Friday, December 08, 2017

The Universal Language of Cats


Dear George,
I live in a big metropole and, I humbly must admit I live the life of the riches!
Really, I am a rescue who got the chance to live in a Four Season Hotel suite!
But, that’s not the reason I’m writing to you! The reason is that I’m afraid I’m losing my mind and I don’t know if it’s because of the luxurious life I’m living or if it’s because the electro-magnetic/microwave pollution of the big city or what! How am I manifesting my symptoms? Simply….I think there is a Tower of Babel ….in my head!You see…Italian is my mother tongue, my mummy speaks French and my daddy speaks English. They have friends who speak other languages. When we have company …everybody is talking to me in their mother tongue and I DO UNDERSTAND them all!
Isn’t that crazy? How can I understand all these foreign languages?
George, can you explain this to me before I completely lose my mind? Or is it that we are so advanced that cat language transcend any other languages?
Completely confused
Signore Bianco

Dear Signore Bianco,
Of course you understand what humans are saying - in so far as it is worth bothering about. The feline communication system is multi-faceted involving scent, vocalising and body language, far more advanced than the human one. Using those three senses we read our humans. (Admittedly like reading a book for very young kittens as most of their language is unnessary blah).
We read their body language much better than they read it. We read their tone of voice with an ability much better than theirs. We read the way their scent changes with their emotions and we read the family mixture of scent - hers, his, and mine.We can detect if they have been stroking another cat half an hour ago or which supermarket they went to (they smell different).
Human beings only understand vocalisations.  And because their other senses just don't work, they have to do an awful lot of vocalising in different languages. But we read what is behind or underneath the words: so we don't have to bother with the exact way they vocalise. Much of what they say is very boring anyway. Poor nose blind creatures!
Yours 
George.

5 comments:

  1. Carla, the tuxedo catDecember 10, 2017

    Buongiorno Signore Bianco, you understand so many languages because we, the cats, translate "sounds" to "vibrations"! We do understand "frequency" unlike humans who translate "sounds" to vowels and consonants! Of course, this is only in my humble opinion :-)
    Ciao,
    Carla, the tuxedo cat

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow! Nice view! Can I visit?
    Vegas

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hmm! Just curious where you live! It doesn't look like Switzerland but must be somewhere where everybody speaks 3-4 languages!
    Thea

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh, yes! I can smell a human! I can smell a rat!
    I don't need any language!
    Tom

    ReplyDelete
  5. I had a cat that could read my mind. He always knew when I was going to put him in the cage so I could take him to the vet or force an antibiotic down his throat. Some cats can do that. They have mind-reading abilities, which are better than understanding a spoken language, because they can understand you no matter which language you use, and because when humans talk, sometimes they lie. But when reading your mind, they only see the truth.

    ReplyDelete

Help for cats whose humans show behaviour problems.

This blog is devoted to the study of human behaviour. We cats, who live with this sometimes unpredictable and always feeble minded species, can benefit from seeing their behaviour in its proper scientific context. The study of feline dilemmas, training problems, and difficulties with humans, can only benefit all of us. All of us train our humans - to buy the right food, for instance, but many of us do not have knowledge of how to improve our training methods. The human species is obviously not as intelligent as the cat, but nevertheless can learn quite a lot - if properly managed. Topics of interest include the use of claw and order, purring as a human reward, rubbing your human up the right way, when to bite, spraying as a method of making our wishes known, ignoring the human, human harassment, human inattention and sheer human stupidity. I welcome your questions. Photos can be sent via my secretary's website, www.celiahaddon.com This blog has been chosen as one of the top 50 feline blogs by Online VetTechprogramms.org