House cats manipulate owners through special cry

A study found that domestic cats use amplified purring to solicit food from their human companions. Researchers believe cats exploit humans' protective instincts through not-so-subtle cries for food.

If you fill your cat’s food dish before prompted by your pet’s jarring, incessant howl, chances are your cat has you well-trained. A report to published in the July 14 issue of Current Biology says domestic felines motivate people to fill their food dishes by calling out with a dramatically amplified purr. It’s a mix of insistent meow and normal purr that humans find both annoying and difficult to ignore, say researchers from the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, and the Atlanta Zoo.

"The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response," said study author Karen McComb, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, in a written statement.

Hear the solicitation purr (mp3) Cats have learned to use this coercive form of communication, what researchers call ”solicitation purring,” to send a subliminal message that taps into humans’ protective instincts, according to McComb. Not surprisingly, cats wouldn’t perform on demand for the study, so McComb’s team enlisted cat owners to record 10 different cats’ cries. Fifty people listened to the playback of the food-seeking cries and judged them more urgent and less pleasant than those made in other contexts, even if they had never lived with a cat. McComb, a scientist who studies vocal communication in mammals, said she was inspired to do the study after being woken by her own cat in the mornings with an insistent purr. She learned other cat owners had encountered the same manipulative trick.