There has been a fair amount of research on the faces cats make to communicate with people, along with research on their expressions when they are in pain. What hasn’t been well studied are their facial expressions to communicate their feelings to other cats.
It’s not surprising when you consider that for most of feline history, cats haven’t been around other cats that much. When they were, they may have used facial expressions to say such things as “Get off my turf.” That’s certainly true of wildcats, the closest living relatives of today’s domesticated house cats. Solitary animals that develop their own hunting territories and want to avoid others of their kind, they aim to resolve conflict before it happens with movements of the face that signal to other cats either an aggressive or defensive posture.
But today’s small cats often do live among their own, either in people’s houses, in shelters, or in feral colonies where they gather to share resources. Might these felines use their faces to articulate positive feelings towards those they are thrown together with? It has been only about 10,000 years since cats became domesticated and have learned to be around other cats — the blink of an evolutionary eye. But new research suggests that even though cats’ faces aren’t as expressive as those of a number of other animals, the answer about whether they have learned to signal in socially affirming ways to other felines appears to be yes.
Put on a “happy” face
Researchers at the University of Kansas Medical Center and Lyon College in Arkansas videotaped 53 adult male and female cats who spent at least some time living together in a communal shelter during a 10-month period, where they were not separated by cages. The investigators discovered that while the animals certainly made faces to indicate when they they were feeling combative or antagonistic toward another cat, they also used facial expressions to communicate positive feelings about social bonding with their own.
In all, 276 different facial muscle movements were detected. Some of the moves that correlated with a feeling of positive affiliation for another cat included ears forward, whiskers forward, and eyes closed. (Ears flattened and pupils constricted signified to another cat that things were not good between the two.)
Implications for cat welfare
The investigators point out that theirs is just the first of many studies needed to explore how cats signal to each other in positive ways with their faces. Our domestic felines have already shown a number of other ways in which they signal affinity for each other — by playing together, sleeping together, and even taking care of each other with grooming. Cats living together outside even find ways to cooperatively divide up resources. Thus, it does certainly seem feasible that in the scant 10,000 years since cats have come into our lives and have adjusted to sharing space with each other, they have learned to let other cats gauge their moods with a literal nod and a wink.
The more we learn, the better we will become at helping cats make peace with each other in shelters as well as in choosing cats who will make good housemates. As put by one of the researchers, comparative and evolutionary psychologist Brittany Florkiewicz, PhD, “It is helpful to understand the facial expressions cats use to communicate positive and negative interactions, as this can aid in assessing their compatibility.”
