Caturday felids: cat pwns bat, hears baby talk

December 10, 2011 • 5:15 am

Here’s a video of a cat snatching a bat out of the air, killing it, of course. It’s sad, but it’s natural selection in action, and the cat’s acrobatics are amazing. I know no details of this interaction save that it was sent to me by alert reader Richard.

On a lighter note, here’s a cartoon from xkcd, with a hat tip to reader Gregory:

I never talked to my cats in baby talk, and it sort of irritates me when humans talk that way to human babies too. It’s not as if babies understand you better when you address them in a high, squealing babble, but perhaps something in our genes incites this kind of behavior towards infants.  Perhaps evolutionary psychologists could explain its adaptive significance.  As for my part, I would address my kid, if I had one, in an adult voice:  “Hello, there, are you hungry?”

70 thoughts on “Caturday felids: cat pwns bat, hears baby talk”

  2. Wot, no comments?
    ——–
    / O O \
    ——uuuu—\/—uuuu——-

    (Do Americans do/ did WotNos?, if under another name?)

    German for “bat” is, IIRC + approximaately “flittermaus”, or “flying mouse”. Obviously this cat reads and understands German, and has understood the “nom” implications of this.

    [Obligatory Canine Denigration on Caturday] When was the last time you heard of a dog that can read German?

    Note the cat’s implicit understanding of the conservation of angular momentum : to rotate the body to bring the feet back under the body, the tail is rotated in the opposite direction. When was the last time you met a dog that understood conservation of angular momentum?

    1. Sigh ; approximate spelling of “approximately” ; and the attempts at ASCII art failed.
      ……….—––……..
      ………/ O O \…….
      – – -uuuu- -\/- -uuuu- – –

      Will that hold together better?

      1. Unfortunately, even if it works for you, ASCII art tends to be font-dependent and other users with other browsers and/or operating systems might see something different.

      2. No, that would be flûgel maus, I think.

        “Flittermouse” is the swedish term, sw: fladdermus. Compare ge: fledermaus. It looks to me to have the same roots. (FWIW, Swedish has germanic roots, and some modern influence under the Hanseatic League.)

  3. I don’t speak to my cat using baby talk, as I think that’s pretty silly, but I have noticed that the pitch of my voice tends to raise at least a little bit when I’m talking to her… I definitely don’t speak to her as I would to other people.

    FWIW, I’ve noticed that I also do this when talking to a stranger. I’ve thought it might be an attempt put them more at ease, or to be less threatening.

  4. Merlyn blocks and snags toys thrown 3-4 feet over his head, even when he’s not expecting it. Fantastic to watch. He would make a great goal keeper.

    We don’t talk to our cats in baby talk. We talk to them like adults. And they converse back. They each have their own voice (not a baby voice) and personality. It can get pretty funny. I know we’re not the only ones who do that. Right? … Right?

  5. I saw one of my cats wall-running on a brick wall, Matrix-style, chasing after a chipmunk.

    Cats, when you really look at them and watch them in motion, are elegant incredibly-optimized killing machines. Sometimes I get the same feeling thinking about them as I do when reading about how atomic bombs work: What an awful thing to have wrought, but what beauty in the engineering! How horrific, and yet how triumphant!

    Too bad about the rodents and other small animals, though… As SMBC said about cats, “I like to watch small animals beg for death!”

  6. I don’t know, but I think there’s a lot of biology going on there. If you had a baby, chances are you’d use some flavor of baby talk. Maybe it would be “Who’s our favorite evolutionary biologist? huh? Who’s our favorite evolutionary biologist?” in a high pitched tone. 😉

    People who do that with cats are exhibiting misdirected sociobiology.

    1. Or just extending a behavior commonly used with one’s own offspring to other seemingly dependent, innocent creatures…

      I think I use a lot more baby talk with my animals than I ever did with my children!

  7. It’s not as if babies understand you better when you address them in a high, squealing babble, but perhaps something in our genes incites this kind of behavior towards infants.

    I think it’s easier for them to hear, actually, and they seem to enjoy it.

    I’m with you in general though. Sometimes it is necessary to modify how you talk when speaking to young children, but people waaaaaaaaay overdo it. Most of the time, I talk to my sons like they’re, you know, people.

  8. “Here’s a video of a cat snatching a bat out of the air, killing it, of course.”?

