Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/02/cat-chattering.html
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That’s how cats react when they are watching birds that are out of their reach. Our cat Missy does this regularly at our back door.
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Yes, definitely a bird thing. Cat looks up, sees birds, chatters. Looks down, sees people, gets quiet or does a more normal meow.
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Yes, this is cat-speak for “Imma eatchoo, bird!”
That’s a frustrated cat, but it’s not suffering from some terrible pathology or distress, unlike some of the other ‘funny animal’ videos floating around the net.
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Yeah it’s a bird thing and siamese cats don’t really hold back on their opinions of something.
I have 4 siamese/part siamese cats and they can get quite talkative. One of the them is part maine coon so it still has that talkative element but with the common maine coon grumbles, trills and cooing noises. She sounds miserable but she’s usually pretty happy when talking like that with her tail up and acting friendly.
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Are we absolutely sure it doesn’t have some horrible jaw condition exacerbated by brain parasites.
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Nah man, usually when an animal hallucinates, they try to interact with whatever they’re seeing more directly, EG biting/clawing etc…
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I’ve had a girl who did this every week. It’s probably fairly rare, because over the years I’ve probably had twenty cats who didn’t.
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I had a cat (rest his soul, if cats, in fact, have souls) that would do this to me. I would call his name to him in that stupid sing-song-y voice we all use with cats and he’d chatter back. Or I’d play peek-a-boo with him and he’d do it.
I know it was because of frustration, but it was too much fun…
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We’ve loved and lived with 5 cats at different times (each very long-lived) and every one of them ‘chattered’ at the window or patio door when spotting something they wanted to chase/catch/torture/eat. They were all rescues: a dilute tortie domestic long hair, orange tabby long hair, mackeral tabby short hair, black short hair, and only the first 2 were litter mates.
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We’ve got the weird Siamese cats who make almost no noise. Yet, our standard seal point will chatter once in a while on windy fall days as the leaves are blowing around. He loves watching the leaves blow around. I haven’t seen our flame point chatter yet, but she’s slightly more vocal - she purrs out loud instead of quietly, on the inside like the seal point does.
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Since the cat seems to be Siamese, I think we can all be thankful that there is no audio with this vid.
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I had a cat years ago named Frank - pure white, stone deaf and stupid as a sack of hammers. Big cat - little head. Because he was deaf we wouldn’t let him outside but since we were living in Kensington Market we just gave him free reign on the rooftops. He used to sit with the pigeons and do that - but never chase them. If another cat made the scene he’d walk over, ignore all the social signals, and with just one two-handed push knock them right off the roof - and then back to chattering with the pigeons. What a dick.
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Oh, there’s audio. Many videos in Firefox seem to come up muted by default now, and I can’t say it’s an unwelcome development – though I do wish the relevant setting wasn’t shrouded in mystery. I’d also much rather have a video not playing at all instead of playing soundlessly in some background tab, consuming bandwidth and CPU cycles.
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My tabby trills and coos all day long, like she’s muttering to herself.
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The cat’s practicing.
If you watch a cat carefully while it’s doing this proper, you can see the back teeth shuttling back and forth like a high speed hedge trimmer made of microserrated ivory. It’s almost too fast for the eye to follow.
If you ever wondered how an animal with teeth like a cat’s can instantaneously shear the head off a bird or rodent, well, now you know. It’s a very specialized muscle movement pattern that turns those oddly shaped cutters into a razor chainsaw.
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The cat is obviously shooting at enemy aircraft swooping outside the window, with her mouth machine gun - as one does. Some cats don’t stop at just mouth sounds.
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cats on laxo again
Mine does too… not exactly the same sounds as this cat is making, but something similar whenever she sees a bug, bird, or squirrel on the back deck… sometimes leafs, too. Weird cat.
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