Tail signals are especially interesting. A tail held vertically often means “I am young, small and friendly.” A tail held upright, but puffed up like a brush can often mean “I am big and impressive.” In contrast, a tail held upright with a slight kink or hook resembling a question mark often means “I am contented, curious and friendly.”
Tail wagging has a fundamentally different meaning with cats than with dogs.
It rarely has to do with joy or with joyous excitement. Instead, it seems to be more like a reflexive reaction to an inner conflict. The stronger the wag, the stronger the conflict. While a slow wagging is often only a sign of intense concentration, stronger wagging means “I am excited,” and even stronger wagging means “I am very worked up—it is about to get serious.”
Spraying and Rubbing: Scent Signals
Unfortunately, we humans cannot perceive all of the scents that our cats leave behind. The scents called pheromones, which are essential in communication between cats, persist longer than sounds and even continue to communicate something long after the cat that left this scent message behind has gone elsewhere. Scent markings are almost like writing for cats. These signals can describe the cat’s gender, age, health and readiness to mate, as well as reveal how old the scent mark itself is. Scent marks wear off with time and need to be continually renewed. Urine, stool and scratch marks are all among the scent signals. Scratching or rubbing with the head or the body also leaves decisive scent marks behind, as cats have scent glands on their paw pads (between the toes), as well as on their head and cheeks.
We humans often entirely misunderstand these signals. When cats spray urine around or scratch the furniture, we often take it poorly and suspect malice. And we do quite a bit to prevent this behavior in our cats. We try to clean our furniture or treat it with chemicals that we hope will force our cats to give it a wide berth in the future. In the worst case, we might have to dispose of furniture that has been so treated. For the cats though, this behavior is communicative and important for the care of their claws.
For example, when Kompis pees on the bushes in the garden, he tells all other cats that the garden is his home territory. In cities, where there are many four-legged creatures in a tight space, nobody gets their own beat, but instead must negotiate the same territory.
Amazingly, cats in tight quarters are often able to reach compromises and establish a kind of shift operation: “I can patrol here in the mornings without a problem and leave my scent marks all over the place, the neighbor cats can come in the afternoon (when I am at home sleeping anyway) and do the same. That way, we rarely meet each other and avoid conflicts.” That is how Kompis solves the problem. His warning to other cats— that he is the king of “his” garden, young, healthy and ready to defend his territory—is understood by potential rivals. If another cat does come and leave a mark on his territory, he renews his claim the next day by leaving a fresh mark.
When Turbo sharpens his claws on his favorite scratching tree, it does not serve only to help maintain his claws; it is also a scent marking. The glands on his paws leave a scent on the tree, so that the other cats can tell that he was there. It is a kind of cat social media—“I am logged on, and this scent is my status update.”
Rocky and Donna also communicate with scent when they rub their heads against my legs, my face, the kitchen door or the leg of a chair. These marks mean something more like “I live here, and I feel well. I would like to leave my scent here so that the residents and things all smell like me. That way, I feel safe and secure.”
Even if I cannot entirely perceive these scents, I have noticed that it smells a bit like bananas when my cats rub their foreheads or cheeks against my face. I do not know whether I am just imagining it, but to me, this scent says something like “You are my human, and so we should both wear the same perfume.” Maybe it is a kind of declaration of love or at least a way of ensuring the togetherness and belonging of cat and human.
TIP: If you have a sufficient number of scratching posts and trees in carefully selected spots (where the cat is feeling secure and comfortable) you may reduce the scratching of your furniture.
Meowing, Trilling, Growling and Purring: Communication through Sounds
Not all cats communicate happily or frequently with sounds. Many prefer to be silent. Let us not forget that they are predators, and being a predator is deeply embedded, even in our pet cats. That is why they instinctively try to hide their location and their physical and mental state (especially when they are sick, in pain or giving birth to kittens) from other animals or humans to avoid conflicts. Still, they sometimes want to communicate with each other with the help of sounds. Cats like to be out and about at night, and sounds are an especially sensible way of communicating over long distances or when visibility is bad. Certainly many are familiar with the nocturnal concerts of cat sounds.
Cats have learned that humans react well to cat sounds. We humans do not have the same good noses that cats have, and our eyes are also often elsewhere, so that we do not notice, for example, when our furry friends have sneaked into the kitchen and sit in front of their food bowl. When we are working, are occupied with our computers or smart phones or are sleeping, sounds are especially effective. The four-legged companions have understood that and adapted themselves to us. That is why many cats develop a kind of spoken language together with their humans that is mutually understandable.
I have also found that the more I talk to a cat, the more it talks back to me. However, it is important to clarify something here: Do all cats speak the same “language”? Can they understand each other when they communicate with vocal signals? There seem to be signals that are universal and are understood by all cats. But there also seem to be geographic, cultural and breed-based differences. Maybe cats are even influenced by the language or the accent of the people around them. When I give lectures about cat communication, people often come to me afterward with comments and questions. For example, “My cats make entirely different sounds than the ones you played in your lecture. Could it be because I usually speak Japanese at home with them?” Although it has not yet been investigated thoroughly, many researchers are of the opinion that cats can, in fact, develop family, group or neighborhood dialects (Bradshaw, 2013; Leyhausen, 2005). Do cats have dialects or do they develop a set of unique sounds that only their humans can understand? This fascinating question is also the subject of my academic work.
Now we are getting down to it: I would like to explain my work as a phonetician briefly and then help you understand the sounds of cats from that perspective.
WHAT DOES A PHONETICIAN ACTUALLY DO?
My task as a scientist is primarily the investigation of human speech. I have been doing it since 2000. It sounds simple, but some knowledge of the methods is necessary.
My natural curiosity makes my work a lot easier. When I am tracking down a secret, it is not so easy to scare me off the trail. Even if everything is smooth and flawless on the surface, I like to scratch a little bit to see if something else is not hidden there after all.
How do we produce spoken language? How are the sounds of speech (vowels and consonants) produced in different languages and dialects? What do they sound like? These questions are at the core of my work and continue to catch my interest. I am also interested in how sounds, syllables, words, phrases and utterances vary in length (duration), tone (intonation, melody), loudness and voice quality—that is to say, in prosody, as well as what they sound like in different languages and dialects. I have also observed the changes our human voices undergo as we grow older using scientific methods. And it gets even more interesting: How do our emotions influence the way we speak? Why does our speaking style change depending on with whom we speak? Why do we sound different when we speak to young children than we do when we speak to elderly people, when we speak to someone we love and to someone we dislike, or when