    Pardon my skepticism, but doesn’t it seem more likely that the bat was either fake or already dead, and someone threw it over the cat while someone else was standing ready with the camera?

    And if cats have been selectively bred for thousands of years to kill mice, Would this really be “natural selection in action”?

    1. I admire your skepticism, but in the slo-mo sequence the bat is clearly flying.
      And I doubt that any selective breeding has ever been necessary for effective mousing.

      However, I can’t think of any meaningful way that this represents ‘natural selection in action’. The bat is trapped indoors, apparently in a small room, and likely freaking out*. We don’t know how many tries the cat took to succeed, but the fact that it was being video’d in the first place suggests multiple preliminaries. Is the cat likely to obtain more reproductive opportunities because it finally succeeded in killing the bat? Are future generations of bats less likely to get trapped in small rooms because this one got killed?
      It’s a silly, throwaway comment.

      2. How about selection against bats to go indoors? And it’s still selection to avoid predators, no matter how many times the cat struck. And really, don’t you think it’s a bit rude to come over here and say that something I sid was a “silly throwaway comment”. It’s my blog here, and you can attack my ideas, but please try to be polite.

          1. I’m glad you caught that ‘blog’ reference. Who is this person, and what has he done with Jerry?

    2. It is natural selection in action. The bat gene pool has been altered in a very small way by the death of that particular bat. The long term consequences for bat evolution are likely to be astonishingly small, but that doesn’t make this any less of a selective event.

      1. This seems to me a bit like saying that the motion of one molecule is thermodynamics in action. Thermodynamics is by definition a statistical process, and so is natural selection. If one bat gets killed by one cat, that’s bad luck for that particular bat, but I don’t think you can call it natural selection unless there’s a statistical pattern of bats with different alleles being more or less vulnerable to death by kitty.

        1. Maybe I’m just thick, but that bat failed to escape a predator. It is no less a case of natural selection in action than is a gazelle failing to escape a leopard attack.

          It seems to me that denying this as an example of natural selection would prevent the description from ever being used when observing predation.

          1. Selection for what? That’s not a question that can be answered by a single instance. We have no idea what caused that particular gazelle to fall prey to that particular leopard on that day. Maybe its eyesight and running skills were excellent, but it had the bad luck to step on a hidden rock at the wrong moment.

            You can’t generalize from one data point. To invoke natural selection for or against particular alleles, you need an aggregate of statistical data regarding the fates of many individuals carrying those alleles.

            It’s basically the same reason we carry out clinical trials in medicine: because one patient’s death or survival tells us nothing. We need statistics to infer causation.

          3. By making your statistical argument, all you accomplish is to remove all individual survival/non-survival events as examples of natural selection in action. Isn’t natural selection a process that occurs via countless particular events? How is any understanding of evolution advanced by ignoring the particular events by which it operates?

          4. Thermodynamics is a process that occurs via countless particular events. But we don’t understand thermodynamics by studying individual gas molecules. We understand it by studying their statistics.

            That’s how you understand any statistical process: by ignoring the particular details of specific events and studying the patterns that emerge in the aggregate.

            I would go so far as to say there is no such thing as an individual example of natural selection in action. There are individual examples of predation, and of death by any number of other means. But “natural selection” is not a synonym for death. It’s a description of an abstract process that’s visible only at the level of populations. So removing individual examples from discussions of natural selection is a good thing in my book if it focuses attention more clearly on the inherently statistical nature of the process.

          5. I’ve been, from time to time, accused of pedantry, so this may be pot and kettle time. But I think you are being pedantic.

          6. Pedantic for what? That’s not a question that can be answered by a single instance. =D

          7. Oops. My apologies for the bad joke and the =D. I wasn’t really reading the context, which I should have.

    3. “Pardon my skepticism, but doesn’t it seem more likely that the bat was either fake or already dead, and someone threw it over the cat while someone else was standing ready with the camera?”

      It happens. See my comment at #17.

      “And if cats have been selectively bred for thousands of years to kill mice,”

      This isn’t too clear. Lately cats have been bred to sleep on the couch, look cute, and beg for food from cans. All of which my cats are quite proficient at.

      A few cats are good hunters. Most in my experience are rather lazy about it.

