Just because your cat can’t speak English doesn’t mean they can’t communicate. In reality, cats communicate their feelings all the time, whether it’s by pinning their ears back when they’re nervous or wiggling their tail when they feel playful. This Hug Your Cat Day, why not take a moment to learn more about kitty communication so you can find the perfect time for that hug?
Your cat’s tail, ears, eyes and posture all work hard to express how your cat is feeling and what they’re thinking. From identifying an illness sooner to picking up on their mood and identifying situations that cause them distress or pleasure, we can care for our cats much more effectively when we understand their body language.
A lot of non-cat-people like to claim that cats are impossible to gauge because they don’t express themselves as dogs do, but pay no heed! All we need to do is learn to speak their language and they’ll tell us all we need to know.
Across the animal kingdom, ears play an essential role in communication. Ours allow us to quickly size up any situation by hearing words, sounds and inflections, and are more or less static. Cats use their ears to hear, but they do so in a way that makes our aural set-up seem almost primitive. They can pinpoint sounds five times further away than a human can, rotate independently to 180 degrees and hear at much higher frequencies too. Cats’ ears are also a beacon of information, and learning the various ways a cat can hold their ears can help us interact with them more easily.
How Is Your Cat Holding Their Tail?
A cat that’s about to pounce on a toy or is otherwise focused on something may slowly wave their tail, while a lashing or flicking tail signals that the cat is agitated. To help pet owners understand cat tail language, animal behaviourists have done exhaustive research and broken the complicated communication down to a number of easily-learned points:
