Cats - playful pets...
..fearsome fighters...
..deadly hunters.
They beguile, intrigue,
and mercilessly exploit us.
Meow!
But how much do we truly understand these enigmatic creatures?
Millions of us have cats in our homes.
They're one of our favourite pets
and yet, we still know very little about them.
So, in a ground-breaking scientific study, we've been unlocking
the secrets of our feline friends.
In this final part of our study, we want to find out just
how our cats are coping with being pets in the 21st century.
How are they getting along with us and with each other?
We're going to reveal the remarkable language of your cat.
There's a trill that Jasper does.
TRILLING MEOW
That's it.
They make that funny little noise... TRILLING MEOW
Meow!
OK, let's let him go.
And Britain's top cat experts will carry out experiments to discover
how cats let each other know if they're friend...
..or foe.
The surprising conversations they have while we're asleep.
And why we find them irresistible.
She's got a lovely narrow little face
and these lovely little ears.
CATS MEOW
Tonight, we'll explore how your cats communicate with each other
and what they're trying to say to you.
We're nearing the end of our unique month-long study,
following 100 cats and we're getting a real insight into their lives.
We've seen what they get up to on the farm...
..in the village...
and this time, we're focusing on the city cats.
This is Hanover, a maze of terraced streets in Brighton's city centre.
Areas like this one in the South of England have the highest
density of cats in the country.
There are over 50 cats on this street alone
and in some homes there are more cats than there are people.
With so many cats living together,
this is the perfect place to find out
how they communicate with each other...
..and with us.
He's licking my hand.
Meow!
At Cat HQ, our experts are looking for examples of the most obvious way
our cats communicate, to us at least.
They're trawling through the footage from our cat cameras,
to uncover the sounds our cats make when they're on the prowl.
This is from Smudge. It's the dead of night
and he's out patrolling his territory...
LOW YOWLING
..when he spots another cat.
LOW YOWLING
Yowls like this are common when there's conflict between cats.
It's early morning and Tigger spots a strange black cat
on a nearby roof.
And listen to this.
SOFT CHITTERING
Chittering may simply be a sound of frustration
but scientists are still not exactly sure.
This is Rocky.
GROWLING
HIGH PLAINTIVE MEOW
He makes this noise when he finds another cat blocking the way.
But the story of cat communication
is a lot more surprising than this.
There's one noise our scientists have hardly found in the footage.
Meow!
It very rarely happens when the cats are out with each other.
Meow!
To understand what's going on here...
Hello! Do you want some dinner?
..we have to go back to the beginning
and the youngest members of our study.
TINY MEWLING
Biologist Dr John Bradshaw knows why these one-week-old kittens meow.
MEWLING
Kittens meow towards their mums to get them
to pay attention to them. As we can see
it's extremely effective - the mother is very attentive to those meows.
But then as the kitten grows up
and the mother begins to wean it, so these meows become less effective
and the kitten just stops using them.
MEWLING
Once the kitten has become adult, it will no longer meow
if it's only communicating with other cats.
That's because adult cats are always so aware of each other,
they don't need to meow to attract attention.
And that's a kind of problem
when cats get into a human household because we don't watch them
in the way that cats watch each other. We look,
we read books, we watch the TV, we look at a computer screen.
And so each cat learns that by meowing it can get our attention.
A little meow, we'll look up and then the cat can indicate
what it wants by doing something, by moving towards the food bowl
or the cat flap or whatever it is that it actually wants to happen.
Meow! That's pretty interesting.
That's quite a clever thing to do, cognitively speaking.
That's a remarkably clever thing to do,
What's wrong?
What's unique about the domestic cat is that it's communicating
with a different species rather than its own kind.
Come and say hello to Mummy! Meow!
So, cats have two different languages,
one for each other...
HISSING Oh!
..and one for us. Meow!
Scientists have found that cats can produce a huge range of meows...
CHITTERING
..and wanted to know if there was a universal cat-human language.
Meow!
There's a trill that Jasper does. TRILLING MEOW
Yeah, that's it.
They make that funny little noise... TRILLING MEOW
Meow!
Meow! Meow! Meow!
Meeeeeeoooow!
Grrrrr! Hissss!
That doesn't sound anything like it.
SHE LAUGHS I think it does.
Scientists have discovered that every cat's meows are unique.
Meow! Meow!
Meow!
Each cat learns which noises work best for certain situations,
developing a special language that only their owner will understand.
When they want food it's a much more prolonged meow.
Are you hungry? Meeeeow!
Miss Piggy's learnt how to say "milk", so she does a proper milk meow.
It's like "Meeoow..ilk", like that.
Is it nice?
And when our cats meow there's one thing almost every owner
in our study told us that they did in response...
Did you go hunting today?
PURRING AND SOFT MEOWING
..talk back.
Pretty girl. Are you a pretty girl?
Are you Mummy's pretty girl?
Pixie, you lovely girl.
Talking comes naturally to us, and every kitten that spends time with
people learns that to communicate with us they have to make a noise.
Meow!
But the meow is just a small part of the cat's fascinating language.
Cats also communicate in a more mysterious way
that's much harder to understand.
We're going to examine what's been going on between the cats
in Hanover Street to see if the experts can translate
this language and decipher what they're really up to.
We've been following Ozzy for the last three weeks.
He was undisputed king of his half of the street
until Prince appeared on the scene.
Ozzy's losing his throne.
And he's very grumpy about it.
It's a younger male, a grey cat, who is a fighter -
his ear's notched in a few places
and he doesn't run away when Ozzy shouts at him.
The scientists wanted to know why Prince was prepared to fight
for his right to roam this particular street,
so they decided to put him under surveillance.
We asked the other owners what they knew about him.
He definitely lives on our street, doesn't he?
He's on Hanover.
Or he acts like he lives on our street.
If I leave the door open
he'll try to break into my house and eat Pussy-Cat's food off him.
We found Prince spent more time on the street
than almost any other cat.
I definitely recognise Prince.
He's been meowing at our door to come in a few times.
Prince isn't just meowing.
Cat behaviour expert Dr Sarah Ellis
has spotted some of the other ways he's trying to communicate.
He spends a lot of time
out on the street and he's very, very confident.
You can see how he rushed over to the person here filming.
And what he's doing here is what we call a social roll,
so it is a positive behaviour,
and we know that because what we
tend to find is the cat is exposing its stomach, its belly area,
and they wouldn't do that if they felt very, very vulnerable,
if they were worried about that person
because that's their most sensitive area.
OK, there was also a little bit of,
while it was on its back, little tail...the tip was going like this.
Yeah, that's interesting.
The little bit where he moves the end of his tail,
generally if the cat was in a really negative state
the whole tail would be moving and thrashing.
The end of the tail is often, for example when a cat is friendly,
the end of the tail will be curled round.
So, you'll often see the soft tip of the tail.
We've heard that Prince's owner has left him with flatmates
while abroad.
So, is Prince trying to find someone else to take care of him?
He's been regularly coming round for about three weeks now.
He's sweet and he's normally very vocal and he's very bold.
He definitely wants to come in.
I feel like he's trying to sort of get a second home.
He meows at the door and I think he knows he's with a cat lover
when he comes down here.
Cats like Prince are doing something remarkable.
They've learnt how to communicate with people and that meows
and body language are most likely to work.
And when they succeed, we can't help but love them.
Tilly is my aristocat. She's long and elegant.
She's got a touch of Siamese about her
and a lovely narrow little face and these lovely little ears.
They're tapping into something deeply rooted within us.
We love our cats because they love us.
They're everything to me.
She's like the last jigsaw of our family. Awww!
And she really makes our family be together.
Back at Cat HQ, Dr John Bradshaw is setting up an experiment,
to try and get to the bottom of why we can't resist cats.
Take a look at these pictures.
How do you feel watching them?
Some scientists think that looking at pictures of kittens
can trigger the same reactions as looking at pictures of babies.
That's the theory, so we decided to put it to the test.
We're going to show you a series of images on this screen here.
What we're doing in this experiment is to try and find out
whether viewing kittens makes people more careful.
So, what we're doing is to get them to do a very simple puzzle.
Sometimes it will be after they've watched random pictures
which happen to be vegetables
and other times it's after they've watched picture of kittens.
I need my glasses for this.
Have we started already?
Ah!
ELECTRICAL ZAPPING Oh, my God! What have I done?
So, what did our owners think of the pictures?
I think looking at the first sequence
it didn't do very much for me, vegetables and stuff.
But the kittens, I was definitely enjoying them.
Whether it calmed me down or not I'm not sure.
The vegetables are just boring,
whereas the kittens are really cute, and beautiful, aren't they?
So, maybe I felt more relaxed, I don't know.
You might think it unlikely but we found over three-quarters of
the cat owners did better in the test
after watching picture of kittens.
So, what's going on?
It's known that watching pictures of babies
makes women in particular more careful.
This seems to extend to watching pictures
or indeed looking at real baby animals.
So, kittens are imitating the facial features of babies.
So, a kitten has a nice round face,
it has large eyes like a baby has
and so what our brains are essentially doing
is being fooled by a kitten into thinking that it might be a baby.
Clearly we know consciously that it's not,
but there's something really quite primitive in our...
going on in our subconscious that is persuading us to pay more attention
to that cat, to look after that cat, and that has obviously stood cats in
very good stead over the whole time they've become domesticated.
Cats' faces seem to tap into our parental instincts
and make us want to look after them, especially when they're kittens.
