Vegetarian Star

The Office‘s Angela Kinsey and Jenna Fischer admit they both own pretty vocal cats.

“I’ve never had a cat who meows and chatters as much as he does,” Fischer told PEOPLEPets.com at the La Femme International Film Festival Celebrity Gala. “He’s a very vocal cat.”

Kinsey, whose character on the show is an eccentric cat owning woman, says her cat, Otter, sounds like he is always on the prowl for a female. “He’s chatty, but it kind of scares me,” she said. “It sounds like maybe a cat in heat. That’s just him [being] happy.”

Any cat owner knows felines have a way of communicating with humans, but is it actual language they’re getting across or mere vocal utterances? Regardless of the answer to that question, a graduate student at Cornell University found domesticated cat noises seem to be successful in one area in particular–getting the human to respond as needed.

In a study described as one where “no cats were harmed in the experiment, although a few human eardrums were stretched,” Nicholas Nicastro compiled dozens of vocal samples from cats and played them for human volunteers who were asked to rate them for pleasantness and appeal and examined what acoustic features accompanied each sound.

“The sounds rated as more urgent (or less pleasant) were longer,” Nicastro said, “with more energy in the lower frequencies, along the lines of ‘Mee-O-O-O-O-O-W!’ Whereas, the sounds rated as more pleasant (or less demanding) tended to be shorter, with the energy spread evenly through the high and low frequencies. These sounds started high and went low, like ‘MEE-ow.'”

The urgent, lower frequency meows are for when kitty wants food and the shorter, high and low frequency sounds come when the cat is less demanding, such as wanting playtime.

Interestingly enough, Nicastro’s experiment with African Wild Cats may prove that wild animals were never meant to be kept with humans as pets, as those cats didn’t sound like they were looking for anything from humans. Or maybe they never learned how to ask for it, thus never became domesticated.

“Those cats sounded permanently angry,” Nicastro continued. “If they were looking for affection, they weren’t expressing themselves very well.”

Maybe they were upset about being stuck in a zoo versus the wild or a sanctuary.

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