I hear you, I just don’t care: cats know their names, they don’t know respect

In news that will surprise no cat owner, your feline friend knows its name, it just doesn’t respect you.

Cats are just as good as dogs at learning. They’re just not as keen to show their owners what they’ve learnt, the experiment found.

If your cat does not respond when you call, it is not because it does not recognise its name. It is because it does not respect you and instead views your life with, at best, cold indifference.

That is one conclusion of a paper that has found that cats, like dogs, are perfectly capable of understanding their names.

The finding comes from an experiment in Japan involving 78 cats, which were measured for their reaction when both strangers and their owners read out their name. To ensure that the cats were not just responding to sound, the participants first read out a list of random nouns, before slipping in the cats’ names. Then the scientists watched to see if their ears pricked up, their heads moved or they displayed signs of excitement such as tail movement.

The study found that while cats reliably moved their ears or heads, they rarely demonstrated excitement.

The reaction was instead best characterised as “cautiously wary”. Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, the scientists said that this made sense; hearing their name probably meant a human was about to disturb them, for good or for ill.

Atsuko Saito, from Sophia University in Tokyo, said the finding may cause people to re-evaluate cats’ abilities.

However, John Bradshaw, from the University of Bristol, said that cats do not understand language in a meaningful sense: “Cats are just as good as dogs at learning. They’re just not as keen to show their owners what they’ve learnt.”

The Times