Aha! I Was Right!

From the brilliant minds at the University of Sussex, via LiveScience.com:

Cats Do Control Humans, Study Finds

If you've ever wondered who's in control, you or your cat, a new study points to the obvious. It's your cat.

Household cats exercise this control with a certain type of urgent-sounding, high-pitched meow, according to the findings.

This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry. While people usually think of cat purring as a sign of happiness, some cats make this purr-cry sound when they want to be fed. The study showed that humans find these mixed calls annoying and difficult to ignore.

'The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response,' said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. 'Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom.'

They Know Us
Previous research has shown similarities between cat cries and human infant cries.

McComb suggests that the purr-cry may subtly take advantage of humans' sensitivity to cries they associate with nurturing offspring. Also, including the cry within the purr could make the sound 'less harmonic and thus more difficult to habituate to,' she said.

McComb got the idea for the study from her experience with her own cat, who would consistently wake her up in the mornings with a very insistent purr. After speaking with other cat owners, she learned that some of their cats also made the same type of call. As a scientist who studies vocal communication in mammals, she decided to investigate the manipulative meow.

Tough to Test
Setting up the experiments wasn't easy. While the felines used purr-cries around their familiar owners, they were not eager to make the same cries in front of strangers. So McComb and her team trained cat owners to record their pets' cries--capturing the sounds made by cats when they were seeking food and when they were not. In all, the team collected recordings from 10 different cats.

The researchers then played the cries back for 50 human participants, not all of whom owned cats. They found that humans, even if they had never had a cat themselves, judged the purrs recorded while cats were actively seeking food--the purrs with an embedded, high-pitched cry--as more urgent and less pleasant than those made in other contexts.

When the team resynthesised the recorded purrs to remove the embedded cry, leaving all else unchanged, the human subjects' urgency ratings for those calls decreased significantly.

McComb said she thinks this cry occurs at a low level in cats' normal purring, "but we think that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans." In fact, not all cats use this form of purring at all, she said, noting that it seems to most often develop in cats that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners rather than those living in large households, where their purrs might be overlooked.

The results were published in the July 14 issue of the journal Current Biology.

I swear, Gentle Reader, Dr. McComb should have recruited Parmer Dude for her study. That fat, hairy bastard makes that annoying, hard-to-ignore plaintive wail of a meow 10 to 15 minutes after we've gone to bed. He isn't crying because the little moron is hungry. No, the dain-bramaged furball, I swear to you, is wailing because he's lost in the dark. Yes, Gentle Reader, you read that right. He's lost. Even though he's lived in this house for seven years, I swear to you once we turn out the lights, he can't find his way from the kitchen to our bedroom. The only way to shut him up is to call to him so he can follow the sound of our voices.

God love the fat, hairy, noisy, dain-bramaged bastard....

Despite the girth and the noise and the bulimia and the shedding and the smell and the gum funk he leaves behind on certain wall corners and his penchant for taking up half the couch when he's inclined to join us on it and the poor vision and the brain damage, I probably wouldn't trade him for the world.