Any cat person will tell you that the most extraordinary honor a cat can bestow upon a human is the slow blink. Receiving a slow blink from your own cat is always lovely, but getting a slow blink from someone else's cat is magic. Conversely, slow blinking at your cat, only to be met with a hard stare, is a blow to any cat lover's ego. But are we reading too much into it? Is a blink just a blink?
Research backs up the idea that this is actual interspecies communication. A study in Scientific Reports describes two experiments. The first showed that the cats did respond in kind when their humans slow-blinked at them. In the second experiment, the humans were strangers. The cats also blinked back at these humans and were likelier to move towards an outstretched hand if the human had slow-blinked first.
Professor Karen McComb, from the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex, who supervised the work, said: "As someone who has both studied animal behaviour and is a cat owner, it's great to be able to show that cats and humans can communicate in this way. It's something that many cat owners had already suspected, so it's exciting to have found evidence for it.
"This study is the first to experimentally investigate the role of slow blinking in cat–human communication. And it is something you can try yourself with your own cat at home, or with cats you meet in the street. It's a great way of enhancing the bond you have with cats. Try narrowing your eyes at them as you would in a relaxed smile, followed by closing your eyes for a couple of seconds. You'll find they respond in the same way themselves and you can start a sort of conversation."
I encourage all cat people to perform their own experiments.
via Sciencealert.com
We helped train our cats to slow blink as kittens, and they use it for a variety of communication. Except our cat Oz is unusually social and tries to slow blink at strangers, including their dogs. It's almost sad the way he slow blinks at someone on the sidewalk and then continues with an increasingly frenetic blink trying to get them to be friendly, before giving up. A lot more people need to learn to slow blink back at cats. if nothing else, it communicates "I'm not a threat to you."
(we only walk our cats outside supervised, in a feeble attempt to thread both past and future)
👀