothalamic region of cats that was mapped out by electrical stimulation in the late 1940s by Dr. Frederic Andrew Gibbs and his spouse Erna L. Gibbs. Fred was a famous EEG expert.
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.
I would argue that nursing human babies make a purring sound as they drink milk from their mother’s breast. That sound evokes a sense of attachment and bonding.
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.
This sounds reasonable but mountain lions and many other types of non-domesticated cats still purr (https://parks.sccgov.org/plan-your-visit/park-programs-event...). You might be right that domesticated cats have evolved behavioral traits to purr more than their undomesticated counterparts, but I doubt the trait itself is linked to domestication since it still exists in the wild.
> 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.
Do you have any studies that prove this statement?
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.
I went with our cat for a USG. I held her while the vet examined her. Suddenly I felt some vibrations in her throat (didn't hear purring) and alerted the vet to it. He said that it's probably a quiet purr, cats often do that when getting examined and it's probably to self-soothe.
Cats purr when they want something. Often what they want is more of what they are already getting, so they continue purring while they get it. But, crucially, they purr before.
Of course they only purr for what they want when somebody else can supply it.
I can purr and meow as well as any of them (also consider my username) and my cat agrees. I assume most cat owners are like that, just like dog owners do whatever they do?
I swear my dog purrs sometimes when I'm rubbing his neck. Its very subtle but he makes some sort of low grunting noise when he's relaxed and enjoying his massage.
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.”