I Tried to Communicate With My Cats

Every Saturday since my girls were kittens, I have sung, “It’s a soft food Saturday, for my little pussy cats,” to the tune of “Puppy Love” by Donny Osmond when presenting them with their weekly allocation of tinned flesh. I don’t know why it’s that tune and I’m not entirely sure why I sing it several thousand octaves higher than the original but let me tell you, it gets results: The cats go fucking mental. Casual observers who happen to visit on a Saturday morning have been rendered speechless and gaping like Simon Cowell by the spectacle, though I’m yet to receive a call from the Britain’s Got Talent team.

Other tunes have made it into the repertoire, of course. There’s the “I Like Fishy Soup, You Like Fishy Soup” song for when they get the squeezed-out tuna water - that one’s to the tune of “Cheesy Poofs” by South Park’s Eric Cartman, a criminally underrated songwriter. There are original compositions of my own, too, but I wouldn’t want to get a reputation as an oversharer.

I like to think the response to these screeching ditties is that my cats appreciate my singing voice and have divined each song’s meaning - that we, you know, get each other. Scoff if you want to, but it turns out being a high-pitched arsehole like me could actually be the key to meaningful communication with our feline cohabiters.

A new study by Charlotte De Mouzon, from Paris Nanterre University, shows that cats recognise their owners’ voices. Interestingly, if this voice is in a high-pitched, ‘baby’ register, the cat supposedly pays far more attention than if it’s your normal adult conversation voice. The study doesn’t go on to investigate deranged Donny Osmond singing, sadly.

De Mouzon’s team recorded 16 cat owners saying things like, “Do you want a treat?” in both a higher-pitched ‘cat voice’ and a regular human-to-human register. They played these recordings to the cats with their owners out of the room, then filmed and rated the responses. They found the cats reacted more to their owners’ ‘cat voice’ than to their normal voice or to a stranger’s voice - no matter how squeaky the stranger made it. 

Cat behaviour expert Kristyn Vitale, assistant professor of animal health and behaviour at Unity College in Maine, ran similar tests using recorded voices on the Netflix show Inside The Mind Of A Cat and her findings were along the same lines. What does Vitale think of De Mouzon’s ‘baby voice’ verdict?

“This research shows that cats pay attention not only to what their caregiver says but how they say it,” confirms Vitale. This aligns with her own findings that cats behave differently depending on how humans behave toward them. “Many cats prefer human social interaction to other types of rewards. When placed in an unfamiliar situation, the presence of the human caregiver can also significantly reduce stress in cats.”

To test these theories on my own cats, I invited my mate Jim round for a guest appearance in the Soft Food Saturday slot. Unsurprisingly, the cats appeared a little bewildered when this bearded bloke started singing our song to them first thing in the AM. They turned to me for reassurance, ears swivelled backwards, but when I ‘grabbed the mic’ and took over, all was well again - they spun in circles, joined in yowling and skidded around their bowls like a normal Saturday morning. 

The following weekend, I went away and left my neighbour with strict instructions to play a recording of my rendition of “Soft Food Saturday” at the appropriate time. He was so alarmed by their response that he dropped his phone into their food bowl and I had to pay for a new screen for it. 

It’s worth noting that attempts to impress random cats by taking my song to the streets of Hulme, Manchester, did not yield any successful results.

I ask Vitale what she thinks of my cats’ response to my singing. “Cats are very good at learning from different experiences in their environment, including from their owner's behaviour,” she tells me. “It’s possible that your cats have learned that when they hear this special song it signals the availability of food, so they run to you expecting a meal.” Apparently, this is a form of “operant conditioning” - when the animal learns from the consequences of their behaviour. “Operant conditioning is a form of learning that I use all the time when training cats,” she says.

Humans have been trying to communicate with their pets ever since the early days of domestication, and new technology has brought us much closer in recent years; from AI-powered collars that categorise dog barks into emotions to the hexagonal soundboards with buttons you’ve probably seen on TikTok. A lot has been made of TikTok phenomenon Bunny, a dog whose owner claims to have trained her to use one of these soundboards to form rudimentary sentences like: “Bunny want food,” or more existentially, “When no Bunny?” Dog people will have you believe that their best friends are more intelligent and easier to train than cats but with research into cat behaviour around 15 years behind that of dogs, we’re only just starting to understand how well cats interact with humans. Fans of Bunny may or may not be aware that there’s also a cat called Billi who uses this kind of mat.

I ask Vitale if there’s evidence to suggest cats are too cool to be trained like dogs, but she insists that simply isn’t the case. “I’ve offered training classes and socialisation sessions for both kittens and adult cats and they’ve learned many behaviours, some of them pretty complex,” she says. “Cats get a bad rap for being untrainable, but they’re able to learn just the same way as dogs.” Vitale suggests that if you’re finding it hard to train your cat, it’s probably a you problem. “It’s possible they’re not using preferred items to reward the behaviour, which leaves their cat unmotivated to participate in the training session.” She goes on to add that a higher proportion of the cats they tested preferred social attention than food. 

I tried a couple more techniques from Inside The Mind of a Cat on my own moggies: Slow blinking is apparently like a cat kiss but when I did it both my cats stared back at me like I had lost my mind. But a nose boop got good results from my fluffy cat Rudi - she closed her eyes and smushed her nose happily into my outstretched finger. 

I ask Vitale for other ways to deepen my relationship with my cats beyond my successful singing method. She proposes regular training sessions starting with basic behaviour like ‘sit’, ‘high-five’ or ‘targeting’ - when the animal learns to touch an object with a part of their body. 

“You can train the cat so when they touch an object, like a chopstick, they get a reward,” Vitale explains. “After you do this over and over, the cat will learn to approach and touch the chopstick when they see it. You can then use this to communicate with your cat.” She suggests guiding your cat into its carrier using the stick, instead of picking them up and forcing them in.

It’s early days, but I’ve started training sessions with my cats and have had varying results, shall we say. Rudi has learned to ‘stand’, while Sheena seems less keen to please but maybe I’m yet to find her preferred method. Soft Food Saturday is still doing the trick for them both and I’m optimistic they’ll pick up some other moves if we persevere.

So if you’re shrill AF when you talk to your cats like I am, take heart, actual science supports our behaviour - no matter how much our friends and neighbours want us to STFU. I, for one, am thrilled to have confirmation that communication between me and my cats is the real deal. If you’ve not tried performing a special celebratory meal time song for your cats, maybe give Soft Food Saturday a whirl. Now I’m off to develop some new material for a demo EP because somebody’s got to cash in on this. 

@keliseating