Cats - playful pets...
..fearsome fighters...
..deadly hunters.
They beguile, intrigue,
and mercilessly exploit us.
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.
That's it.
They make that funny little noise...
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.
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.
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...
..when he spots another cat.
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.
Chittering may simply be a sound of frustration
but scientists are still not exactly sure.
This is Rocky.
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.
It very rarely happens when the cats are out with each other.
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.
Biologist Dr John Bradshaw knows
why these one-week-old kittens meow.
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.
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.
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!
So, cats have two different languages,
one for each other...
..and one for us.
Scientists have found that cats can produce a huge range of meows...
..and wanted to know if there was a universal cat-human language.
There's a trill that Jasper does.
Yeah, that's it.
They make that funny little noise...
That doesn't sound anything like it.
I think it does.
Scientists have discovered that every cat's meows are unique.
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?
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?
..talk back.
Pretty girl. Are you a pretty girl?
Are you Mummy's pretty girl?
Pixie, you lovely girl.
Talking comes naturally to us,