Purrtty please? Science proves that cats meow to manipulate humans to do their bidding

A scientific breakthrough underscores what my cat-fanatic editor has long believed: humans are essentially simps for their cats.Researchers from the University of São Paulo in Brazil have found that a cat’s meow is essentially a demand that we, their mortal lessers, solve their problem.To prove the point, scientists introduced an “unsolvable task” to 38 domestic cats to assess what happened when their simp solvers were present versus nowhere in sight.Shockingly, the nonplussed felines were four times more likely to get vocal when a human was there to hear them.

“These results are consistent with meowing playing a communicative role in cat-human interactions,” the study authors wrote in a paper published in Animal Behaviour.It’s well established that cats meow frequently and at great volume when their humans are around and are decidedly mum in their own company.Further, feral cats meow at a much lower rate than their domesticated brethren, indicating that the sound is at least partially influenced by the presence of human beings.

Earlier research found that the sounds domesticated cats make have evolved over time to make the tone more coercive to humans.“Short, higher-pitched sounds are more pleasing to our auditory system, because young humans have high-pitched voices, so cats have evolved to curry our favor,” Jonathan Losos writes in “The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved From the Savanna to Your Sofa.”Over thousands of years of cohabitation, their purrs have also evolved to sound “nicer” to our ears. However, it is the meow, specifically, that seems designed to make us do their bidding, with different pitches that loosely translate to “feed me, you knave;” “permit me royal entry through this blocked portal, worm;” and “you are sanctioned to pet me, plebe.”In this latest round of research, Naila Fukimoto of the University of São Paulo and her team recruited 38 feline familiars who had a history of meowing for and around food.E...