Chapter Three

Thinking? Talking?

What was she saying? We were sure it was something, and from the look on Augusta’s face you could tell she was distressed that we weren’t getting it. She tried saying it again, in several different ways. It wasn’t “out,” it wasn’t “food,” it wasn’t “pick me up,” or any of the usual requests, nor did it sound like any of them.

How much can you know of what your cat knows? Most cats’ human companions take one of two approaches: Either they project their own imaginings onto kitty—ranging from serious wish fulfillment to preposterous YouTube fantasy—or they indifferently reject the question as unanswerable, often in fact valuing their cats’ opacity. I would watch Augusta for hours, lost in wonder, learning almost nothing. Charles Darwin devoted an entire book to The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, finding by studious observation that at least some animals—the more expressive ones, like dogs and chimps—shared a wide range of emotional understanding with humans, and we’ve now seen that people and cats have a deep-seated neural substrate in common, which recognizes each other’s vocal expression of basic emotions. (You will also recall that that recognition may be only unconscious in humans.) Other research, some of it quite recent and not widely known, has begun to reveal the astonishing scope and subtlety of what cats know and how they express it to us.

Cats’ communication with other cats is part of what we need to understand, but far from all. A lot of cat-to-cat information exchange is body language, and people watching cats over time have come to understand it pretty well. Cats use most of the same postures, expressions, and gestures to express the same things to us. Most cat books describe the basics of feline body language—the flattened ears and thrashing tail of the angry cat, the hair-on-end and hiss of the frightened one, the scamper and horseshoe-tail of let’s-play, and so on—but this chapter’s exploration of vocal expression will show that there are more nuance and variety in cat language than most people have ever imagined possible.

Cats’ communication also employs their genius for olfactory discrimination, which we get only the occasional and unpleasant merest fraction of, alas, as when kitty sprays her pungent, invisible message where we don’t want it. They try to communicate with us in scent: The simple chin-rub and head-bonk are gestures of familiar affection that also have a significant pheromonal component, if only we could smell it. Equally invisible to us—and unintelligible because unsmellable—are sebaceous glands not only on the friendly chin and noggin-top but also along the jawline, along the lips, at the base of the tail, and just inside the ears. Each secretion is host to a complex of bacteria and other microorganisms that produce a variety of olfactory signals. Depending on your cat’s preference, or tolerance, a gentle or strong rub on those sites can calm and please your cat. There are several other gland sites that you’ll have to use careful judgment about: the flanks (some cats can’t stand to be touched there and will scratch you in a flash, instinctively), between the toe pads (ditto), and just around the anus (even if you can stand the thought, be very careful there). A patient and attentive ear and eye will be rewarded.

Neutering greatly reduces urine spraying, but for owners of intact cats, especially males, it’s obviously an important concern. Cats are territorial, they just are—especially unneutered tomcats—and establishing and maintaining territorial boundaries are ineradicably inscribed in their DNA. They also need to know all about every other cat boundary that touches on their own. This is as essential to a cat as food. All cats, therefore, fixed or not, need to read freshly spray-marked surfaces. When cats first encounter the litter boxes of other cats, they pay close attention to whatever information is encoded there, and what that may be, beyond proof of ownership, we really don’t know. Someday, perhaps, researchers will be able to read the rich and various scent code of cats, but so far science has yet to crack it. We know it’s way more than territory marking and sexual signals, but a translation of the cat’s vocabulary of scent into anything meaningful to the human mind remains an unexplored opportunity.

Researchers have, however, spent years on the mystery of the purr—a form of expression that begins between kitten and mother, in mutual soothing, but which then essentially dies out in adult inter-cat communication. After that private maternal phase, the purr becomes exclusively a cat’s expression of something to a person: They do not purr to one another. The general belief is that it means the cat is happy, which, in general, isn’t wrong. Some people say it means the cat loves you. You may also have noticed that purring increases toward mealtimes. Some behaviorists believe they’ve teased out a certain occasional scamming in the purposeful purrer. It is also the case, however, that cats often purr when they’re sick, or injured, or dying.

It took science a long, long time and a lot of busted hypotheses to figure out how cats produce the remarkable suite of sounds we group together under the rubric of purring. In fact, it’s not entirely figured out yet. In the breakthrough (and still gold standard) paper “How Cats Purr,” published in 1991, Dawn E. Frazer Sissom and colleagues write, “Despite many years of observation, our understanding of the mechanism of cats’ purr is still incomplete. Questions remain concerning which organs are involved and what processes produce the sound and vibration.”1 The Frazer Sissom study used high-sensitivity oscilloscopes and microphones to record purring not only at the mouth and nose, where it’s loudest, but all around the body surface. In fact, if you think about it, we commonly perceive purring as much as a tactile experience as an auditory one.

The auditory aspect is extremely complex. Please do try to grok these details—the whole thing is weird. The fundamental frequency of the purr in all domestic cats is about twenty-five hertz (cycles per second, abbreviated as Hz). With only narrow variation, that tone is the same in cats of both sexes, all sizes, and any age, from kittenhood to senior citizenship. Twenty-five hertz is lower than the lowest key on an eighty-eight-key piano. It’s barely above the average low limit of human hearing—twenty Hz—and for that reason quite a few people can’t hear the basic tone at all. What anybody with ordinary hearing hears are the overtones produced by the fundamental frequency. It is the “chordal” nature of the overtones that make the cat’s purr such a rich and complicated sensation. Usually, both the sound and the palpable vibrations hardly vary between in-breath and out-breath, and the pause between in-and out-is barely perceptible. Because the fundamental frequency is so low, it is audible only within a couple of feet. This is truly intimate communication.

