Somehow my cat has figured out that when I am on the phone I won’t shoo him off my lap, and when I make a call he is immediately there to jump into my lap before I have even finished dialing. What I’m wondering is how he can be so ‘johnny-on-the-spot’ about hitting my lap. He doesn’t come over when I just pick up the phone without wanting to call, such as to untwist the cord. My hypothesis is that as soon as he hears the first time I push a number and begin to dial he starts his journey immediately. However, I’m suprised that cat hearing would be that good, does anyone know if a cat could actually hear the sound from the earpiece of a telephone from 10 feet away?
According to this study, cats can hear a wider range of frequencies than humans. In fact, they can hear much higher frequencies even than dogs, renowned for their hearing.
Here’s a suggestion: try just picking up the receiver without dialing and see if the cat comes a-runnin’. He may actually be responding to the dial tone.
Just be thankful he’s *only *reading, and not actually placing his own thoughts in there…or is he?
On a more serious note, he’s probably responding to your body language, or other nonverbal clues. When you are ‘settling in’ to talk on the phone you probably carry yourself differently than when you are just ‘testing him’. You might not notice it, and I probably wouldn’t, but to your cat it might be very apparent…
I think cats can hear really well. Whenever my husband calls me on my cell, apparently the cat can hear him speaking when I’m talking to him, and he nearly breaks all four ankles trying to get to the phone when he hears my husband’s voice. He doesn’t do this if anyone else calls me on that phone. Just my husband. So, I think he can hear his voice rather well.
This cat was found, and adopted by my husband about 6 years ago, when he found him as a tiny kitten, at a truck stop in northern Ohio, near the lake. It was a frigid, rainy/snowy night, and the kitten was a total mess. My husband brought him to his truck, dried him off, warmed him up, and bought all the amenities that a newly adopted kitten would need. A new litterbox, litter, Kitten Chow, a baby blanket, food and water dishes and toys. The cat lived in the truck with him for the following two years.
This cat SERIOUSLY misses my husband now that he’s not able to bring along a pet in the truck with him.
I strongly believe that while dogs are social animals who relate to humans through their pack instincts, cats being lone hunters who avoid each other only have two natural instinctual ways of relating to humans and other cats, their relationship with their mother and with their litter-mates when they are kittens. I am quite sure that my cats are certain that I am their mama. I would suspect that Baggins thinks your husband is his mama too
I’m positive he does, AllFreedomUnlessDefyingScience!
We weren’t sure that he’d even make it, so we took him to our vet as soon as my husband made it home a few days later. He’s now one of our 4 felines, and he’s a very happy boy!
None of our other cats do the phone thing when he calls, or when anyone else calls, either. Just Baggins, and only when my husband calls.
While I don’t discount body language completely I think it’s not a big factor here, as he usually sleeps behind me and the chair I sit in obscures most of my body from view. In addition, like most cats, at any given moment the only thing he’s looking at is the inside of his eyelids as he is usually ‘cat-napping’ but as soon as I start to dial BAM he’s up, across the room, and either in my lap, or pushing at me to back up from the desk to give him room to jump up. I don’t think I make any particular noises myself when I plan to dial, it’s not like I say “It’s time to call someone” or anything, I just pick up the phone and start dialing. I’m still thinking he can hear the sound of me dialing and differentiate it between the sound of the dial tone even from 10 feet or more away.
This article says cats can hear sounds four to five times further away than humans can – in other words a sound you can hear at 10 ft, a cat can hear it at 40 ft. Cats can also locate the source of a sound in a fraction of a second. They also have an extremely strong ability to distinguish between tones. http://animal.discovery.com/cat-guide/cat-anatomy/ears-hearing.html
Every night after eating, I will go sit on the couch and Mr. Sali will take a mini-bar of dark chocolate, break it in half, and give me a piece. My cat will then materialize out of thin air and sit with his tail curled around Mr. Sali’s foot, waiting. Not for chocolate, but for Mr. S to give him a pinch of catnip, their nightly ritual. The crinkling sound of a chocolate wrapper means catnip is sure to follow!
I don’t think that is correct. I have two cats, one given to me by a friend and one adopted from a shelter. Both like me to pet and caress them, and they both like to rub their scents all over me. One of them, the 4-year old male (Wilson) also enjoys the company of a 6-yr old neighborhood male cat and whimpers when this cat leaves our house in the morning. All three are neutered.
Our Hoot the Bad Kitty can be dead asleep in another room and hear me open my sewing box. It’s a box with leather hinges. It doesn’t creak or anything. I try to do it as soundlessly as possible, and yet, there he is before it’s even all the way open. It’s a blink of an eye thing.
Sewing box, you say? Yes, Hoot loves thread more than food, more than catnip, more than his bouncy balls which he catches in midair and returns to us for hours of repeated throwing, and certainly more than he loves me. He’ll shred me to get to the thread. I cannot sew around him, what with needles being sharp and Hoot being completely insane. If he gets ahold of any thread, he eats it, of course, which I believe to be detrimental to his health, so I try to get it away from him, which generally results in bloodshed. He’s called Hoot the Bad Kitty for good reasons. Now I lock him in a bedroom so I can sew on a button, and just listen to his pitiful frantic mewling because he *hears * and he *knows *when I’ve opened the sewing box.
I have a pair of cats and they are actual liter mates which may be part of the effect, however, they bathe each other and can be affectionate with one another, and then fight the next. However, no matter how viscous their fights sound, neither of them ever shows any sign of having a wound. It has been proposed by those who study cats scientifically that domesticated cats, particularly those who do not go outside, live in a state of ‘perpetual kittenhood’ and over the years my experiences with multiple cats support both that, and the idea that they relate to each other more as fellow liter mates than the way cats relate in the wild, where they are all territorial loners, both male and female, with the exception of the period of mother-child relationship before adulthood.
