Silence of the Cats?

Blog Entry at Say Hello Beanty receives the All My Kids Have Fur Reward.

This is a partial reprint from Say Hello Beanty: http://www.sayhellobeanty.com/ please check it out....

In an article about animal writers, a pet writer ...explicitly stated that pets don’t talk, cats especially...

Beanty is a grey domestic short hair. Perhaps your cat is an orange tabby or rambunctious Scottish fold who loves boxes. When I say cats communicate quite clearly. I think you’ll agree. What’s the harm in going a step further and lending them the words they’re unable to say...We dress them in bizarre clothing, and that’s okay. There are cat capes, dresses, booties and wigs. I’m partial to cat wigs myself. Can there be anything better than a tortoiseshell cat in a hot pink wig?

Is the mix of cats and language a potentially lethal cocktail...Do they have the power to unleash a deadly new virus when trying to pronounce a long vowel? Does the scientific community know something we don’t?.... A cat says many things, least of which is, Why isn’t my box clean or Who moved this chair?

...Cat lovers are strange enough. We can’t have a bunch of people covered in cat hair, walking around recounting conversations with their cats during office potlucks...But they do talk. And if we can somehow manage to put down the cat wigs and calico dresses long enough we’d realize that they have far more intelligent things to say...

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to explain why I moved a chair.

For full version of this story see Silence of the Cats and please leave the author comments. Thanks! [update: unfortunately Say Hello Beanty blog is no longer on the net? :-( ]

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Mom's Comment:

Has this pet writer checked out animal research at all? Cats understand hundreds of words and can remember them. Their vocal chords are able to formulate the words they understand better than dogs can.

Based on the research I had found on communicating with chimps, dogs, and cats, I set out to see how much my cat I raised from three days old could understand and vocalize. As a kitten, my cat Spunky picked up more on food words, but he also knew my name. He had trouble pronouncing the “k” and the “th”, so it sounded like “atrin” versus Katherine.

My other male cats, Sandy and Baby would vocalize “hungry” “water” “want out.” In fact when it came to the word “hungry,” Sandy and Snow Baby came up with their own way to tell me they were both hungry. Sandy would say “hung” and Baby would walk around Sandy and say “ree.”

Sandy also decided on his own that “water” was actually “ehr” and that he was really saying, “want ehr.”

I found out that I was the stupid one... I had to retrain myself to see how beautifully intelligent my furry kids have been and still are.

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