The mechanics aren’t simple, or they would have been explained long ago. Studies prior to Frazer Sissom’s had gone down many blind alleys. There were all sorts of theories about the vocal cords, all wrong. (It should be noted here that what most everybody calls the vocal cords are, in fact, vocal folds. That is the term scientists use.) Electrodes probing cats’ heads located several areas of the brain that elicited purring when poked—proving at least that the central nervous system was involved, but decidedly not establishing the “purring center” in the brain that had been hypothesized. Electromyographic instrumentation of cats’ larynx and diaphragm muscles showed activation at the fundamental purring frequency—but then cutting the poor lab cat’s laryngeal sensory nerve did nothing to stop the purring. Other experiments claimed to show involvement of the intercostal muscles (those between the ribs). So the purr was originating, apparently, at several loci in the brain, and nobody seems to have been able to find even where the purr was being physically produced.

Finally the Frazer Sissom study nailed it—the basic mechanism, anyway. The intercostals had nothing to do with it. When your cat purrs, his larynx acts as an extremely fast-opening and fast-closing gate; the instantaneous onrush of breath and the equally instantaneous intake force the vocal folds suddenly open just to the point at which they produce, as Frazer Sissom et al., write, “a sound very rich in harmonics (i.e., the fundamental tone). The vocal tract filters this sound and conducts it to be radiated from the mouth and nose.” It’s important to realize that even though the vocal folds are producing the sound, they’re not doing it in the same way as when we talk or the cat meows—those are much higher frequencies, and involve varying the tension of the vocal folds and, hence, their length; that’s how you get the great variety of voice that both people and cats are capable of. In purring, the vocal folds don’t stretch; they just open and close really fast. And as for the humming you feel under your hand, “The surface vibrations are caused by the same pressure difference across the larynx as is the sound. Pressure changes propagate as sound waves from the trachea to the surface of the lung at speeds approaching three hundred m/s (meters per second).” You will notice that you feel the purr most distinctly just where your kitty’s lungs are.

Is this not amazing?

Given that purring is intended for human understanding alone, it makes sense that variations will have evolved for specific expressions. Any cat owner knows that one of the beast’s favorite themes is, “What about my dinner?” The seamless transition from the purr of pure contentment to the barely audible, just slightly irritating extra layer of urgency is a fine example of such evolution. It’s physiologically possible in the first place because the purring cat’s vocal folds can continue doing their breath-gating job while at the same time stretching to vibrate up in the voice frequencies. Cats have also evolved a particular “isolation cry” (“I’m lost!”) with a remarkable acoustical resemblance to the distress cry of a human infant, to which humans are instinctively responsive. And now wouldn’t you know, the acoustic profile of the subtly added vocal note—“the cry embedded within the purr,” as it was called in the study that first identified it 2—falls right in the same frequency range as a human baby wailing. “The inclusion of this high frequency component within the purr,” the study’s authors write, “could serve as a subtle means of exploitation, tapping into an inherent mammalian sensitivity to such cries and also possibly rendering the call less harmonic and thus more difficult to habituate to.” Exploitation? By a cat? Yep.

And this little trick of emotional blackmail tunes to neuroacoustic signals buried deep in your brain a long, long time ago. Anybody still want to say cats are dumb?

That brings us neatly to the bigger question of what cats actually know, a subset of which is what they say. Modern science has been singularly unhelpful here. To a lot of biologists, the question of animal intelligence is kryptonite—touch it and your own intelligence will be melted by the mockery of your peers. A brave minority, nevertheless, have devised experiments in which birds, for example, have performed remarkable feats of what can only be called brilliance. The obstacle to examining animal intelligence has always been not its absence or low quality but the difficulty of devising situations and tests congenial to the nature of the animal under consideration—and obtaining the cooperation of a subject who is quite likely not to see the point of the constraint, obedience, occasionally pain, and, often, from the subject’s point of view, absurdity involved. Some species, of course, are more cooperative than others. Dogs come to mind.

Some animals seem to be just too smart to play along. Horses are for the most part wondrously docile, and can be trained to do the damnedest things on command; but anyone who knows them well can tell you they’ll play wicked tricks on you too—and when you least expect it. Some of the smaller cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises, and whales) have the same qualities, but they seem also to keep the greater part of what they know entirely to themselves. Or else they’re trying to tell us things and we’re just too dumb to have learned their language.

