Every time I see a video of a cat that’s just meowing constantly, I think about how they developed meowing exclusively as a way to communicate with humans.
Past kittenhood, I mean. Kittens meow for the same reason human babies cry; to tell their mom “I have needs and wants and I’m so so small and I hardly even know it!” But adult cats have other ways to communicate with each other. They only continue to meow because they realize it’s the only part of their language that gets have anything close to the correct response from humans.
Anyway. Whenever I see videos like this where a human and cat are doing that sort of call-and-response routine, like-
*human talks at the cat like its a person*
*human talks at cat like its a person*
-so on and so forth, like I dunno, it just hits different somehow. Like it’s not the same as dogs barking at humans, dogs barking is a “natural” dog instinct (to my knowledge), but adult meowing is a specifically domestic behavior. They developed it for us. They know we can’t really understand them, the same way the mom in this video knows the cat can’t understand her, but they meow at us anyway. And this cat’s plaintive meows are it begging to be set free of the grooming torture, obviously, but sometimes it seems like it’s just a call and response.
Like you’ll see a video of a human talking at a cat, and the cat meows back between sentences, and the cat is like lying with its eyes half closed or sitting with its back turned to the human and it’s meowing back anyway and you stop and think about it and realize that they’re doing the same thing.
The cat and the human talking at each other when they don’t need anything from each other, that’s- that’s just conversation. It’s literally cross-species small talk, because both the cat and the human are engaging in it just for the sake of hearing a response back.
They can’t understand each other at all, but they continue to communicate purely for the sake of communication. For the pleasure of each other’s company. For the sake of socializing with each other. We don’t even understand each other, and it’s still small talk.
And you think about that and you remember again that adult cats without humans don’t meow and it’s just their human company comfort language and you cry.
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