Along with their meows,
which are high-frequency, like a baby's cry...
TINY MEWLING
..it makes cats irresistible to so many of us.
All our owners love picking up their cats and stroking them
and most say their cats are friendly and tactile in return.
Sandwich loves being tickled between the ears and Timmy
loves being rubbed on the head.
But there's one thing our owners may not realise,
when they do this, our cats are trying to communicate with us
in a way we'd never guess.
They're using the same language they would with another cat,
according to behaviour expert, Dr Sarah Ellis.
When cats greet each other that are familiar
with each other and have a positive relationship,
they'll start off my touching noses, then they'll rub
the side of their faces together, which is called facial rubbing.
Sometimes they'll press the tops of their head together, you'll
see them curving their heads in.
That's called head bunting and then they will body rub.
They'll go in an opposite direction and rub their flanks
against each other.
It's about depositing their scent and picking up
the scent of the other individual and the mixing of these scents.
If you're in the same social group, your scent would be
a communal scent, so it would be made of up of all those individuals.
Just like us, cats use physical contact to show affection,
but when they rub up against each other, they're also
exchanging scent messages that we can't pick up.
When they rub against us,
they rub against our hands, most commonly, because that's the closest
thing to them and our hand's about the same size as a cat head.
You can see here, they'll often roll over
and push their head into that and that's just mimicking where cats
would make create physical contact with one another.
Does it have the same meaning when they rub against us?
We believe so.
We don't know for certain, but we certainly believe so.
Cats tend to only do it with people that they feel comfortable
and familiar and friendly with.
The difference is we're not depositing our pheromones
on them, like other cats are.
You can't help but want to do this all day,
but with cats, it's better to do it little and often.
High frequency, low intensity,
whereas we as humans are high frequency and high intensity.
It's a wonder we get on with each other at all.
But we do get on very well indeed.
Cats have done something remarkable.
They have learned to communicate with people as well
as they have with other cats
and that's made them much-loved pets.
By using clever strategies, they've managed to carve out
a niche for themselves, getting us to attend to them, but also
retaining their independence, coming and going as they please.
As well as urban cats, we've been following these semi-feral
farm cats, like Growler and Black and Ginger.
They survive by catching mice and rats in the farmyard
and in the fields.
Our GPS traces show these farm cats hunt alone.
Growler heads for the woods while Black and Ginger travels
in the opposite direction along the hedgerows.
Their lives are as close as we can get to the way their wild
ancestors used to live.
The farmyard is remarkably quiet.
These cats rarely communicate with each other using sounds.
A cat's natural way of communicating, is by leaving scent.
Their extraordinary sense of smell is how cats have been able
to detect the scent messages they leave for each other
for thousands of years, without ever having to come face to face.
But these scent messages are impossible for us to understand.
So, is there any other way we can interpret
what our cats are saying to each other?
The best place to find out, is here in the city,
where our cats are bumping into other cats all the time.
Take Treacle, Sparky and The Dude.
Their GPS traces are almost on top of each other.
And they're not just sharing their gardens.
Over half the cats in our study don't even have
the house to themselves.
It seems once we get one cat, we can't stop.
This one is called Ben and he's got a brother Joey,
they're two and a half, we've had those from kittens,
although they have calmed down rather.
I have a ginger short-haired cat called Theo
and I have Pixie, who's at my side here.
I'm the mad cat man of Hanover Street.
I have six cats at this moment in time and I hopefully,
will not be having any more.
Buster, Jasper, Pookie and Miss Piggy
are another typical city household,
an ever-expanding family of rescue cats.
I came home from work one night and then I went upstairs
into the spare room to get something
and this white cat just appeared out of nowhere
and ran down the stairs.
I thought it had come in through the window at first,
but then I realised that Hannah had re-homed another cat.
I volunteer at a cat shelter and one of the sort of perils
of that kind of work is that you might happen to just accidentally
bring one home in your pocket every now and again.
Miss Piggy! Buster, Buster.
They all get on brilliantly.
We've introduced each of them, kind of gradually over a period of time.
Jasper, who we had first, has had to kind of get used to
lots of new animals coming in and he's been really good with that.
All our owners think their cats must like company,
in the same way we do.
So, we decided to investigate if this was really the case.
As these four cats live together in one house, it's also the perfect
place to discover how cats communicate,
so we're going to examine every detail of their lives.
We need to find out how much time the cats spend together, to find out
how they get along.
Are they really the big happy family we like to think they are?
The first thing we need to know, is how
they share the house, who lives where?
Hiya, Ben.
The team has been developing new technology to help them
track cats indoors in a way that's never been done before.
Ben, I'm really interested in this technology.
We need to understand the movement of the cats indoors,
we can't use the GPS collars because obviously they can't
talk to the satellites, so you're coming up with brand-new technology,
is that right?