And so modern science, for the most part, has had to forego translation of animal language and content itself with the observation and interpretation of behavior. When scientists manage to see that behavior on the animals’ own terms, it can, as Stephen Budiansky writes, be nothing short of miraculous:

Evolution, learning, the very wiring of animals’ brains and sense organs, adapt them to the cognitive demands of their physical and social environments in ways that at times put us to shame, with our reliance on consciousness and language and reason to see us through. We can study books about cryptic moths and make long lists of their distinguishing characteristics and actively try to commit them to memory and in time can do as well as every blue jay in the world can. We might with enough mnemonic devices or other memory tricks find caches the way Clark’s nutcrackers can. We can never follow a trail the way a dog can, or find a rotting carcass the way a turkey vulture can, or navigate our way home the way a pigeon can, or locate a tiny rapidly moving target the way a bat can, or calculate the distance of a Carolina wren from the tonal shifts in its song the way a Carolina wren can.3

As we’ll see in chapter 5, cats have their own system of knowledge—an immense amount to tell the scrupulous analyst of their behavior. They also insist on talking to us. And, almost always, only to us. The only talking that grown-up cats do among themselves has to do with sex, and those vocalizations are so closely tied to specific behavior that they have proved relatively easy to interpret. Making sense of the sounds that come out of cats’ mouths in the company of people is not easy at all.

Those sounds—the myriad variations of meow, aow, mmph, and the rest—are made only for the sake of saying particular things to particular people, and among all the felids of the world, only domestic cats try to talk to people. A Cornell University biologist named Nicholas Nicastro was “interested in learning how humans have shaped cat vocal behavior by artificial selection, and how cats have evolved to exploit pre-existing human perceptual tendencies.” (There’s that word exploit again.) “Seven thousand years ago,” he says, “when we think the ancestors of our domesticated cats began wandering into Egyptian granaries and offering to trade rodent-control services for shelter, it was probably the pleasant-sounding cats that were selected and accepted into human society.” Just to see if our cats’ ancestors showed any of the same proclivity for making nice, attractive noises to people, Nicastro visited some African wildcats at the South African national zoo. “Those cats sounded permanently angry,” he wrote. “If they were looking for affection, they weren’t expressing themselves very well.”4

Not only have cats developed a language for humans in general, they often customize it for the individual. Most cat owners—97 percent, in Victoria Voith’s study—talk to their cats, and over time the language, or dialect, of which they share an understanding evolves its own particular shape, elements, rhythm, and melody. There are constants as well, the biggest reason being that cats are capable of producing only a limited range of basic sounds. Within that range, nonetheless, is great diversity. All this complexity—the individual variation between particular people and particular cats, the bewildering variety of subtle differences of expression—has had the evident result that modern science won’t touch cat talk with a ten-foot pole.

That is, scientists won’t attempt trying to translate it. There is, however, a good deal of fine-grained physical analysis going on. Susanne Schötz, a professor of phonetics at Lund University in Sweden, has done remarkable work in characterizing the acoustic properties of nearly every sound ever to come out of a cat’s mouth. Just one of her many papers—don’t laugh, this is serious science—“A Phonetic Pilot Study of Chirp, Chatter, Tweet, and Tweedle in Three Domestic Cats”⁵—establishes a virtual taxonomy for the vocal output of three cats looking at birds through a window. What Schötz’s three cats had to say comprised not only the four “words” in her title but also chirr, chitter, chirrup, peep, pipe, twitter, warble, and quaver. Those were ultimately grouped together as either chirps, chatters, or tweedles. (Okay, go ahead and laugh.) A computer program calculated the mean duration, the minimum basic frequency, the maximum basic frequency, and the mean basic frequency of each. The paper also classifies the voice (voiced or unvoiced), the pitch, the loudness, the rate, the “modulation/reiteration” (for example, “rapid series or rattling”), and “other descriptions or comments” (e.g., “clicking sounds used to urge on a horse” and “titter, nervous giggle”) for six basic vocalizations. As for what they may have meant? Professor Schötz doesn’t address that.

In another paper, Schötz and her colleague Joost van de Weijer did consider not what cats were trying to say, but what people thought they might be saying. The focus of “Human Perception of Intonation in Domestic Cat Meows”6 was pretty narrow: cats meowing at feeding time and cats meowing while waiting at the veterinarian’s office. They found that the hungry cats’ meows went up in tone at the end, and the anxious cats’ meows went down. They asked people familiar with cats to interpret recordings of those meows, and people who weren’t familiar with cats. The people who were familiar with cats were more accurate in their perceptions. “Taken together,” wrote Schötz and van de Weijer, “these results suggest that cats may use different intonation patterns in their vocal interaction with humans, and that humans are able to identify the vocalizations based on intonation.”

And that’s about the state of the art in contemporary research on cat talk. Luckily, a work of genius produced many years prior to the Swedish studies did the kind of comprehensive analysis that seems to be missing from the current scientific literature.

“Vocalizing in the House Cat: A Phonetic and Functional Study,” by Mildred Moelk, was published in the American Journal of Psychology in 1944. It is a masterpiece not only of observation and interpretation but also of wit, style, and grace.

Moelk undertook her work with simplicity: She studied her own cats—very closely. Once she had arrived at her categorizations of their speech and her conclusions about its intentions, she checked them far and wide, both observing other cats and also studying the work of observers from other cultures, other languages, and other times. But what seems most significant, and most beautiful, about her work, is the quality of attention she brought to it, particularly in her exquisite contemplation of a single cat—“a female given to much vocalizing… already in her tenth year when the study began, [who] had long before achieved an equilibrium of acquaintance and habit between herself and her environment… [and whose] vocalizing patterns may therefore be regarded as firmly established.

