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By Liz O'Connell
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Feeling as if you're man doesn't listen? Cats might agree. A new study shows that they meow more when greeting men than women who return home.
Research published in the journal Ethology found that domestic cats tend to become more vocal when they spot a male owner coming home versus a female. This includes meows, purrs and chirps—averaging about 4.3 meows in the first 100 seconds of greeting, compared to 1.8 for women.
The team, led by Yasemin Salgırlı Demirbaş from Ankara University in Turkey, studied 31 cats in their home environments between 2022 and 2024. Owners used a chest-mounted camera to film the first five minutes after returning home, remaining as natural as possible, with the team analyzing the first 100 seconds of each recording. All of the cats were at least 8 months old and had lived with their owners for six months.
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They also watched for 22 specific cat behaviors, including head-rubbing, yawning, tail posture and stretching. But meowing stood out as the only behavior that differed between male and female owners. The increased vocalization toward men remained consistent regardless of the cat's age, breed, sex or household size.
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The team suggested that the difference may be because men engage less frequently or respond more slowly to the cat's calls. Female caregivers tend to speak more often to their cats and pick up on subtle body-language cues, thus forcing felines to adjust their strategy to grab a man's attention.
If a man responds to the explicit vocalization, it reinforces the cats' tendency to use it more frequently, the study said.
The study also found that cats will use several behaviors as part of their greeting routine, depending on their level of arousal or stress. A positive relationship was shown through cats keeping their tails up, approaching their human and rubbing against them, while those stressed might cope by yawning, shaking, scratching or licking. This could represent displacement or self-directed behaviors, and felines might use it as a social cue to elicit attention and interaction.
But the team noted that the sample size was extremely limited, based on size and location, as all participants lived in Turkey. Cultural factors might've played a role in a cat's response. Researchers could not control the time a caregiver was absent or the cat's hunger levels at the time of their return.
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