Yes, so what we have here, is this very small little
electronic device that we plant in various positions
around the house, so under beds, under sofas, in corners of rooms,
things like that, so we can create a load of hot spots around a room.
And then this is the cat collar?
Yeah, there's a small radio transmitter. Right.
As soon as the cat comes within the vicinity of that,
we can then log them as being in that area.
We can tune these to work from very, very close,
like round food bowls, all the way up to covering a whole area like a bed.
So, this is going to give us a really accurate representation of
what goes on indoors, how cats might interact with each other
when we're not around to interfere with, you know,
their behavioural instincts.
Yeah, it's been a fun challenge.
As well as these radio transmitters, we've fitted the house with
CCTV and even infrared cameras.
We'll be able to see what goes on in the dead of night
when the owners are asleep.
Over the next three days, we sift through all the data we're
getting from the cat's home.
The new technology reveals something we couldn't have found
out any other way, exactly where these four cats are 24 hours a day.
Interestingly, Miss Piggy just seems to hang out
mostly on the kitchen table, that seems to be her little zone.
So, Pookie and Jasper seem to hang out together quite a lot, they
seem to just want to spend all their days on the owners' bed.
Buster, yeah, he's fairly solitary,
his little area that he likes is the kids' room.
These cats are choosing to live by themselves most of the time.
Each has a space it prefers in a separate area of the house.
Although two cats, Jasper and Pookie,
do spend time together on the bed, it's mainly to sleep.
The others only come together at feeding time.
And even then, their owner say they prefer to have separate bowls.
Perhaps this isn't one big happy family after all.
Could their body language reveal the true story?
To find out how they are communicating,
Sarah Ellis has been examining the footage.
Cats have no facial expressions to help us,
so the signs of a difficult relationship may be hard to spot.
But she has picked up some tension between Pookie and Miss Piggy.
The body language is much. much more subtle,
and this is often things that owners will miss.
This is where we see cats blocking access for other
cats to certain resources.
It may be to get through to the other room,
it may be to go up the stairs.
And they'll do that just by sitting there and staring.
So, in this situation, something as subtle as a fixed stare,
so if we're not looking at the eyes we might miss it,
is enough for one cat to move another cat.
Let's have a look at that.
Doesn't have to do anything else but just stare at it.
Pookie can move Miss Piggy with just a look,
so subtle, it's almost impossible for us to notice.
Sarah has been trawling through footage from all our homes with more
than one cat, so she can show me other signs of tense relationships.
Kali and Khan may look like they're having fun,
but once you understand their body language,
we see an entirely different story.
We just pause that for a second, we can see some really
agonistic body language going on there.
Firstly, we can see the cat on the left is likely to be the instigator.
We would say his body language is much more offensive
and the cat on the right is much more defensive.
And if we just play that and have a look at their tails...
Oh, look at that, that's very fast, isn't it?
Very, very fast. Generally we find the faster the tail moves,
the more aroused that cat is and that can be positive or negative.
In this situation, obviously negative,
that they're much more prepared for fight or flight.
The last thing I thought that was really interesting in that video,
did you see the tongue come out? Yes. Both cats? Both of them licked.
What does that mean? That's a really interesting thing, actually.
We're not quite sure what that means, but we do see it a lot in situations
of conflict, when this tongue comes out and flicks over the nose.
We don't know if it has some kind of communication function,
or if it's a way of that cat, trying to calm itself down.
We don't know at this stage.
But we do see it a lot in conflict situations, so it can be
quite a nice indicator that these cats are not particularly happy.
One cat did it, then the other cat did it, so it suggested that
both of them are not comfortable with this situation.
All these little things that are constantly
going on between cats, most of which we miss,
all are so telling about how we've put cats together,
how they should be together, how certain situations are stressful?
Absolutely, and I think what we are starting to see,
is we think cats don't do that much at all, they sleep all day,
but when we start to look at them REALLY closely,
we can see that there is actually quite a lot of body
language going on, we just need to spend the time investigating it.
All this new research into the body language of cats is giving us
clues about how the four cats living together in Hanover Street
are getting on.
It's already helped us
see that Pookie knows how to get rid of Miss Piggy with a stare.
But Buster's relationship with his housemates is still a mystery,
because he is never in the same room with any of them.
Have we got some footage of these guys' four cats?
Right. Wow, look at Buster.
John invites their owners in to try
and find out why Buster's never around.
He's quite busy in the early hours, isn't he? 4 o'clock in the morning?
Out, out and about a lot. Yes.
Wow, patrolling, gosh and he goes right up there.
So, that was all in the course of about an hour.
So, that, is that pretty much what you expected, that he's the biggest
roamer of your three outdoor cats?
I definitely knew he was the biggest,
he's out a lot of the time and he goes out, in and out,
in and out all the time, day and night.
