As soon as you leave the room, this is what cats do. This is a couple dancing to Prince's 1980s hit 'Purple Rain' album. Just out of camera shot are the empty bottles of wine and overflowing ash trays. Parasites! We think they're cute just because they purr, as if they love us, but all the while they're thinking, 'Ha-ha! Suckers!' Expect a backlash against the cat community in the wake of this shocking news...
Courtesy of BBC News
Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans. Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a "soliciting purr" to overpower their owners and garner attention and food.
Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a "cry", with a similar frequency to a human baby's. The team said cats have "tapped into" a human bias - producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore.
Dr Karen McComb, the lead author of the study that was published in the journal Current Biology, said the research was inspired by her own cat, Pepo. "He would wake me up in the morning with this insistent purr that was really rather annoying," Dr McComb told BBC News.
"After a little bit of investigation, I discovered that there are other cat owners who are similarly bombarded early in the morning."
While meowing might get a cat expelled from the bedroom, Dr McComb said that this pestering purr often convinced beleaguered pet lovers to get up and fill their cat's bowl. To find out why, her team had to train cat owners to make recordings of their own cats' vocal tactics - recording both their "soliciting purrs" and regular, "non-soliciting" purrs.
"When we played the recordings to human volunteers, even those people with no experience of cats found the soliciting purrs more urgent and less pleasant," said Dr McComb.
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