The other day I was watching I Am Legend, and in the beginning, there’s a scene where a lion jumps out, roars and attacks. My TV is hooked up to my stereo speakers, and it was pretty loud.
My cat was standing on the coffee table, checking out the haps outside from the window, and she normally completely ignores the TV. She doesn’t respond at all to cat sounds, dogs barking, birds chirping, or any other sound from the TV.
This time, however, when she heard that roar, she flipped around in like a tenth of a second, and panicked for a couple of seconds. She looked like this: :eek: but in cat form. I have to admit, it was hilarious.
WAG: A roar seems to me to be a pretty hardwired sound of “I’m gonna kick someone’s ass, and it’s gonna be yours if you’re right in front of me.” Plus, if you have a good soundsystem, the bass of the roar can also communicate the full range of the “emotion” behind it. Has she heard other primal danger/warning sounds on tv? Monkeys screaming, bears bellowing, etc? She might have reacted to the sound because it pinged her “danger” sensor, but a regular dog bark wouldn’t have the same weight to it.
Ha! I wish I could have seen your cat’s face. That sounds hilarious. One of the funniest things I ever saw was when we let our pet rabbit hop around the house. The cat came around the corner, having no idea what was coming, and there was THE BIGGEST MOUSE SHE’D EVER SEEN!!! She made the :-o face, too.
From time to time I’ll catch myself watching lions on the Discovery Channel or whatever, and my cats never pick up on their sounds. Maybe my TV isn’t producing the same level of bass that a real lion’s roar in the wild would create, and thus my felis domesticus doesn’t register it.
My cats ignore the sounds of animals through the TV speakers but think it’s the real thing when played through my stereo. The best one is a commercial about a dog named Roscoe, my cat Roscoe will hear his name being called and he will run to source of the name calling, my stereo.
The only TV ‘animal’ sound my cat has ever responded to wasn’t even an actual animal sound.
First night in my new apartment, kitty was nervous so she was living on my lap or in my arms if I was standing up. So I was standing there, holding kitty, flipping channels on my TV.
flip
Me: ‘Hey, cool. Jurassic Park!’
T-Rex: ROAR!
She freaked. Leapt off my shoulder with her claws out, leaving me with shredded skin (still got the scars). She stayed under the bed for over 24 hours.
I went to the zoo when I was a kid. We were 10 feet from a lion who let out a jungle roar. My dad said he turned to ask me if I thought that was loud. I was gone. I was outside the exhibit and past the door . I never heard a lion roar but I knew I did not want to be there.
One of my cats had never heard thunder or rain before. Actually, neither had, but she was the only one to react. Back in Oregon I played Holy Diver, andshe just syarted flipping out at the sound of wind and thunder. Unfortunately for her, she was destined to live in Missouri. She has had it rough the last few months and today is no exception. I only hope she is easy access when the sirens go, so I can get her to the tornado room.
I imagine cats know what a roar sounds like, though they wouldn’t have any idea about lions per se. It would be worthwhile to have an instinctive fear aroused by roaring noises, because in many situations in the wild it means something very nasty is about to go down. I always guessed that the reason many animals are frightened by thunder is that they instinctively (mis)react to it as a threatening noise from a big animal. Of course, animals have to be physically large, and have big resonant spaces in their upper respiratory systems, to make loud rumbling noises. Anything with big resonant spaces in its upper respiratory system almost certainly has big jaws and teeth in the same neighborhood.
To add one data point, I think they’re as much guided by the sounds as by the visuals. We had a very smart cat once who blithely ignored the TV for years, until one night we watched a certain nature program in which a mouse was scurrying through some undergrowth and making lots of rustling sounds. Major perking up ensued, with our cat rushing right up to the screen, sitting upright on her haunches, and taking it all in. The thing is, though, this was a large-screen TV, and this mouse was, like, one or two freakin’ feet long. IRL, none of our cats would’ve confronted a gigantic mutant mouse like that, so either our girl understood that this was merely a TV image, or that it was artificially magnified, or both. But she was still very excited by it.
I have a screen saver on my Mac that has a featureless humpback whale and her calf swimming slowly from side to side, followed by a fast porpoise. My two boys are entranced by this, and it’s strictly visual - there’s no sounds at all.
Maybe a cat can recognize the lions roar as a sound made by another cat, only a MUCH larger one. I have known a few cats in my day who were afraid of NOTHING but other cats. I’ve also known cats who were friendly to all other cats, but afraid of humans, cars, thunderstorms, small children, etc.
Cats are all personality all the time. Why? Because they can be.
Or, maybe it WAS the bass, doesn’t a lot of bass noise do something to your heart? Maybe your kitty has a tiny little minor heart condition and the bass made her skip a few beats and that was what scared her.
Jurassic Park was the first DVD I bought, to play in my brand shiny new DVD player with 5.1 surround sound and the speakers to match. Poor cat was in the middle of the room when I went straight to that scene.
I’ve never seen him smoosh himself so flat into the carpet. He really couldn’t move until I turned it off.
In my pop science readings (sorry, no cite), I have read that evolution has divided up the sound spectrum of the natural world as efficiently as the FCC auctions off the wireless spectrum. This helps keep all organisms from accidentally interfering with one another’s communications, and it also helps with identifying the threat or opportunity associated with each one. One study noted that the sound of fingernails on chalk, well-known for giving humans the heebie-jeebies, falls in the same spectrum as monkeys screeching in alarm. We don’t think there’s a monkey loose in the classroom, we just get an awful unnameable feeling.
Having originated from a place where other great cats evolved, domestic cats probably have the entire bass spectrum at any non-trivial intensity flagged as “haul ass”. They don’t know what lions sound like, per se, but they are wired to react expedient to that general range of sound.
There’s a Rossy CD called ‘Island of Ghosts’, and the 11th track features the sounds of lemurs recorded in the wild. I’ve never seen the cats freak out like that before - stalking throughout the apartment trying to figure out where the intruders were. It has happened every time we’ve put that particular disc on. Just something about the sound, I guess.
When I first got my surround sound system I popped in The Matrix. I was sitting on the couch enjoying the heck out of the nifty new speakers. My cats were on the couch as well, just hanging out.
Then we got to the scene where the agents have Morpheus tied up in a building. All is cool until the scene in the movie where the fire sprinklers went off, which kinda sounds like rain. And definitely sounds like falling water.
At that point my cats decided to leave the room in a rapid as manor as possible. Except, since the movie was in surround sound, they couldn’t figure out which way to run. They jumped up bolted two steps one way, stopped, bolted the other way for a couple steps then stopped turned around and bolted the other way a couple steps. Lather rinse repeat. All while their little tails were fluffed up and they were in full on freak out mode.
