According to a recent study, cats think men don’t follow direction very well! At least that’s what a lot of people are concluding. But what was the study, and why was it done?

Reason for the study

The study, undertaken by a Turkish university instructor and researcher, started because of a classically feline reason: curiosity! Kaan Kerman noticed that while people clearly understood their dogs, cats were often a mystery. This is interesting, considering how popular cats are in Turkey. So apparently that aura of feline mystery is worldwide, not confined to one country or culture.

Details of the study

Anyhow, in his search for better feline understanding, Kerman put together a study to look at how cats greet their human families. Since it’s easier to study cats at home in their regular environments, the participants wore a body camera at home to interact with their cats. Over a period of a couple of years, 31 people offered up footage of them interacting with their cat.

The results left no doubt: cats meowed more at their male family members than the females! We’re talking an average of 4.3 meows per 100 second greeting for men, versus 1.8 meows for women.

But what does it really mean?

So do cats actually think men need more instruction than women, or is that just a human interpretation? The definitive answer is: maybe yes, maybe no!

Look at it this way: no matter the culture, men and women interact differently among themselves, and around their pets. And cats, being the sensitive, intuitive beings that we are, will respond uniquely to these different approaches. So that partly explains why a cat may meow more at a man than a woman. But there’s more.

The human-meow factor

Many of you may know that cats don’t regularly communicate with other cats by meowing. Everyday feline-to-feline communication is done through body language, ear placement, eye movements and the like. Meows are saved for things like fighting, or when play gets too rough, or excitement.

Cats meow at humans because they see that people communicate more through vocalization (talking, to your humans). So we modify our behavior in an attempt to better communicate with you. It seems to work too!

So if we are meowing more at men than at women, we probably think they need more of it. Maybe we just realize that men tend to be less intuitive than women and need more vocal communication.

That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it! If you want to read the whole study, you can find it here in the Wiley Online Library.

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