As an Australian, I’m not angry, just very, very disappointed.
Milo is a right of passage in childhood, particularly if you have siblings. In fact I’m sure making one is on the citizenship test. If you don’t understand why, then you’re doing it wrong.
I read a headline on the internet once (in other words: What I’m about to say is almost certainly bullshit) that cat owners can understand THEIR OWN cats.
Anecdotally as a cat owner, it seems we train each other, cat makes a noise to get attention, human gives a kind of attention when hearing that noise, cat starts making that noise to get that specific attention. My cat has a food meow, an attention meow, a bath water meow (my cat likes to drink from the tub faucet) and a “it’s 3 AM and my brain can’t handle it” meow, and I can definitely tell them apart. There’s also a difference between the “enjoying a shoulder rub” purr and the “make me breakfast make me breakfast make me breakfast make me breakfast” purr. Hand me a different cat and that cat speaks mandarin Swahili.
Not a human baby (how could they, most cats have never seen a human baby), but as a kitten they meow to their parents to get food etc. So we’re their parents now and I guess they never really grew up and became independent.
Cats meow in the same register that human babies cry. They aren’t saying that cats are specifically trying to cry like a human baby, but that cats as a species have grown over thousands of years to meow in the same pitches as human babies.
While I’m still not sure if this is true, there was a very interesting clip I saw to support the evidence, where a tiger enclosure was somehow across the street from a farm’s cow enclosure. The tigers had started “mooing” along their edge of the fence in an effort to make the juicy, meat-filled cows feel safe around them.
I've also heard that cats try to mimic birds. It's one of the theories behind that weird clacking noise they make when they see prey that's out of reach.
Something I once read is that different cats don’t seem to use exactly the same noise to mean the same thing, ie, one cat might use a certain sort of meow to show that it is hungry, but another cat might use a similar meow to show that they want attention. Further, that wild cats usually stop making many such noises after they grow up, but domestic ones keep using them to communicate with people. If this is true, then the cat noises don’t really represent a cat language as such since each individual cat would have it’s own different set of vocabulary it develops in an attempt to get humans to understand it, being forced to resort to being all dramatic and acting like a kitten to get their message across because humans are sometimes too clueless to understand their body language.
I’ve got two cats who are sisters and they indeed have very different meows, not just sound but how they use them. One has a very distinct greeting meow literally only reserved for when she hasn’t seen me in a few hours that is isn’t in any way replicated by her sister.
i imagine it’s like when we can’t find the words to explain something and we just point at it and go “there, see that? that thing! over there! i’m pointing at it you dolt! aaargh!”
This is true, and it’s absolutely fascinating, because it’s literally the birth of a tiny language every time. The cat makes noise and notices that the human does something it wants, which makes the cat associate the noise with the action. The human hears the noise repeatedly and notices that the cat is happy about what they are doing, so they associate the noise with the action. It’s a shared language between two individuals, which is just so precious!
My wife and I have been married for nearly 30 years and we’re just now learning to be our best slutty selves.
We’ve been going places to meet others and learning about their lives while sharing ours. The best opportunities usually are at the places where clothing is optional or outright banned. It’s amazing how people open up and talk about all the things when the last physical vestige of hiding is removed.
Some would point and laugh, but we’re not the ones that are lonely. Once you come to the point of reality that all of this ends, it’s easier to let go of the bullshit and just live.
We were raised in a pretty strict environment and, unfortunately, didn’t get much of an opportunity to experience many things during our youth out of fear and shame. Once we moved away from that horrid place and our children became adults, we were able to relax and focus on us and the things we were curious about. That liberation has given us a whole new opportunity to find exhilaration on our terms.
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