Why Talking to Your Cat Actually Matters

I talk to my cats constantly. I narrate what I’m doing in the kitchen, I say good morning to them like they’ve asked how I slept, and when Cory’s trimming their nails and one of them starts to get anxious, I come in and sing to them, which somehow settles them down. For years I assumed this was just a slightly embarrassing thing cat people do. But it turns out the research for doing it is actually there, and your cat might actually be getting more out of these one-sided conversations than they let on.

I mean we’ll never actually know, since our cats can’t speak to us and we can’t understand them …yet. (Have you heard about these cat translator apps that are getting better and better because of technology? It’s kind of crazy.)

What the studies actually show is narrower and, I think, more interesting: your cat knows your specific voice, recognizes the sound of their own name, responds differently when you use your cat voice vs. “talking to other humans” voice, and pays attention even when their only visible reaction is one ear swiveling in your direction.

Here’s what the studies actually found…

Your cat knows your voice, and chooses how to answer

You have to go back to 2013 for the work of Atsuko Saito and Kazutaka Shinozuka. They put 20 house cats in front of some audio: a few strangers who said the cat’s name, followed by the owner. As you’d expect, the cats had more of a response to the owner.

What the study showed is that unlike how dogs react, the cats didn’t really have an overt display. The cats didn’t come over or meow in return. And they kept their tails still. They simply swiveled an ear or turned a head to acknowledge who was there. The bottom line? They knew what was going on but they decided not to react to it. Anyone who’s called for a cat and been met with nothing but a single ear turning their way has basically run this same study at home.

Even if they don’t wanna respond, their ears always do!

— via Reddit.com

They actually recognize their own name

Then in 2019, Saito and his colleagues published a larger, more substantial study. They put 78 cats to the test and found that a house cat can tell its own name apart from other words, even when a complete stranger is the one saying it. It’s an important point, since it means the cat isn’t just latching on to the sound of its owner’s voice; they’ve picked up on the name itself.

But it’s worth being careful with the word “recognize.” The study didn’t prove the cat knows it’s being called by a name, or that it means the same thing that it does to me or you. What was on display was a quantifiable difference in behavior—more of a head tilt, an ear twitch—when their name was used as opposed to a word with a similar ring to it. Over time, with you saying it at every mealtime and hello, the “name” starts to carry a certain weight

They proved this theory in a cat café, where the cats are given different names, and demonstrated no real reaction to those.

Bottom line? Studies shoe that cats know their names if they’re repeated enough consistently, but how they respond to them is up to their mood. Classic cat!

Why cats talk to us at all

Put it this way: the next time you are on the receiving end of a meow, it is worth knowing that adult cats don’t really do that to one another. It’s a habit they made for us. A kitten will meow at its mother, but as they mature, they put that behind them when they’re around other cats. A house cat, however, will keep the practice up for our benefit, with a whole range of chirps and trills meant for the only ones who will actually talk back.

That claim comes from John Bradshaw, an anthrozoologist at the University of Bristol who spent decades studying how cats behave and wrote the book Cat Sense. It isn’t one, big, dramatic experiment; it’s what he and other researchers kept seeing when they watched groups of cats living together, including feral colonies: the adult cats almost never meowed at each other. Well, he does say “rarely” rather than “never,” so cats will occasionally meow among themselves. But the everyday meowing you get at home is your cat deliberately talking to YOU.

And some of that meowing is actually designed to pull at our heart strings (or get us to give them some food most likely LOL). Back in 2009, researchers at the University of Sussex identified the “solicitation purr.” It’s a low rumble with a high-pitched, insistent edge to it. They had non-cat-owners listen in and they found it to be far more pressing than a normal purr (which means they would likely take action if they heard it to make sure their cat was ok of if they needed anything). It seems cats have zeroed in on the very frequency we link to a crying baby. So if the purr you hear in the morning feels a little weaponized, there’s a reason for that. (We knew it!)

The bond behind how you talk to your cat is measurable

One fair question before we wrap up: does any of this talking land on an animal that actually cares that it’s you, or are cats just tolerating us? That’s what a 2019 study from Oregon State looked at. It isn’t about talking at all; it’s about whether the bond is real. Animal-behavior researcher Kristyn Vitale and her team borrowed a classic experiment from research on human babies, called the secure base test. The setup: the cat spends two minutes in an unfamiliar room with their person, then two minutes alone in it, then their person comes back for two minutes. The part that matters is the reunion. A securely attached cat greets their person, calms down, and goes back to checking out the room, treating their person as the home base that makes a strange place feel safe. An insecurely attached cat either clings and can’t settle, or avoids their person altogether.

Roughly 65 percent of the cats were what you would call securely attached; they made their way to their person and then settled in to get comfortable. That’s not far off from what you find with a human infant. So the relationship your talking is building is real, and your voice is wired into it: the earlier studies showed your voice is one of the main ways your cat recognizes that it’s you. All that narrating is part of how you stay their person.

The studies are small, so I’d call all of this what the science suggests rather than proves. But taken together, the results line up, and the picture is a nice one: you talk to your cat because it’s one of the ways they make sense of you and the world around them.

Our vet actually told us to do this

I got the strongest push toward talking to my cats from an unexpected place: the vet. When we had to put Louis on a diet and feed him fewer calories, our vet told us we should have a talk with him, and explain to him that we were going to be putting him on a diet, how much we were going to be feeding him, and why. Ever since then, I try to explain things to Thelma and Louis like another human (which admittedly does make me feel crazy from time to time, LOL).

If we’re going out to dinner, I’ll say, “We’re going out for a drink and dinner with friends. We’ll be back in a couple of hours. Be good, and Louis, please take care of your sister.” Or, “I have to go out of town for work for a few days, but Daddy will be here taking care of you. I’ll be back in three sleeps, and I’ll see you when the sun is shining on Saturday.”

Do they understand the words? Based on everything above, probably not. But the register, the tone, the ritual of it, the fact that it’s my voice doing the explaining, all of that does SOMETHING (IMO). And it actually makes me feel closer to them, which is something I suspect the vet knew.

So what do you actually do with this?

You mostly keep doing what you’re already doing, with a little bit more confidence and understanding that it counts. If you want the cheat sheet:

• Use their name for the good stuff. Meals, treats, attention — not the vet carrier, so the sound keeps a good reputation.
• Narrate the routine. The feeding, the leaving, the coming home. A familiar voice on a predictable schedule is the kind of stability cats lean on.
• Keep the ridiculous cat voice. That higher, sing-songy register is the one the research says they actually respond to.
• Talk through the scary stuff too. The carrier, the car, the nail trim. A calm familiar voice is one of the few comforts you can actually offer in the moment.
• Keep it consistent. Same name, same phrases for the same routines. Cats learn which sounds mean something by how reliably they land.

This might sound obvious, but the one thing I’d let go of is the expectation of a reply. Your cat can recognize your voice, know their name, and feel truly attached to you, and still stare at you and do absolutely nothing when you call. In other words, responding is not the point.

my cat will turn his ears when i call his name a lot, but keep doing what he’s doing and just ignore me. i know that little menace hears me.

— via Reddit.com

He hears you, and that’s the whole thing, so keep talking to them.