Do you woo your pets with your voice?

Not really, Debra, but my tuxedo cat certainly likes being spoken to.


I've got a vivid imagination & can just imagine the scene when you sing to them!

I once tried to hypnotize a cat, cliche-style, with a swinging stopwatch. I was going for "you are getting sleepy" but for some reason, it just made the cat more hyper. Go figure.

Oh absolutely. My kitty is my baby and she will always be treated that way. I suppose it is funny to others to see me talking to her like a baby, but she loves it. Cali follows me everywhere and comes running when she hears my voice as well.

Prrrrrrrrrrrrr :-D

debra, i love your story.

My cat knows the sound of my car and meets me at the door when I come home. He talks a lot too, mostly when he's hungry, but definitely not exclusively then. He's super-friendly though and comes out to make the rounds during parties.

I can have a 'meow' chat with him almost any time. I meow, he meows back, I mrrrrowr, he mrrowrs, etc. If I whistle, he almost always comes (I think he thinks I have a bird in my mouth) and if I howl he also comes running.

LOL Littlek, I can picture that :-D

<grin>

Sounds exactly like my critter, littlek!

Maybe they're related?

I used to think it was the tone of my voice that lured my dog, Jack, into 'knowing' what I meant, but I tried different modulations and he still ran to the door when I said 'outside'; to the fridge, when I said 'ice' (which he catches and runs off to secure between his paws and lick); to hide, when I say 'lets get a bath'...

My husband used to laugh at me, when I'd babytalk him, or speak soothingly when he got a nice, gentle brushing.

I noticed our animals through the years have all favored my son and I, who speak to them in specific tones to show love--and my husband and daughter have never fared so well--they eschew 'special' conversation.

Once, my son and daughter were kidding around, play-fighting. My daughter raised her hand to swipe my son, and Jack appeared out of nowhere, lunged, and airborne, grabbed my daughter's wrist gently stopped her from connecting.

Quite demoralizing to have the dog take your brother's side in a fray.

We used to have occasional family melees in the floor--and Jack always snapped severely at whoever finally pinned me down. My hero.

I like Debra's story. There is a connection, I think, that some people have with animals. The voice is a part of it, I think. But, I think the voice instinctively tells them something deeper about us.

(That we're nuts, I hear my husband saying...)

The Pied Piper of cats, dogs, and kids. . . .
Nice comments everyone, thank you! We all love our babies!

Sophia, my guy also makes jokes about my connection to and empathy for animals. He knows the circumstances under which I adopted Pollyanna--how she dragged her injured body from the back of her cage and stuck her paw out to me. He jokingly calls it the "sign" that I (the animal nut) couldn't ignore.

Pollyanna's Story

When our little guest kitten (Lover Boy the Stray Kitten) made a hole in the back screen door and jumped inside our house, my honey joked that the hole in the screen must be a far more significant "sign" than an outstretched paw. LOL

Now there's a thought, littlek: They're both tuxedo cats, too, Yes?
Hmmmmmm ... Related, but separated by land & oceans. Sounds kinda nice, doesn't it?

My sweetiepie has a companion, named Cleo, who likes to listen to the telephone. One cannot say, certainly, how she "sees" all of this, but there is no doubt that she recognizes the voices. Beth has told me that she will look to the front door, or out the window at the porch, or sometimes up the stairs, as if trying to figure out where i am. If Beth calls, and my phone directs her to the voice mail, Miss Cleo will listen intently to the recorded message. She also responds to Beth's parents' voices when she hears them on the telephone.

Miss Cleo very definitely reacts to the voices she hears on the telephone. Her other companion, Mr. Bailey, however, seems indifferent to the telephone.

I no longer have a cat. I talk to my dogs the way I would to three year old children. They respond remarkably well.

Oh, the late great Jake loved words and talking. He had a sense of humor (some dogs do) and would just, I dunno, kind of look at you and silently laugh. Like we'd open the window a crack and kid with him, now, don't go jumping out the window, and you know he was thinking, Silly humans! You know I'm too big to fit through that window!

He'd be walking away and we'd say, I can see your big Rottweiler butt (he was Mastiff-Rottweiler-Shepherd, a very big boy), and he'd turn around and smile. You just knew he understood and thought that was funny.

He knew words like leash, heel and walk, but also grape and banana (since he disliked bananas, he'd run out of the room if you said you were going to have one).

We didn't have Chewbie as long as we had Jake, but he knew words like down and tug (he had a tug toy).

Shadow was less interested in speech but would respond appropriately if you asked to see her hot puppy belly (she was a pit bull, and her stomach was a lot hotter than the rest of her).

We didn't have Abenaki Knight long enough to really establish whether he liked it when people spoke to him.

Edgar, that definitely makes sense - most dogs adore baby talk and wasn't there a recent study that showed that they can pick up some 200+ vocabulary words?

Some of my dogs have had a remarkable range of word understanding. The one I have now is very smart, but also still learning.

I will share our game: "Sock".

When Jack hasn't had enough attention, he will skulk around the laundry room, looking for a stray sock. Sometimes, he finds boxer shorts, but we don't want to confuse him, so we still call it Sock.

My husband and I will be sitting talking or watching TV, when Jack drags the Sock into the room, plants himself a few feet away from us with it hanging from his mouth, and casts a wary eye in our direction. I make eye contact, but act suspiciously cagey.

In a few minutes, I will squint my eyes and menacingly emote, "I...want...that .....sock." Jack petulantly drops and recaptures his prize...

This goes on for a while; I may lean forward for emphasis---he growls...

Eventually, I am cat-like, crawling toward him, growling of my desire for the sock. He is growling, tossing and recapturing his sock.

We run, snap, fake out, tug of war and it usually ends up with him cowering under the kitchen table, sitting on the Sock, and me pulling out chairs. He lets me win sometimes.

I miss the days when my kids were young enough to play Sock with us. But, I hate to see that he still wants to play, and they are off married or too sophisticated. So, I play Sock...

Jespah's Jake/banana story is a hoot. What on earth...? The smell?

And, Debra's injured bird's sign...!!! Poor little baby! He showed her his boo-boo!

The answering machine story reminded me of when my children and I left my husband. We felt sorry for him, so we left Jack with him...you know, shared 'custody'. My husband said whenever I left a message, Jack would howl mournfully, and look around the house for me. He told me to leave Jack a message in Jack-speak, which I did. He would listen with perked ears, and go through the house, looking for Mommy. Waaah!

I had just thought it was a cute anecdote, but I guess dogs can really be sad.

Awww.

I dunno what it was with Jake. You'd offer him banana (hey, we offered him pretty much anything but chocolate or alcohol) and he'd back away and look concerned, kind of, "Mom, are you trying to poison me or something?"

And no doubt they can be sad. Or bored or frustrated or in love. They're thinking beings. I don't think it's anthropomorphism to see a dog who cries when he or she sees someone leaving and to think, that dog is sad. Of course the dog is sad!

Both of my cat love lying in my lap while I'm whistling melodies. At first I thought they were partial to Mahler's 3rd Symphony, first movement, which they absolutely swoon over, until I whistled Mahler's 2nd Symphony, and they liked that just as well.