News Briefs for the Week of June 2, 2002
By Marcella Durand for Cat Facts
- Cats Know What to Say and How to Say It
Anyone who's lived with a cat can attest to the fact that they can be remarkably expressive with their meows, conveying a full range of emotion with sounds ranging from happy trills to heartbroken wails. However, Nicholas Nicastro, a graduate student at Cornell University who is studying cat meows, says, "We probably know more about obscure monkeys in Africa than we know about the animals hanging out in our own kitchens." Cat vocalizations simply haven't been very well studied.
Thanks to Nicastro's findings, that knowledge gap may soon be narrowed. He has recorded more than 100 different meows from 12 cats (including his own two kitties) by placing them in various situations guaranteed to elicit feline squalls of protest (such as being late with dinner), and also recording the cats "when they were in a good mood." Then he played the recordings back to two different sets of people, asking one set to rate each meow in terms of how pleasant it sounded and the other set to judge each meow in terms of urgency. He found some very clear patterns.
The meows rated most pleasant tended to be the least urgent. Nicastro thinks cats have developed different calls in response to the way we perceive them, so that they can alert us to their moods and needs.
To test his idea that domestic cats have developed specific vocalizations to communicate with humans, Nicastro is currently analyzing the calls of wild desert cats that he recorded at a zoo in Pretoria, South Africa, to see if their vocalizations are similar to those of the domestic cats. So far, he's finding that they're very different. "They're much harsher and far less musical-sounding than domestic cats," he says. "Cats are obviously very dependent on people for their needs," he says. "I think cats have evolved to become better at managing and manipulating people."
- New Diagnostic Test for Feline Heartworm
What do you know about heartworm? You probably know that it's a nasty parasite that dogs get (usually from a mosquito bite), that it lives in their heart (gross!), and that it can be fatal. But do you know that cats can get heartworm, too?
Unfortunately, it can be fatal to them, too. However, it hasn't been as easy to diagnose heartworm in cats because cats usually don't have the larval stage of heartworm in their blood for the extended period of time that dogs do. That's why the news of a new in-clinic diagnostic test for heartworm in cats is such good news.
According to IDEXX Laboratories, the maker of the new Snap Feline Heartworm Antigen test kit, it's the first pet test license exclusively for the detection of heartworm antigens in cats. Symptoms of heartworm include vomiting, coughing and difficulty breathing. If your cat is manifesting any of these symptoms, bring her to the vet immediately for diagnosis.
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