We know that Buster spends about 50% of his time
with our neighbour on the other side.
This is our house and this is Peter's house. Yeah.
So, he's in and out of there.
The team put a cat camera on Buster to find out why he's going to
neighbour Peter's house and whether it's got anything to do
with the other cats?
As soon as the camera is switched on, Buster makes
a dash across the gardens and straight into Peter's kitchen.
He, he really uses this as a sort of a second home,
don't you, Buster?
He comes in, in the evenings mainly and he has a cuddle
and then about half past ten, he decides to go to bed.
Well, he likes to sleep here and sometimes he sleeps on that side.
At four o'clock he buzzes off downstairs
and he comes back about six o'clock.
We both get up at 12 o'clock and then he goes home
and I suppose he eats cos he's very, very fat.
It looks as though Buster prefers to spend his time with a person
than with the cats he shares a home with.
But is this because he doesn't get on with his housemates?
To find out, our scientists lock the cat flap for a night
so that Buster can't escape next door
and has to spend time with the other cats.
Their surveillance cameras will show them what happens.
As night falls, there's something going on with our cats
in the master bedroom.
Back at Cat HQ, scientist John is watching the footage.
They're wide awake, while the humans are completely oblivious to...
Yes. ..everything that's going on.
It's 11pm.
As Buster isn't able to sleep on neighbour Peter's bed tonight,
he seizes an opportunity to get a spot on his owners' bed
next to Pookie.
This is normally Jasper's spot and he's watching from the floor.
Pookie, spooked by Buster's presence,
decides to jump off the bed.
Then Buster notices Jasper on the floor and stares at him.
It's a very fixed look, he's getting very tense.
Finally, Jasper makes his move.
So, he's going round the back where Pookie got off.
And Jasper's approaching him.
He's clearly trying to displace him
and we've got a real kind of standoff,
Buster's looking really tense.
But Buster's not moving, so what's going to happen?
Is he going to move?
CATS YOWL AND HISS
Right, so Jasper actually cuffed Buster and sent him
flying off the bed and he's gone out the door.
It's incredibly rare to catch something like this on camera.
Although it was quick, this is a classic standoff
with Jasper on the offensive and Buster on the defensive.
Jasper tries to move Buster using a fixed stare,
but when that doesn't work he resorts to a cuff.
This is pretty much the first time I've seen
this kind of interaction going on because most of the studies that
have been done so far on cats interacting in households
have been recorded by the owners themselves,
so automatically, those recordings stop when the owners go to bed.
And we know that cats behave slightly differently
when their owners are asleep or away
than they do when their owners are around.
So, we're now getting a much more complete picture of the way
that multi-cat households operate
and what we're seeing here is the fact
that the cats are still somewhat territorial.
Jasper is very defensive of his space on the bed.
So, what this means for Buster is that because he's been shut in
for this particular night, he's been displaced by Jasper.
This would probably have happened in the past
and it's almost certainly the reason that he has gone next door
and now sleeps most nights next door
where he can get a good night's sleep.
These four cats are not quite the big, happy family
we'd like to imagine.
The reason they just about get on is that they've found ways
to avoid each other, most of the time.
It's interesting that John said they've just worked out a way
of being with each other where they have their own spots,
they have their own habits,
they have their own places that they like to sit
and they learn to accommodate each other within that.
Buster, particularly, is quite happy to sort of
live his own life in a way.
I like the fact that he's quite independent
and that's what makes them interesting, I think.
When we have more than one cat in our homes,
we might think we're creating a happy feline family.
But, as our study shows, these cats are loners at heart.
They'll seek out their own space
and only communicate with each other when they have to.
So, is this the way our urban cats will always be, inherently
solitary animals that find it very hard to live with other cats?
These cats have found a way to avoid each other,
but will they ever find a way to get along?
Here on the farm, we've seen how Black and Ginger, Growler
and Mr Tom each go out on their own, hunting to survive.
But we've found they also spend a lot of time together
quite happily in the farmyard,
without the standoffs and disputes of our urban cats.
We wanted to discover why.
As we filmed them, we saw them raising their tails to each other.
John was the first cat scientist to work out what this meant.
In a farm, in a colony where the individual cats go off hunting
and come back again, what we noticed was that when they returned
to the colony they often raised their tails
as they approached the other cats, and then usually the other cats
would react in exactly the same way, they'd also raise their tails
and you'd get a whole bout of rubbing and greeting basically.
So, we came to the idea that this tail-up signal
is the thing that glues cat society together,
it enables them to talk to one another in a way that says,
"I am going to be friendly to you."
The farm cats can tell us something else.
We've been watching these kittens grow up.
And we filmed something just after they were born
that could change the way we look after our cats.
These female farm cats aren't just being friendly.
Scatty Ginger, mum to these three-week-old kittens,
has happily taken her sister's kittens into her litter.
