Cats don't meow at each other

Kittens meow to call their mother: I'm hungry, I'm cold, I'm here. As they grow up, that channel goes quiet. Adult cats hardly use it among themselves: they read each other through scent, posture, tail, distance. Meows are reserved almost exclusively for a species that isn't even their own: ours. Researchers explain it like this: at some point over the last few thousand years, cats discovered that the kitten trick kept working on us. We are creatures who respond to sound, so they kept the baby call alive and kept refining it. So much so that every cat develops its own repertoire with its human: the food meow, the door meow, the eleven-at-night meow. A Cornell University study found that owners can tell their own cat's meows apart better than a stranger's. There is no such thing as the language of cats: there is the dialect yours invented with you. You've been in a private conversation for years without knowing it.