“Of the sixteen phonetic patterns to be distinguished for this mature cat,” she continued, “all but three have been observed in other subjects as well. Two of these (‘bewilderment’ and ‘refusal’) are of minor importance, while the third (‘acknowledgment’) is one which could be expected only from a cat very much at ease in the presence of the auditor.”

Very much at ease. That state of mind is what made Moelk’s observations possible, and Eileen Karsh’s too. And it is the absence of ease that continues to contaminate a great deal of research on animal behavior. When your experimental subject cat is nervous or afraid or angry or freaked out—the usual situation of a cat being experimented on in a laboratory—you might as well just forget the experiment and go home.

Here is a supreme example of an experiment that should have been forgotten in advance. The researchers proposed to use a modified version of the Ainsworth Strange Situation Test to evaluate “the claim that the cat–owner bond is typically a secure attachment.”7 The deal was basically to see if cats behaved measurably differently toward their owners and toward strangers. What made the experiment insane was the setting. A few details will suffice:

Can you imagine? These people thought they could get meaningful behavior from cats in a setting like that? “Two cat subjects… hid during an entire experimental testing period and were, therefore, removed from the data analysis.” You don’t say!

Mildred Moelk’s cats were at home and “very much at ease.” She didn’t manipulate them in any way. She didn’t cover the windows or stink up the room with an enzymatic cleaner. She just listened, and watched. She also had a thorough command of linguistics and phonetics, so she knew how to listen.

Moelk’s report of her study begins by reminding us that cats and people produce vocal sounds quite differently. We talk only on the out-breath. Cat speech uses both in-breath and out-. Cat talk doesn’t use the tips of their tongues at all. We move our jaws, lips, tongues, and other mouth parts to form words; cats mostly change the tension in their throats. She also warns us in advance that she’s going to use non-scientific language like “bright,” “dull,” and “eager.” And we learn up front that she is going to have to use symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent particular sounds—symbols that aren’t at all easy to remember unless you’ve studied phonetics (examples: ŋ for the sound at the end of the word song; œ as in the French word oeuf; ~ to indicate “nasalization,” and so on)—sounds that can’t be otherwise described in print but which she had to learn to listen for in order to discriminate among the “words” her cats spoke.

Moelk builds her system of understanding on a simple foundation of three main classes: “1) sounds produced while the mouth is kept closed, the murmurs, 2) sounds produced while the mouth is opened and then gradually closed, resulting in a fixed-vowel pattern, basically а:ou, and 3) sounds produced while the mouth is held tensely open in one position.” She goes on to explain: “The differences between these three classes are at bottom differences in degree of intensity of effort. More energy is required to say ‘What?’ than to murmur ‘Mhn?’ and still more to snap or thunder ‘What!’ than to make the calm inquiry.” Already we have set sail on the sea of real language.

The intensity and precision of Moelk’s ability to listen combine with her understanding of her cats’ intentions to yield accurate (and beautifully expressed) interpretations of their speech. An example, among the sounds produced in her first category of vocalizations, “murmur patterns”—in which the cat’s mouth remains closed and the sound comes only through the nose—is “the ‘Level ’mhrn of Request or Greeting’: In structure the ’mhrn resembles an isolated and expanded form of the inhaled stroke of purring. The initial m indicates its greater body. The quality of the ’mhrn, like that of the purr, involves the presence and brightness of the r element. Unlike the ’hrn of purring, however, ’mhrn is not composed of a series of separately audible vibrations… but is prolonged by means of repeated new intakes of breath before release through exhalation, represented by repeating the ’hr, mhr’hr’hrn. Murmurs of one, two, or three such rolls are most common, although murmuring may be protracted even through the length of time it takes a cat to run up a flight of stairs, continuing a single mhr’hr’hr’hrn all the way.”

Can you not absolutely hear that cat running up the stairs?

One after another, Mildred Moelk listens deep into cat words, spells them out sound by sound, and names them: the Call; the ’mhrŋ of Acknowledgment or Confirmation; the Demand. Within each can be many variations, each offering its own fine distinctions of meaning: “As the demands become more and more vociferous, increasing stress is placed upon the initial vowel while the murmur-element contracts and intensifies.… A relaxing of stress upon the initial vowel comes as failure imposes hopelessness.…”

She emphasizes, however, that if you’re going to understand what your cat is saying, you’ve got to know your cat: “The voice of one cat can be distinguished from that of another chiefly by means of the difference in their normal initial vowel-sounds, and until this norm has been determined for a cat, attempts to ascribe significance to particular shades of its vowels have little meaning.”

Once you get the norms straight, then amazing insights are possible. In her second principal class of vocalization, Vowel Patterns—“sounds produced while the mouth is opened and then gradually closed”—there are the whispered or silent demand, the Begging Demand (“when in pursuing some end the cat becomes so completely absorbed by the goal that all else is lost sight of”), Bewilderment (“the ’mаou?… of bewildered failure of understanding” and “the tenser ’mæou?… of worry”), the Milder Forms of the Mating Cry, and the Anger Wail. As the attentive cat person surely knows, the category of Complaint allows for quite a bit of variation. Cats’ complaints, when judged to be insufficiently answered, can turn into demands. Moelk finds that she cannot always distinguish between certain “vaguely formed complaints” and “the more hopeless forms of demand,” but she offers the comforting observation that “When complaint forms alone are used, the cat can very often be satisfied with mere verbal sympathy, which is not true of the demand.” That must have been an awfully nice cat, to have been satisfied with verbal sympathy.