This kind of behaviour has also been seen in other farm cats.
What we have here is the original mother of the family,
that's Pickle, who's the one with the ginger ears. Yeah.
And then in the same nest with her is her daughter
from the previous year, Domino.
And in a moment we'll see the daughter... Oh, my gosh.
..start to give birth.
Both of them are cleaning up the newborn kittens.
And Granny's cleaning. And Granny's cleaning them up, yes, yeah.
The grand kitten.
That's extraordinary.
One of the things that tells them
that it's their grandchildren and therefore
she ought to pay an interest is in the smell. Mm-hm.
That is such beautiful footage, how rare is this?
This is extraordinarily rare.
It wasn't really known whether some cats were cooperative,
there was a suspicion they might be, but this really proved it.
To actually capture this particular, very intimate moment
really was a first.
And that's the interesting point, isn't it?
We think of cats as solitary animals, but actually they've got
the potential to behave in a much more cooperative way
given the right environment, given enough food
and especially if they are related.
Yes, that relatedness thing seems to be absolutely crucial,
it's very rare for two unrelated cats
to cooperate in any way, particularly with breeding.
So, I guess the reason we don't see that with our own pet cats
is the fact that we just don't keep mother daughters together,
we tend to have one cat in our household
or maybe two unrelated cats?
That's right, I mean I don't think people appreciate quite
how much cats value the company of their relatives,
and so people who want to get a couple of cats will probably just
get two unrelated cats, maybe at the same time, maybe different times.
And they never see this kind of behaviour.
Having related cats in a household is a really good idea,
they'll respond to each other in a completely different way
and are more willing to help each other out.
And as part of their body language, they'll point their tails upwards
to greet each other.
John wanted to find out whether ALL cats respond to this.
Could it be an important part of every cat's language?
OK, let's let him go.
He designed an experiment to find out.
What we're trying to do here is to demonstrate the effect
of the tail-up signal and show that the posture and particularly the way
that the tail is held is crucial to determining what the cat does.
First up is Lilli.
The friendly cat, the cat with its tail up,
other cats will tend to go straight up to it and sniff it.
And that's exactly what she does.
They tend, at that point, to realise that it's not actually a cat,
it literally is just something cut out of black paper,
but that's enough to tell us that the tail up is the crucial thing
which has told the cat that it's safe to approach.
The cat that's all fluffed up
with its tail made to look as big as possible,
now this is a cat that's essentially trying to defend itself,
it's trying to make itself look big,
it's trying to scare off the other cat.
Cats like Nyles seem to know this fluffed up silhouette
is the sign of a cat that's up for a fight.
Fighting's just bad news as far as cats are concerned
because usually both the cats in a fight get injured
so they'll do anything they can to avoid it.
They generally will tend to keep away and sometimes they will
actually, run away from a silhouette that has the scary posture.
We spotted even our unrelated urban cats using the tail-up signal
with each other.
Like Kali using it to say hello to Jasper.
What do you want?
But we also saw cats like Monkey and Eric putting their tails up
when they were greeting people.
This is one of the most intriguing things about our urban cats,
they seem to be more friendly towards us than to other cats.
This left the scientists wondering why.
And the clues to this special relationship
are hidden in our cats' genes.
Dr Leslie Lyons is the creator
of the world's largest database of cat DNA.
She studies cats from all over the world to find out more
about how they spread across the globe
and where we first started keeping them as pets.
And now she's keen to get her hands on our cats' DNA.
Good girl. Well done.
We swabbed our cats' cheeks to collect the samples Dr Lyons needs
to tell us where our cats came from.
Good girl. She is a good girl.
And that can help us to explain how they came to live alongside us.
We found that one of the cats in our study Daisy, who's a Birman,
can be traced back to the cats of India.
And Kali is a Bengal breed.
She carries DNA from the Asian leopard cat.
But over three quarters of our cats are moggies
and they're the ones we're really interested in.
They could hold the key to our special relationship with cats.
Their DNA has been tracked back to a species of wildcat
that's been around for thousands of years.
We know that at least they're very similar to the cats
that were in northern Africa, in the Near East
and that's going to be the Felis silvestris lybica subspecies.
They're in the right place at the right time.
We're settling down, that's where our first civilisations are built
and there's a wildcat subspecies there.
That's most likely the one that has contributed to our domestic cats.
There's probably more than one individual that got domesticated.
It's probably several wildcats that had natural mutations
that made them more tame, bold enough to come near humans
and to tolerate us
and those are the cats that then go on to become our domesticated cats.
This species of wildcat still lives in remote parts of North Africa
and the Middle East.
But they all look the same and they're still very much wild cats.
So what journey have our cats been on from an ancient wildcat
to the huge variety of friendly pet cats we have today?
