Susanne Schötz - The Secret Language of Cats: How to Understand Your Cat for a Better, Happier Relationship

Have you ever wondered what your cat is saying? Cats do not meow randomly, nor do they growl or hiss because they have nothing better to do. Cat sounds have a purpose, and they can carry important messages, whether for us or other cats.

Susanne Schtz is hard at work on breaking the cat code. She is a professor at Lund University in Sweden, where a long-standing research program is proving that cats do actually use vocal communicationwith each other and with their human caretakers. Understanding the vocal strategies used in human-cat communication will have profound implications for how we communicate with our pets, and has the potential to improve the relationship between animals and humans within several fields, including animal therapy, veterinary medicine and animal sheltering.

In The Secret Language of Cats , Schtz offers a crash course in the phonetic study of cat sounds. She introduces us to the full range of feline vocalizations and explains what they can mean in different situations, and she gives practical tips to help us understand our cats better.

Praise for The Secret Language of Cats

What would my cat say to me? The book reveals it and gives a crash course in cat language.

BILD Frankfurt

Schtz offers many useful tips for dealing with cats; the book is also well set up with tables and glossary for practical use.

Der Bund

In a meticulous evaluation of seen and heard signals, [Schtz] has cracked many codes of cat language and summarized them in her book.

Kurier

A cat moans, growls and hisses. Their sounds have meaning and system. Phonetics professor Susanne Schtz explains what they mean.

GEO Wissen

SUSANNE SCHTZ researches and teaches in Lund, Sweden, where she is an associate professor of phonetics. She lives with her husband and five cats.

The Secret Language of Cats

How to Understand Your Cat for a Better, Happier Relationship

Susanne Schtz

Translated by Peter Kuras

To Lars, for putting up with my crazy-cat-lady behavior and for loving all of our cats as much as I do.

Contents

Preface

Why is the Language of Cats (Still) a Secret?

It is a fair question. Since this book presents the sounds that cats use in their vocal communication with other cats as well as with us humans and describes them carefully, and even uses sound and video to clarify, the language of cats is actually not a secret anymore, right? And yet, even after my numerous studies of cat sounds, something still seems to elude me, and remains hidden, like a secret. And is not this last little bit of mystery the reason that we continue to investigate, the reason that we want to comprehend everything a little bit more precisely? For me, at least, the answer is a resounding yes.

Cats express themselves vocally differently than humans. We have to begin by observing their behavior closely so that we can learn their vocal communicative signals and come to understand them as complete beings. We have to crack their secret code.

We begin by examining the assumption that everyone understands a word in the same way, that everyone defines words identically. But is that really the case? Take the word yes. Does yes always mean yes? Or is it sometimes actually more of a yeah? Or even occasionally a no? The meaning of a word, what the speaker intends when they say something, always depends on the context, as well as on the speakers emotional condition or attitude. Its a good thing that if a word produced by a human speaker is unclear, you can always ask for clarification.

What about foreign languages? Well, if I do not know any Hungarian, for example, I can rely on Hungarian dictionaries and on translations. Hungarian has a grammar, and there are books about the Hungarian language which I can rely on for help. I can take language courses at a community college or a university. I can practice with native speakers.

It is different with cat language. Even if I think that I understand a cat sound correctly and can imitate it somewhat accurately, I can never be 100 percent sure that I have interpreted it correctly, whether I am using it in the right context, and how I might interpret it or even try to translate it into a human language. Cats do not have a language that works like a human language.

Even so, we can approach the vocal language of cats and learn to understand it better. The sounds of animals belong to a kind of communication that depends on the situation or context in which the sounds are uttered. You have to study the circumstances of those utterances very closely before you can begin to recognize patterns, let alone a system. In order to study cat sounds more systematically, we can play our cats prerecorded clips of cat sounds and study their reactions very closely. We can analyze the results and interpret the reasons that a specific sound produces a specific reaction.

These are exactly the kinds of studies I conducted with my cats. Although I am pretty sure that the trilling or cooing with which my cat Kompis greets me every morning is a form of friendly hello, I will never be able to enter his vocalization into a dictionary, as cat language does not have words and sentences with a grammar, with structural rules for how to compose words, phrases and sentencesand what these units meanas is familiar to us from human language.

What does help, if we want to understand the language of cats, is paying attention to the context in which a cat expresses itself. While human languages ascribe identical or similar meanings to different words (a table is called Tisch in German, bord in Swedish and zhuozi in Mandarin Chinese), cat sounds always seem to be tightly bound to specific situations. One-to-one translation from human language to cat language and vice versa are therefore impossible. We cannot look something up in Cat. One more reason, then, that the language of cats remains a secret.

What is more, we still know very little about the various categories, subcategories and variants of cat sounds. Most human languages also have variants such as dialects and sociolects that are used within a specific group, sometimes defined geographically and sometimes defined sociologically, e.g. through geographical location, profession or age. These linguistic variants can still be understood, translated and described. Cats, too, may have developed something similar to dialects: in the situations where they have been successful with vocal communication, they will probably continue to communicate with such sounds, and can develop multiple variations (or even learn them from other cats or from their humans) in order to communicate their message more clearly. There are therefore similar sounds that can be distinguished through different vowels or different melodic patterns though they appear in the same context.

Every cat develops, in the course of the life they share with their humans, unique sounds that suit the specific relationship and needs for communication. It is highly likely that the cat has identified sounds that will trigger the expected results from their humans or fellow cats more quickly. Another reason that the language of cats remains a secret is that we can neither precisely interpret, exactly learn, nor perfectly describe these sounds. Every cat has its own secret language, known only to its trusted humanand even then, only if that human listens closely enough.