The third primary category of cat talk is what Moelk terms “Strained Intensity Patterns”—the mouth open and tense, the voice strong. Among them are the Growl, the Snarl, the Mating Cry (“a much modified form of the Demand,” with many variations), the shriek of sudden pain, the Refusal (the “low, raspingly discontinuous sound sometimes uttered as the cat draws back in refusal from something urged upon it”), and Spitting, fft!

Kittens are born with the ability to make two sounds, a sort of quiet murmur, and the basic vowel pattern, shrill and insistent, sometimes beginning with an m sound, sometimes a w, which gradually becomes the familiar mew and then meow. They begin to purr at the age of two days. The “Level ’mhrn of Greeting” comes into play during the third week, but its varieties denoting confident demand, request, and bewilderment develop much later—after ten weeks. Their mothers have their own language specific to motherhood. Most of it is spoken directly to the kittens. Whenever she’s been away from them, she returns with soft little iterations of ’mhrn—meaning, come to Mom to be licked. She will add a more commanding tone to the same sound when a kitten wanders farther away than she likes. She has a distinctive vocal invitation to play with her, a sound of frustration or irritation if the kitten stops playing too soon, a growl or even an anger-wail if the kitten breaks the rules—biting or clawing, for example. Kittens start to tussle with one another in their fifth week, and will spit in the midst of those bouts, but there’s still no serious fighting, therefore no anger-wail or snarl.

At the same time she is in constant communication with her kittens, the mother cat also tends to talk more to her people. For one thing, she needs more food more frequently. Sometimes, also, she will seem to suffer from a certain postpartum loneliness or anxiety, and accordingly will solicit petting or expressions of sympathy and comfort from the humans watching over her and her new family. The more verbal interaction they have with people, and the earlier they have it, the sooner they will develop the finer points of communication, because only people have the awareness to encourage, narrow, and define particular outcomes to particular vocal expressions.

Cat talk is always interactive, and often aimed at achieving a goal. An individual cat’s characteristic vocalizations can vary in a number of ways—among them loudness, persistence, and emotional intensity. The biggest influence on variation is probably the value the cat sets on the goal he has in mind—food, say, always a favorite. Getting you to open a door is another big one. Then there may be a matter of physical need, or instinctive pressure: If I don’t get to my sandbox this minute I’m going to burst, or I really reallly need to get out there and kill that pigeon. Sometimes the cat may just be bullshitting you: I haven’t had my dinner, I’m starving. Moelk points out that “time and repeated experience also build up varying degrees of anticipation with respect to different goals and different agents, and these various degrees of expectation are reflected in vocalization.” Augusta, once she had achieved her ladyhood, would sit primly by her supper bowl and not say a word until you looked, and then she would offer only the softest, gentlest mew? Cats kept waiting, once they believe they’ve made their point but have not received a satisfactory response, will begin to change their vocalization, first laying a stronger emphasis on the first vowel of a vowel pattern, then increasing its intensity until the request becomes a decided complaint.

A cat’s mood will certainly affect what she has to say, and the mood could well be left over from an unrelated experience: If she has just been pulled down from a tree that a dog chased her up, kitty will not speak in her normal tone of voice. An alteration of her typical sound could also be telling you she’s sick. As a general rule, tone of voice is also an emotional indicator. The friendlier sounds are mostly higher-pitched, unpleasant sounds the low ones.

Finally, you may perceive something that you can choose to read as thanks, when, for example, you plop the old boy’s dinner into his dish and a deep, satisfied purring ensues. Or you get, This crap again? You know I hate it—and a surly rasp of refusal.

It should perhaps be mentioned here that these “translations” are purely figurative: The internal experience of the cat is rather more basic. A cat’s “words” are not symbols, abstractions, or names. They can vividly express the cat’s feelings, however, and can certainly be specific in what they are requesting, enjoying, disliking, wanting, or needing. Elizabeth was convinced that Augusta asked for “milk” by name, and always answered her request with an echoing “milk!” We didn’t know at the time that cow’s milk isn’t good for cats. Neither did Augusta, who, whether or not her little mew was a noun, certainly wanted that milk.

Not all cat talk is about want or need, however. Some is just nice. Augusta had her particular little gurgle-trill to say Hello, hello, I’m so glad to see you and is this not a lovely world? Goal-oriented? How often did that gurgle eventuate in a purr as she was talked to and stroked? She liked to be pushed flat on the floor and brushed hard, motoring like an Evinrude.