The wildcats that were there probably opportunistically decided,
"Hey, free meal if I start becoming friends with humans
"and so that's going to allow me to survive better
"if I kind of tame myself."
The original wild-type cat
is probably just a brown Mackerel tabby. OK.
And so when you start seeing a brown Mackerel tabby
with a little white spot on its chest,
that's your first evidence that that might be a domestic cat
or that they're all black or all white,
that's human selection coming along
and protecting that cat so that it doesn't actually have to survive
in the wild with that colouration but can survive in our household.
Thousands of years ago,
cats were attracted to our farms by all the rats and mice.
Then we started letting the friendlier, tamer ones
that we found most attractive into our houses.
Over many generations we've unconsciously bred
and changed the wildcats into the pets we know and love today.
Like those in our study, living in urban areas
and often friendlier to us than to each other.
The life of our modern cats in the terraced streets of Brighton
is a far cry from those first domesticated farm cats.
And there could be a downside to becoming such a popular pet.
It's like a big soap opera out there, I think.
I don't think he has a lot of friends in the neighbourhood.
There's a lot of cats patrol back and forward on the high wall.
There are cats who make a lot of noise and have large standoffs.
Living with us is forcing our cats to communicate more.
And now that we better understand them,
what are they really trying to say to us?
There's one cat in particular that we followed
in the very first programme who finds urban living stressful.
Our scientists realised something was wrong
when they looked at her GPS trace.
So, she looks to be quite active,
but within quite a constrained area.
And a cat would not normally be that active
at all sorts of different times of the day and night, keep going out,
keep coming back, unless there was really something bothering her.
Minkey is an 18-month-old grey tabby cat
who's spent her whole life here in Hanover.
Her body language and constant sniffing suggests she's anxious.
By studying her behaviour, is there something we can do to help her?
She spends a lot of time going out of the cat flap
and sort of skulking like this, looking either side
and then waiting, looking either side, looking nervous.
It would be nice if she was just a bit more chilled, really,
she doesn't look relaxed.
I always think she keeps patrolling.
Don't you, Minkey?
First, our scientists needed to find out what was making her anxious,
so they rigged CCTV cameras.
They picked up several unfamiliar cats invading Minkey's garden.
MINKEY SCREECHES
Now, our scientists have managed to identify one cat in particular
who seems to be making her life a misery.
Tigger.
TIGGER PURRS
We've heard reports that he might give Minkey a hard time.
I've heard rumours that he sits the other side of the cat flap to her
and stares in through the cat flap.
Is that you, Tigger?
(You wouldn't really do that, would you?)
No, we don't believe it, we want, we want photographic evidence.
THEY CHUCKLE
These two cats are competing for the same area.
But Minkey's body language suggests she's finding it
far more stressful than Tigger.
Our scientists fit Tigger with a cat camera
for proof of what he's getting up to.
At the crack of dawn, Tigger's cat cam shows him
patrolling the wall that runs along the back of the gardens.
Another infra-red camera captures an unsuspecting Minkey
approaching from the opposite direction.
She spots Tigger and jumps down into the nearest garden.
Tigger is hot on her trail.
MINKEY SCREECHES
He forces Minkey out of the space and she retreats,
terrified, under the table.
And he doesn't let up.
In their battle for space, Tigger is taking control.
Sarah Ellis is bringing vet and behaviour specialist
Rachel Casey to meet Minkey and Tigger's owners, to let them
know what's been going on and see if she can offer some advice.
She's brought evidence of Tigger's behaviour.
Well, we've been collecting some footage of them, as you know.
I'd quite like to show you that now.
This is in the morning.
I love the way they jump.
That's our window, isn't it? Yeah, that's our roof.
Minkey spends a lot of time on that roof sniffing and...
Yeah.
He's like, "Are you coming out to play?" Oh, my goodness.
He's right next to my... to my bedroom.
Is that your bedroom window? Yeah. What?
Oh, he's actually gone in our house.
For 37 minutes. Really?
You're joking?! No.
He's coming.
Oh, gosh.
So, he was in the house for 37 minutes? Yes. That's amazing.
He's hidden under one of these...
We'll have words when we get in.
Scraps like the one caught on Tigger's cat cam...
That's not very nice, Tigger.
..are probably common in these terraced streets.
But one thing is clear -
different cats react to them in very different ways.
There's a really big population density here,
and they're all trying to work out how to move around their space
and occupy their world.
But the more cats you have around,
the more difficult it is for them to do that.
I think the difference between your two cats is that Tigger
comes across lots of other cats, but he's less worried about it.
Minkey comes across lots of other cats
and it really worries her, it bothers her.
All this tells us more about how cats communicate
and that for cats like Minkey,
telling cats like Tigger to stay off her turf can be difficult.
All our scientists can do is try and give her more personal space
by building walkways for her in the garden so she has escape routes.
