DESCRIPTION – Although they seem to have nothing to do with it, they are sensitive to the human voice and understand that it is them we are talking to.
Slumped on the sofa, completely passive, barely worthy of moving his ears when you speak to him, your cat doesn’t seem to… but he listens to you. He even pays attention to what you tell him. But if someone else addressed him in exactly the same terms, he would not listen. This is the conclusion of a study carried out by Charlotte de Mouzon, ethologist at the Ethology Cognition and Development Laboratory (University of Nanterre) and published in a journal from the Nature group, Pet cognition.
“A survey conducted earliert allowed us to highlight that cat owners changed the way they spoke when addressing their animals», the scientist explains. Very often, more than the words, what characterizes the language intended for cats is a change of intonation with a higher note and a certain melody, a bit like when we talk to babies.
Like dogs, cats seem to have a special bond with the people who care for them on a daily basis.
Charlotte de Mouzon, ethologist at the Cognition and Development Ethology Laboratory (University of Nanterre)
“So we wondered if cats were particularly sensitive to this language…
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