In one of Mildred Moelk’s fascinating experiments, she set out to speak to every cat she met on the street for a month, “in a quiet, sympathetic tone,” and stroke its head “when that approach was permitted.” Out of the dozen cats she tried, only four declined to be petted. Not one gave her the ’mhrn of greeting, which did not surprise her in the least, knowing, as she did, that cats reserve that word strictly for family and friends. She recorded the vocal responses of the congenial eight in International Phonetic Alphabet—mostly variations of meow—and kept careful notes of their behavior: the cat locked inside a store; the one who tried to lead her to open a door; the one sleeping in the sun (“near-purr behavior”); the one who answered in friendly meows, wanting to be petted but stuck behind a fence; the one sitting on a porch who responded only “after having been spoken to three times… who then returned at once to staring toward the direction in which children, including two from his house, were walking away to school.”

Even Mildred Moelk’s detailed taxonomy of cat talk cannot describe the full range of what your own cat may have to say. That’s because with the passage of time—especially when your cat has been with you since kittenhood—you and your cat together evolve your own particular way of speaking. Augusta, owing to her tendency to explore terra incognita, especially in Montana—where the supply of unknown places was essentially infinite—developed a number of calls to tell us she was lost and needed finding. The basic one was a loud rowow! much louder than one might have thought possible for such a little kitty. Augusta would guide our trudge through mudhole and down timber toward that sound with aows of gradually softening intensity as we drew nearer, and then, when she had located us and could be sure we were coming, the aows would quiet into pitiful infantile miews. (And there she’d be, up in a tree where we couldn’t reach her, pacing back and forth on a high limb in a state of high anxiety. Eventually she would persuade herself to go back to the trunk, grab hold, swing down butt first hanging by her claws, and inch backward to safety—encouraged throughout by the you-can-do-its of her support staff.) She had a different, even more carrying holler for when she was lost in tall grass, for there she could not see out at all and could become entirely disoriented. The rowow! of come-get-me was displaced by an agonized máa-oww, falling at the end in resignation or despair.

As Susanne Schötz found in her acoustic analysis of cats looking through a window at birds and unable to get at them, a frustrated cat can produce a wondrous variety of sounds, trying trying trying to find the one chirr, chitter, chirrup, peep, pipe, twitter, warble, or quaver that will at last evoke the craved response. When Augusta sat at the screen door in Montana staring out into the merciless downpours of June, sometimes she would scold the rain, but as soon as she saw Elizabeth or me it became all our fault and she would try out hopeless variations of “please.” “You’re not a rain cat,” we would say, because if we did let her out she wouldn’t last a minute. Was she begging us to stop the rain?

Cats never address people in the savage vocabulary of courtship and mating. That is another language for another world. The female as she comes into estrus wails and moans like a victim of torture, and the competition for her favors induces the classic alley-cat chorus of groans, yells, snarls, hisses, and screeches. To the human ear it sounds as if the males are going to rip each other to shreds, and although they do sometimes fight, sometimes violently, the more typical dénouement of the hours of caterwauling will be the combatants’ acceptance, however brief, of some one tom’s first place in line. The loser typically will have signaled his defeat by crouching defensively, leaning away from his opponent, and lifting a forepaw. The female in heat will express her own acceptance of the winner’s victory—as he mounts her—with a deep, muttered growl. (Her egg is not released until his penis enters her vagina.)

That is almost never the end of the scene, however. They may go at it again and again, as often as ten times an hour. Or number one may strut away in satisfaction, with the wailing, yowling argument of his fellows uninterrupted. Many female cats in heat will mate with a number of their supplicants. Hence the sometimes stunning diversity of kittens in a single litter: Each one may have had a different dad.8

Cats express more with their faces than many people seem to realize. Certainly, compared to a dog’s face, a cat’s can seem uncommunicative. We have to learn to pay attention to subtle signs. It took me at least a couple of years of watching Augusta intently to realize that the interruption of a soft direct gaze by a slow blink is an expression of contentment. You should also know that staring straight into a cat’s eyes can be taken as a sign of aggression or dominance, and may be met with unintended consequences. Only cats and their people when fully in each other’s confidence can engage in the loving long gaze. Once you’ve reached that point, however, direct eye contact can develop its own subset of language. For one thing, you can now read the “eye whiskers” (not so easy with Augusta, black against black) and slight changes in the shape of the eyes. You may see longing, impatience, let’s-play, anger, fear, need, love.

Some people say that when a cat comes into a room full of people whom he doesn’t know, he inevitably seeks out the one who doesn’t like cats. This may be true—again a matter of eye contact. The hypothesis is that the cat people all look at the cat, hoping for a response of some kind. The non-cat person will look away, wanting no part of it. The cat will then have taken all that staring as potentially threatening, and will perceive the person looking away as polite—just as unaggressive cats meeting for the first time will avoid eye contact. Hence the friendly approach to the wrong person.

Another friendly gesture, usually reserved for the cat’s closest friends only, is the flick of the tongue from between closed lips, so quick sometimes you’re not sure you’ve seen it. The position of the whiskers is also expressive. Curled forward and fanned out, they say that the cat is fully aware, unafraid, ready for action. When she is calm, they will stand straight out and come closer together. When she presses them back flat against her cheeks, watch out—that’s anger or fear, and claws could be next.

A cat’s mouth doesn’t have a great range of expression—except, of course, when it’s talking. A big yawn can be taken as an expression of comfort. Mouth agape, as we’ve seen, means flehmen—that special, hypersensitive mode of smelling other cats’ pheromones. Exposed teeth with lips drawn back are a bad sign—sometimes dangerous to children who mistake that expression of fear and potentially immediate aggression for a smile.