And making sure other cats can't get into her house.
Tigger, on the other hand,
seems to cope much better with life as a city cat.
It was a bizarre experience to see what
he gets up to because we see one side of it but obviously he's
got a completely different life out here doing what he wants to do
and going where he wants to go and he doesn't see the boundaries
that we see so it's fascinating to see what he gets up to,
but it also shows that we don't know him quite as well as we think we do.
So, what's the difference between these two cats?
What's going on inside Tigger's head which makes him
far less stressed than Minkey?
Rachel Casey has set up an experiment to try
and peer into the minds of our cats.
So, what we're doing here is a study called cognitive bias,
which basically helps us to get inside the heads of cats
and understand better how they're feeling, or their mood
and emotional state, if you like.
Polly is offered either a bowl to her left or a bowl to her right.
That's brilliant.
The one on her right always has food in it
and the one on her left is always empty.
A new third bowl is then placed in the middle of the room.
Our scientists want to see how Polly reacts to the new bowl.
POLLY MEOWS
What we're basically asking them is do you think this bowl
in the middle here actually has food in or not?
Are you optimistic that it's likely to have food
or are you pessimistic and you think it's likely to be empty?
If a cat goes quickly to the middle bowl,
it's a sign that it's in an optimistic frame of mind.
The slower cats are likely to be feeling pessimistic.
It gives us insights into what's actually
going on in terms of the cat's underlying emotional state.
The reason why that's so important is it's actually very
difficult to tell by looking at a cat whether it's stressed or not.
It helps us better understand how our cats
fit into the environment we keep them in.
What's really exciting about this latest research,
is that we'll be able to better understand our cats'
emotional states, and what might be contributing to them.
And so we'll be able to change those conditions
and improve their welfare.
This is very new science, but thanks to studies like these,
we're beginning to understand
what's going on inside the minds of our cats.
And this should lead to us unlocking more secrets
about the language and lives of our feline friends.
There is one final thing that Sarah wants to show us.
WOMAN CALLS CAT
It sheds light on our cats' journey from a wild animal
to a pampered pet.
She's intrigued about their future
and whether cats will retain their wild side
or eventually evolve into more sociable, loyal
and obedient pets, like dogs.
You've taught your cat to sit?
Yes, I have and to come when he's called.
That's pretty impressive and it's about food
so I'm sure there's a lot of owners who will say,
"Well, yeah, I shake the bag of treats and try
"and get my cat to come in but he doesn't come in."
Then really the case there is they're asking for too much
all at once, so they're asking them to come
from too far a distance, or the treats are not high enough value,
that the reward is simply not exciting enough to motivate them
to come in and there's other things outside that are much more exciting.
Is this a high-value treat for them
or did you start with raw chicken and then...?
Yeah, these are quite high value... OK.
..but things like cooked chicken, cooked ham would be even higher value.
I only use these types of treats in training so that enhances their
value, they don't get free access to them whenever they want,
they always have to work for them.
OK. Do you think I could try and get Cosmos to sit?
We could try, I've never generalised it to other people,
it's always been me that's taught him,
so he might not because we haven't taught him that other people
might ask him this command, too. I'm sure it won't work.
Cosmos. That's it.
OK, now, sit.
Excellent.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you get your cat to sit.
Sarah has also trained Cosmos to come on walks with her and her dog.
Come on.
So, how often does he come for a walk with you?
Maybe about three or four times a week. Mm-hm.
Come on, Cosmos.
One of the things, we live quite near a busy road
and I'm always quite worried about the cats for that,
so I've trained them to come when they're called,
and as you can see to walk with me.
So, if Cosmos wants to come out, he comes out with me
and the dog or I can call him and he'll come back to the house.
He's very obedient.
COSMOS PURRS
If we can train cats like Cosmos to sit,
and come back when we ask him to,
could our close relationship with cats mean that one day,
their wild side will disappear?
Could cats become more sociable with each other,
content not to go roaming and hunting,
better suited to 21st-century life?
But how much do we really want our cats to change?
Personally, I'd like to think that instead of turning cats
into something similar to what we have in the dog,
we could try to conserve their unique nature.
With a better understanding of why these fascinating animals behave the
way they do, we could find a way for cats to maintain their independent
wild side and live happier lives alongside us in the modern world.
Over the last few weeks, we've met some amazing cats.
Top hunters Sandwich and Saphie...
..and Ted, who started life on the farm
and is now living a life of luxury.
We've seen Black and Ginger teach her kittens to hunt...
and Jasper and Buster scrapping in the dead of night.
Our study of 100 cats has given us
a unique insight into their secret lives.
And one thing is very clear -
they're at a time of great change,
with two paws in the past, and two in the future.
And although that sometimes makes life difficult
for our cats, it's also what makes them so fascinating to us.