Dealing With Cats - Tumblr Posts

Cats tend to only meow at humans after a certain point in their lives for the above said reasons. Even feral cats would have something like meows in the case where they'd be in contact with humans, since most of the vocalisations cats do make amongst each other are outside the human hearing range and/or are accompanied by non-verbal cues.

A large part of housecat vocalisation toward humans isn’t goal-directed communication, but rather, affiliative signaling: a simple call-and-response protocol which establishes that the participants are part of the same social unit. Amongst themselves, most housecat affiliative signaling is non-vocal, but humans aren’t really physiologically equipped to respond to such signalling in a feline fashion, and cats, well, they’re adaptable.

Which is to say that when your cat yells, and you yell back, so the cat yells again, and so forth, what you’re really saying to each other is “hiiiiii~”.