The eyes are usually a component of a more complex expression. Seen alone, they can be ambiguous. Narrowed pupils may mean anger, or just that the ambient light is bright—the reactions are the same. Unusually wide pupils can mean fear, anger, or the acute attention of the hunter. When Augusta greeted us on our returning home, or just to say hello in the morning, she would stretch her legs forward in a deep bow, keeping her hind legs just loosely bent, and close her eyes for a couple of seconds. A cat purring in your lap will often close her eyes in contentment. When Augusta was being stroked or brushed, the milky nictitating membrane would come out from hiding to cover half of each eye—pure bliss.

A cat’s ears can be eloquent. With more than twenty muscles controlling them, they can swivel an entire half-circle. Between cats, they are quick and easy indicators of mood. Lifted and forward means contented and maybe also ready to play—though in conflict situations the ears will take the same position, pointing directly toward the perceived threat. Straight up is relaxed attention. Ears out flat plus dilated eyes means ready to fight. Flat back with head down means scared. Swiveling, twitching, switching back and forth between positions all can indicate states of awareness, uncertainty, sensory overload. Sometimes a cat caught in ambiguity will have one ear wide open and the other closed flat. A cat will almost always turn her ears toward you when you speak, though she may otherwise seem not to notice. When both are open and cupped forward, she is maximally alert and aware. To see Augusta enter a woodland with her little black ears straight up, almost quivering, with her eyes wide open and every sense electric, was to touch the animal spirit in ourselves.

Posture and other body movements indicate a cat’s fundamental mood. A frightened cat will draw himself up with an arched back, sideways to the potential aggressor, every hair on end, tail straight up—the classic Halloween silhouette—and sometimes crab-walk cautiously away, still sideways, saying, “I really don’t want to fight.” Deeper fright will turn the tail into an inverted U, sometimes curling forward between the legs. As tension mounts, the cat’s breathing becomes more rapid, and the body becomes lower in back than in front. He seems to be making himself as small as possible. In utter terror, especially when cornered, the cat will take a defensive crouch, ears flattened, tailed curled tight around the body, eyes dilated to the maximum, whiskers back, every muscle quivering with tension, the only hope a last spring and full attack.

Anger—which can come on suddenly, even in the midst of a round of happy petting when the cat has had enough—is telegraphed first by a lashing tail. It will often seem incomprehensible to the person—Where did this come from, what did I do? “No one Cat is wholly good or bad,” wrote T. S. Eliot in his poem “In Respect of Felines.” “For even the nicest tabby that was ever born and weaned / Is capable of acting, on occasion, like a fiend.”9 A cat warns of aggressive action with stiff, slow steps, twitching ears, a relentless stare with pupils constricted to slits, the lashing tail. When he is about to attack, his ears will swivel back flat against his head, to avoid injury. Fortunately, real attacks on people are extremely rare.

A happy cat almost always approaches her people with tail held high, sometimes with the tip curled into a question mark. A cat minding her own business, content but feeling no need to communicate, usually carries her tail more or less straight out. A droop probably indicates a less than sunny mood. When a cat lying on her side grows irritated but isn’t yet ready to take her leave, she will thump her tail hard on the floor. A cat sitting on her haunches with all four feet together and her tail wrapped softly around them is in a state of relaxed attention. Lying in sphinx position with paws tucked in and tail quietly alongside her body means peace of mind. A gently waving tail-tip usually indicates that the cat is listening intently but without tension. When the cat is sneaking up on prey, belly to the ground, the tail vibrates with excitement. Grown cats sometimes chase their own tails in a whirl of craziness—just for fun, it seems, though sometimes it may be in pursuit of a devilish itch. The tail is, of course, essential in the cat’s extraordinary talent for balancing, as a counterweight that can change position in an instant.

Some cats will roll onto their backs in a number of circumstances—a gesture that some people confuse with a dog’s belly-up posture of submission. Sometimes, not very often, it may signal a desire for a tummy rub. Other cats, apparently just as relaxed in the same position, will claw the bejesus out of you if you so much as touch that inviting soft fur. Females in estrus commonly express their readiness by rolling over. Some cats love to sleep on their backs, legs akimbo, evidently trusting that no harm will come to them despite the vulnerable position.

Augusta was never that confident: Her default sleeping posture was curled up tight, head sometimes buried in her side or behind her tail, not infrequently with one eye slightly open—just in case. When you spoke to her in that position, even when she seemed to be fast asleep, she would acknowledge your utterance with a soft curling of the tip of her tail. When brightly awake and full of beans, Augusta often did what we called “wiggle-worming,” writhing at our feet, or “doing a banana,” in which she stretched all four legs as far as they could reach while arching her back like a bow. Both were among the friendliest of her postures, with a modest, unassertive begging component mixed in. She certainly had it figured out that both gestures got our amused and affectionate attention.

