I believe there is a factual answer to this question. If mods disagree, please move to MPSIMS.
Our new kitten is now about 3.5 months old. We’ve had her for almost two weeks.
She has never made a noise other than purring … no meowing, no yipping, no nothin’.
The long-suffering Mrs. Spiff and I think is unusual.
Our kitty, Molly by name, came from a shelter and the staff there told us she came from a house with about a dozen other cats of varying ages, and needed adoption because their human owner had died.
So, she must have been exposed to other cats who vocalized.
But Molly is silent.
I played her a few YouTube videos of cats meowing, and her ears perked up … so for that reason and other observations, we know Molly is not deaf.
Do we have a cat that will be silent for the rest of her life, or is there any evidence out there that a silent kitten such as Molly might begin to vocalise sometime later in life?
Not all cats meow with any regularity, and if they do, it may only be in certain circumstances (annoyance, needs, excitement, pain, etc.)
The last few cats I had weren’t typically very vocal, but if I kept meowing to them in various ways – excited, fake sad, etc. – they would sometimes respond accordingly, sometimes meowing back. Eventually one of them got really vocal, but only to me. He’s silent to my partner but now meows at me a bunch.
I guess you can kinda “teach” / encourage them to meow more if you do it to them a lot under the right circumstances. It’s not something they typically use a lot of to each other, but they can learn to do it for humans if you really reinforce it.
She might learn in time. I adopted two brothers as kittens. One purred up a storm, the other almost never purred. I used to say the first got all the purring genes in the family. But after that brother died, the non-purrer took up the slack, and now purrs quite regularly.
Some cats rarely speak. Others quite a bit. Cats don’t really speak to other cats much, if at all. They only speak to humans. Continue speaking to her and continue playing her sounds of other cats. Perhaps she’ll get the message. And as someone suggested, next time she’s at the vet, have them check her out.
We adopted a cat who was about two years old, and he never spoke, and if he did, it was a very soft mew. One day at the vet’s office they took his temperature with a rectal thermometer. Boy, did he speak that day! I stood there astonished and said “Jack! We didn’t think you could speak!” He still never spoke that much, but he would always speak when he saw one of us, a quiet mew, a greeting from him. And he was always quite vocal at the vet’s office, even if he didn’t get his temperature taken.
Our younger cat rarely meowed in her first year, just making maybe squeaky door noises at most. These days she not only meows but won’t shut up when she wants attention. We have an older cat who meows as expected so I don’t know if that factored into it.
If you’ve never heard your cat meow, please don’t be alarmed. This doesn’t mean that anything is necessarily wrong. Some cats are naturally more quiet and don’t feel the need to vocalize.
Note that this was written by a veterinarian who runs a cats-only clinic and has a postgraduate certificate in Small Animal Medicine and a certificate in Advanced Feline Behaviour from the International Society of Feline Medicine.
It might well just be this. Cats communicate primarily with ears, tail, overall body position, and direction and duration of gaze; they do also make a number of vocal noises, but those don’t have the sort of primacy in communication that (usually) spoken language does in humans. Some of them figure out that humans like to communicate primarily by making noises; others either don’t figure this out, or don’t feel that they need to add to the noise level.
Or, especially if she looks like she’s meowing but you don’t hear anything: cats hear into much higher frequencies than humans do, and some of them do their meowing in those high frequencies. Some such cats, over time, will figure out that humans can’t hear them unless they drop their voices; but not all of them will.
We currently have three cats: Snow, a 3-year-old mama cat, and Chai and Kona, her two 2-year-old sons.
Snow kitty is a yakkity kitty. Always meowing, with full expression and vibe. Little questioning meows, loud complaining meows, demanding meows, greeting mews, chirp-purr “I’m happy” meows.
Chai kitty mostly talks to beg for food. A little variety in tone, depending on whether he feels like “tiny baby kitty” begging or “OMG I’m starving here” begging. Plus the occasional “I’m lonely WHERE IS EVERYONE” calling.
Kona kitty is the quiet one of the three. Very few conventional meows. If he’s sleepy and feeling affectionate, he’ll make tiny kitten mews to ask for pets and cuddles, but only then. If he’s hungry, he’ll give little asking meows (much more restrained and polite than his loudmouth brother Chai). And he’ll do loud calling meows if he wants something (a door opened, the water in the bathtub turned on so he can play in the water, etc.)
That page says that cats can hear a much wider range of frequencies than humans can (which is pretty well known), but it doesn’t actually seem to be claiming that any silent meows are making noise outside of the range of human hearing. I’d be curious to see if anybody has hard proof of that happening (e.g. with data captured by infra/ultrasonic transducers).
It appears that some cats just don’t meow. We have one. He purrs just fine and also makes a funny warbling noise when he decides to zoom around the house, but doesn’t meow. Very rarely he will make a small meowing motion with his mouth, but not make any noise that we can hear.
@Atamasama: They’ve got the ears and angle of gaze pretty much right in that chart, too; though they’ve left some out, and I’ve known cats who used the tail twitch differently, and the “high alert” one doesn’t look quite right to me. But that is indeed a pretty good place to start.
My current four:
– Senior cat: very talkative. Meow meow meow pick me up! Meow chirrup meow churrup yes that’s right pat me right there! Can and sometimes does produce a tomcatty yowl, despite having been neutered at about eight months.
– Tricolor cat: generally quiet, except occasionally she produces a purr that can be heard in the next room. Sometimes mews when she wants something, or when being washed by the dog; mew mew mew in a not very large voice.
– Large yellow cat: similar to the tricolor, except his purr’s not loud. Is capable of producing a tomcat yowl, but hasn’t had much use for it since a couple of weeks after he moved in.
– Most recent addition: meowed so much when he was first hanging around and when he first decided to move in that he got named for it. Very rarely says anything now. I guess he’s got what he was meowing for.
I think I have seen that somewhere, but wasn’t able to find it when I checked. It seems a pretty obvious thing to check, though.
I adopted a couple of adult cats when I was in the Army. One could purr but never vocalized. The vet opined that there might be something wrong from a vocal cord because sometimes it was if he were trying to meow, but if I had him close to my face I could just hear a bit of air hiss. I named him “Silent”.
Does your kitty ever look like she’s making mouth movements, like she’s attempting to meow?
If she does and the result is like what I described with Silent, maybe see if you can get a vet to check the vocal cords. But if not, I’d hope that she just hasn’t decided to try it out yet.
Both my current ones are pretty talkative. Allie’s apparently a Siamese mix, Buddy’s a basic generic orange cat. Their predecessor, Felix (believed to be part Maine Coon), didn’t usually have very much to say.
