Again, this might have been the Silent Meow I referenced a bit up in the thread, and may not have been silent but just ultrasonic.
It is of course possible that there was something wrong with the particular cat’s vocal chords. But the Silent Meow is pretty common; and most of those cats can vocalize even if they’ll only do so from sudden pain or in a cat fight.
Right. We inherited a young girl cat from our neighbor who had to move across the nation, and she never meowed until just recently when she noticed it was working for one of our other cats. And even so, she hardly ever does it. One of our rescued feral cats never meowed either.
Right,
Ain’t nuthin’ generic about gingers, they are all special!
I named one of my kittens Willis, specifically so I could say “whatchoo talkin’ 'bout, Willis?”. Unfortunately he never talks about anything.
So true. We lost our ginger guy last year; he had the loudest purr of any cat I ever heard and boy do I miss that guy. Our current little calico girl barely purrs. She walks around crabbing/meowing if dinner is late or the person on whose lap she is resting gets up too often, but rarely purrs and it’s a very soft little sound. On the other hand she didn’t even meow for the first three or four months we had her (she was adopted at almost 2) so who knows, maybe she’ll develop a resonant purr.
I had a few minutes so found this:
The article is dense, likely of interest to cat lovers, but table 2 lists mews up to 1,200 kHz.
Thanks for all the replies.
I’ve learnt that a non-meowing cat is much more common than I thought.
And also that our kitten may or may not develop a voice as she matures.
Either way, we’ll give her so much love.
(She’s a ginger, too.)
Sounds so high a bat can’t make them and a cat can’t hear anyway? Could be bullshit.
Or could be that some sounds produced are incidentally created and not used communicatively.
But is evidence (unless data is faked or faulty) that cats do create sounds that encompass their auditory perception range and beyond such that they produce sounds other cats can hear even we do not. What, if any, communication value they have vs the sounds in human frequency range is unclear.
Is that specific cat selectively producing higher than adult human perception mews? No idea. But is possible and is possible that other cats hear them.
ETA even I as not a cat person find the analysis of the different sounds fascinating. The last section mentions that feral cats mew less including in colonies. Mewing is more a cat to human thing?
Cats’ upper hearing range is said to be around 64 kHz, about an octave and a half above humans’, to compare to this alleged 1200 kHz meow.
Adult cats, let’s talk about feral cats, are pretty silent, unless they intend to fight. They communicate by body language, and rubbing and licking each other.
Our two adopted feral cats rarely meowed. The female makes a sort of querulous noise to let me know she is jumping on my bed. Bother purr loudly.
To be clear most of the sounds reported in that article were not so ultrasonic and nothing there demonstrates that those silent mews actually contain those sounds.
Personally I suspect their superior ultrasonic hearing is more associated with hunting small mammals that squeak in those ranges than with communication.
Still the variety of identifiable sounds the contexts they are made … chirps? … interesting.
I think this is the source of the table, says 1200 Hz, not kHz
Brian
Hmm access denied
Here?
Acoustic parameters of mew calls
| Mean duration (ms) | Min Fo (kHz) | Max Fo (kHz) | Mean Fo (kHz) | No. of cats | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.11–3.1 | - | - | 400–1,200 | 12 | [31] |
| F: 1,016; M: 989 | F: 0.27; M: 0.24 | F: 0.44; M: 0.35 | F: 0.37; M: 0.30 | 17 (F: 8; M: 9) | [30]* |
| 0.5–1.0 | - | - | 700–800 | - | [2] |
| 0.54 | 221 | 1,185 | 698 | 3 | [29] |
F, female; M, male.
This. Plus it’s a new kitten in a new home. Give it time and space, and LOTS of love and affection. You will not be disappointed.
link is flaky, but sure enough it says
| Acoustic measure | M | SD | Range | Context correlation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duration (s) | 0.78 | 0.45 | 0.11–3.10 | (Agonistic +) |
| Mean F₀ (Hz) | 621 | 165 | 372–1039 | (Agonistic −) |
| Initial F₀ (Hz) | 581 | 233 | 172–1119 | (Agonistic −) |
| Final F₀ (Hz) | 592 | 211 | 190–1110 | (Agonistic −) |
| Max F₀ (Hz) | 767 | 191 | 431–1335 | ns |
at least that’s Table 2; in any case no ultrasound or millisecond chirps…
? The table I copied is labeled table 2 ?
But yeah most of the rest of that article is reported in Hz not kHz so maybe that’s a typo there?
Not the table you copied; Table 2 from Nicastro and Orwen:
Ah. Got it.
I’m reminded of an old joke: Timmy was an 8 year old boy who had never spoken a word. One day while eating dinner, he took a mouthful of food, spit it out, and yelled “Yuck! This is terrible!”
His parents said to him: Timmy! You can talk! Why have you never spoken before?"
Timmy answered: “Everything was all right up to now.”
Maybe the kitty doesn’t have anything to say.