Wiggle-worming in dirt or gravel seems to be a sort of self-grooming, but it also often denotes a readiness to play, especially if there’s going to be chasing involved. Scratching something vertically leaves an olfactory Kilroy-was-here for other cats, and also aids in the shedding of old claws—with the new, very sharp ones just beneath. Trees and scratching-posts are ideally close at hand, but the furniture of many a cat owner can attest to their cat’s persistence in marking his home territory no matter how many times hollered at or even bopped on the nose. A very gentle nose-bop emulates the no command of the mother cat. Anything more forceful than that is abuse. It won’t work, anyway. Hitting a cat can only make him angry or afraid. Altogether too much trust is shattered when cat owners lose their tempers, and the distrust consequent to a single episode of loss of self-control can last life-long. Water pistol or spray bottle squirting can be effective, but they should be resorted to as seldom as possible, for an intelligent cat will sense the anger behind them. The result may be less an obedient cat than one who runs from the sight of you.

As in virtually every other aspect of their lives, what cats say to people shows a wide range of individual variation. Some cats are simply unexpressive—call it private, if you like. Some, notably some Siamese, can never shut up, and seem to be complaining much of the time. In between those extremes, what you say to your cat, what tone you say it in, how often you repeat it, how well you imitate the cat’s own vocalization, and especially how early in the cat’s life you start babbling at her all have an influence on her own loquacity. Like Bashan in Thomas Mann’s “A Man and His Dog,” cats like to hear their names again and again.* “Augusta, busta busta busta,” we would say and say, “Auuu-gusss-taaah!” and as soon as she considered her current preoccupation finished—she did not like to be hurried—she would come trotting down the hall or bounding out of the tall grass, gurgling happily.

Even given the multitude of ways in which cats express themselves, a theory of the feline mind remains elusive. There’s still imperfect agreement, after all, on the human mind. The simplest way to think about what cats are thinking—until some miraculous new machine is invented that can look inside their little skulls and read it—may be not to search for the “thoughts” processed in their subjective experience but to rely instead on what results they get. Michael J. Owren of Georgia State University and two colleagues propose that science “revise the definition of animal signaling by replacing the problematic notions of information and encoding with the broader, yet better bounded and testable idea of communication as influence.”10 That would naturally include the responses of their human companions. While we should always be cautious not to over-interpret, there is increasing evidence that people understand more of what animals are trying to say than science in the past has tended to admit.

Zana Bahlig-Pieren and Dennis C. Turner’s experiment (cited in chapter 1) compared the interpretive prowess of people familiar with cats and those unfamiliar. They were surprised by how well the people did who didn’t knows cats. “This result,” they wrote, “may offer some support for [the] notion that humans have been selected for an ability to predict and interpret the behavior and emotional states of other non-human species. Empathy and anthropomorphism play an important role in this capacity, as it presumably also did in the original process of animal domestication.”¹¹

Some cat owners may not realize that their feline companions’ expressive ability takes longer to develop to full proficiency than has been generally thought, and that it can continue to grow throughout their lives. Cats do not reach intellectual and social maturity until somewhere between the ages of two and four years.

That was certainly the case with Augusta. At the age of one she was still flighty, distractible, and impulsive. She was a superb athlete, able to jump from the floor to the top of the refrigerator, or even a higher shelf, with no appearance of effort. Horizontally she seemed to fly like Supercat, limbs outstretched, her trajectory nearly flat, across unbelievable distances. She loved to knock things down. By the next year, however, she was becoming, dare I say, contemplative. She might watch a butterfly before pouncing on it. She never became as vocal as many another cat, but as she grew older she also grew calmer. We inferred that her infancy must have been chaotic and scary. With peace and comfort and the passing of time, she began to sleep more soundly, play more gently, and speak more often.

Augusta adjusted well to her narrowed habitat in San Francisco, but with her return to Montana every summer the pure joyousness of her true self poured forth: Her fur was sleeker, her movements more buoyant, her voice less shy. She hated being in the car, and the scent of motels. Whether in her carrying case or not, she would employ her let-me-out and help-I’m-lost at high volume, and in a room strongly redolent of disinfectant she would moan and mew in misery all night—but as soon as we arrived somewhere congenial and had stayed long enough for her to settle her wracked nerves, Augusta sniffed every edge, rubbed her chin glands on every corner, and mapped every door, high perch, and window, wanting out, wanting in, and, if it was Montana, wanting out out out to my wilderness! In each new place she generated new routes and new routines, and literally made herself at home. She had traveled enough to have concluded that that most identifiable of scent stations, her litter box, would mark her home, wherever it should be, henceforth.

Whenever we left her, she grew anxious. One house we rented in Montana had a long driveway that led to a bridge over the West Boulder River—five miles from the ranch where we used to live—and one night, returning home from a dinner party, we saw her eyeshine in the middle of the bridge. This was hundreds of yards from our cabin—where could she have thought she was going? Had she been trying to follow us? Did she have some scent, or sense, of her old home upriver, and was she headed blindly there? She was shivering, cold, and scared, crying weakly when we picked her up. There were also times when she wanted to be alone, and she had a fine talent for identifying hidey-holes where we could never find her, some of them right in the house, some well out into forest or brush. Sometimes—not wishing to end a nap, perhaps, and not hungry—she refused to emerge or make a peep no matter how long we called. Then, in her own good time, she would appear, bright-eyed and crooky-tailed, and ask for dinner.

And sometimes she would try so hard to tell us something and we just couldn’t get it.