Question to those who have one or more cats at home: how does the feline greet you when you come home after a long day at work? Does he rub up against you, yawn loudly, meow…? Your answers will probably vary from person to person – especially when it comes to meowing: there are cats that never stay quiet, others that are much more restrained in their vocalizations.
Have you ever wondered why? The answer is… in your sex: if you are male, it is very likely that your cat meows more often at you than, for example, at your partner. A Turkish study published in the journal says so Ethologywhich also tries to explain the reasons for these gender-based differences.
Home movies. Compared to traditional studies on cat behavior, the one from Ankara University has an advantage: it is not based on what is reported by humans but on videos recorded for the occasion. The experiment involved 31 people, who were asked to record their return home after a day of work, with the request to behave in the most natural way possible.
The researchers analyzed the videos in search of 22 different behaviors, ranging from meows to yawns (which are often a sign of stress) to all those signals related to the request for food, from heading towards the bowl to rubbing one’s legs. The analysis revealed the link between some of these behaviors: social ones almost always occur in pairs with those that indicate a request for space, demonstrating that cats’ communication is more complex than it might seem.
Males versus females. The most interesting element, however, is related to a behavior that does not seem to have links to anything else, and which is therefore managed separately from cats: let’s talk about meowing. Which is the only feline behavior that changes depending on the sex of the human in front of you: when it’s a male, cats tend to vocalize much more during the early stages of the encounter – almost three times as much. And this tendency to “talk” more with males than with females is not influenced by any other factor (age, breed, sex of the animal).
The hypotheses. But why do cats meow more at males than at females? The team has not yet analyzed this difference in depth, but they have some hypotheses: according to them, the reason is to be found in the fact that males tend to be colder, give less attention to cats and tend to “respond” by imitating a meow less often than females do.
In short: if you are male and your cat meows constantly, it’s because you don’t consider it enough.
