Cats meow more at men to get their attention, study suggests

Over 10,000 years of domestication, cats have learned to meow to get exactly what they want from their human servants. Now, researchers in Turkey have found that cats greet men far more vocally than they do women — and this could be another way they manipulate us to get the attention they deserve.

The new research reveals "cats' ability to categorize bonded individuals and modulate their responses," said study co-author Kaan Kerman, principal investigator of the Animal Behavior and Human-animal Interactions Research Group at Bilkent University in Turkey. "This shows that cats are not automata and possess cognitive abilities that enable them to live alongside humans in an adaptive manner," he told Live Science in an email.

Despite their reputation for being aloof and unfriendly, cats are actually highly communicative and masters at fitting into different social groups.

"Both the public imagination and the scientific community for a time viewed cats as loners with little need for social bonds," Kerman said. However, "cats are more social than previously assumed. They do not interact with humans solely to obtain food. They actively seek social contact and form bonds with their caregivers."

Greeting is a key part of that sociability, as it helps reinforce bonds between domestic cats (Felis catus) and their humans, the researchers wrote in the study, which was published Nov. 14 in the journal Ethology.

To find out more about how cats greet humans, the researchers fitted 40 cat owners with cameras. They were asked to film the first 100 seconds of their interactions with their cat after returning home. The participants were told to act normally so they could capture typical interactions. The researchers then analyzed the footage to assess whether certain behaviors are related, and whether different demographic variables influenced the cats' behaviors.

Nine people were excluded from the study for various reasons, but videos from the remaining 31 participants revealed that the cats were far more vocal toward men than women when their humans first walked in. "No other demographic factor had a discernible effect on the frequency or duration of greetings," the researchers wrote.

The researchers then accounted for different factors, such as the animals' sex, pedigree status and number of cats in the household — but found that the sex of the human was the only significant influence on cat vocalizations.

The researchers suggest this could be because women are typically more verbally active with their cats and better at interpreting what their cats want. Men, on the other hand, may need a lot more prompting before they pay sufficient attention to their cats, the researchers hypothesized in the study.

The team also speculate that cultural factors may have influenced their findings. Previous research shows that people in different cultures interact with cats in different ways — and that this also impacts how cats interact with humans. In this case, the participants were in Turkey, and it may be that men in Turkey are less likely to be chatty with their cats, the team wrote. "However, this interpretation remains speculative and warrants further exploration in future research," the team wrote.

The team also found that meowing and other vocalizations didn't fit into a specific pattern of behavior — meaning these vocalizations were not a sign of a specific emotional state or need.

The team acknowledged that the study has several limitations, including the small sample size and the participants being from the same region. The researchers also noted that the study did not control for other potentially important factors, such as how hungry the cats were when their humans returned, the number of other people in the household or the length of time the animals were alone. Previous research suggested that cats react differently to humans — such as by purring and stretching more — when they are separated for longer periods of time, so the results don't necessarily reveal that cats always meow more at men.

"One important next step is to replicate the findings in different cultural contexts. This would help us understand how generalizable the results are," Kerman said.

Dennis Turner, director of the Institute for Applied Ethology and Animal Psychology in Switzerland who was not involved in the study, said he was impressed by the team's findings.

"I liked the authors' speculation about the reason for this finding and suspect that the men either were less attentive to the cats' vocalizations on other occasions or reacted differently (more or less strongly, different voice frequency) to the greeting vocalizations than women," he told Live Science in an email.

"Much of my team's research [h]as shown that men and women (and children) interact differently with cats in the household." For instance, women speak more to cats and are likelier to go down to the cats' level to interact with them, he noted.

However, cats likely have no preference towards men or women, Turner added. Instead, he agreed with the researchers' view that more meowing toward men is a sign of cats' social flexibility.

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