Wild cats need love too

How close do you feel to your cat? Will it always return to you for dinner? Well despite their reputation as less loyal than dogs, it seems like cats may have a natural ability to recognise voices of individual humans like their owners.

At Oakland University, Professor Jennifer Vonk has been studying different species of wild cat, and she believes they have a “remarkable ability to discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar human voices.” Voice recognition has been studied a lot in domesticated animals, but this new study has explored it among species like lions, tigers and cheetahs, definitely not ones you could keep as a pet.

With carefully crafted experiments, Vonk’s team found strong evidence of voice recognition in 25 varied wild cats. In the pilot and main studies, they responded quicker and for longer when hearing familiar voices, compared to that of strangers. Even when the unfamiliar voices used the cats’ names or rearing history, this didn’t affect their affinity towards the familiar humans.

The results suggest that it’s not domestication that makes housecats good at telling humans apart, but simply close human contact. It also goes against the idea that species with less social behaviour lack these abilities compared to their “friendlier” relatives. Professor Vonk stresses that “we should not neglect the study of social cognition in less highly social species.”

When you think about how widespread cats are, how much humans love to have them in their homes, it’s clear how important these findings could be. Knowing how and why they interact with, and distinguish between, humans could change how we view their welfare and interactions. This study is just one in a growing number re-evaluating cats, and challenging the stereotype of them as “aloof creatures”. It reminds us to not overlook the brainpower of different animals, even the ones we would like to keep to themselves.

by Louis Davies @louis.on.air

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Source:

Crews, T., Vonk, J. and McGuire, M. (2024) Catcalls: exotic cats discriminate the voices of familiar caregivers. PeerJ 12e:16904 http://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16904