    2. Yes, I talk this way sometimes, just to annoy my cat. Because she sometimes deliberately annoys me.

      1. I’ll admit I do the baby talk to my cats (“Ooh a diddum kittums. Yes ooh are!”). While I do the high-pitched voice around infants, I don’t change my actual words. I figure my cats will never speak English (or any other human language), so I’m free to speak to them like using the admittedly idiotic baby-talk. But they seem to respond positively to it.

  10. I have always spoken to my babies in a sing-song type of voice because it is what they respond to and bonding is best supported by interactions.

    When you have a baby, and I think we can all agree on this, you want it to not cry. The extension of that is you want it to be happy and a monotone or regular voice just doesn’t interest babies, they only really respond positively to a flow of words in a slightly higher pitch. They respond and we get encouraged by the interaction which creates an escalating cycle of interaction.

    Baby talk, on the other hand, has always meant things like saying horsey and birdy instead of horse and bird. This drive me nuts! Why teach the wrong way to say something only to have to relearn it later with the correct word?

    This probably explains why my daughter grew up to be a linguist, language is very important to us and seeing it used improperly makes us twitch.

  11. dont have cats. when speaking to my dogs its usually along the lines of “stop eating tht! stop licking me! get back damn it!” if i were to talk to my turtles, i should use a sinister voice for as much as i love them, looking into their eyes ican tell that if i were smaller, they would eat me with no less remorse than they do worms, slugs, and crickets.

  13. Babies are very sensitive to the sing-song voice with marked melody somewhat rising to a high tone: it is the inter-language mothering tone. It indicates too a strange adult is safe.

    1. That sing-song voice is exactly the tone a middle-aged and rather authoritarian colleague of mine (decades ago) used to use in talking to his wife on the phone. His whole voice used to change. The rest of us youngsters in the office used to lampoon him cruelly behind his back. I don’t think he realised he was doing it and he never caught on.

  14. I love your mix of writing,very enjoyable. I also love cats, I am involved in feral cat spay and neuter program. I also have a personal rescue program, since people are jerks and dump them around my farm a lot. If they come to me and are obviously pets, they get to stay as long as they are fixed and vaccinated. Baby talk, I guess I probably sound like that for a reason. I change the letters in certain words to avoid the hissing sounds, they seem to be a lot calmer and more likely to fit into the household, maybe it removes the sound of a threat by me.

  15. We all adapt our speech patterns to suit our audience. Babies, cats, parents, kids, professional colleagues, hometown buddies: each gets a slightly different vocabulary, intonation, even regional accent. We unconsciously move toward the style that elicits the best feedback in each context.

  18. One night my ex feral cat woke me up to tell me something important.

    I wasn’t interested and just went back to sleep.

    The next morning, on the top of the covers was…a dead bat. I suppose it is the thought that counts.

    My cats have caught a few and I’ve seen them trying. When the bats are flying low, they jump up in the air and grab them. It doesn’t work very often but they keep trying.

    1. I’ll consider myself lucky that my first cat, who was an excellent mouser, would “gift” us his kills on the driveway, and never indoors.

    1. Thank you, too. I was too lazy to go digging for citations, but thought such research would be more widely known. It’s certainly the sort that gets attention in the popular press.

  20. There is actually a lot of research done on baby talk, or “motherease”. They don’t understand it, but they do seem to pay more attention to it, and to take it as addressed to them. The fact that in all cultures baby talk seems to have the same characteristics – high pitch, long amplitude – also might mean there is something important about it. Check out Csibra and Gergely’s natural pedagogy for discussion of this – it’s actually really interesting.

  21. I hope that kitty has its rabies shots. Even so, if it’s in the US, it’ll probably need to be quarantined for a while. (Maybe not if they were able to have the bat’s head tested for rabies.)

    My ex-stray cat got a wound on his head, and when I took him into the vet, they said that since we didn’t know what caused the injury, and we didn’t know about the cat’s vaccination status, he would have to stay inside for six months.

  22. Is it a coincidence that this looks like the back half of a “Jesus Fish”? Apologies if this is a repeat of another post but I was too lazy to go through the comments.

  25. It is natural selection in action; but only in a very uninteresting way, at the moment.

    It would be more correct to say the cat’s amazing ability to catch a bat in flight is the result of natural selection.

  26. I always addressed my son in adult English. I thought that any other way of addressing him was demeaning. I lift the cooing to my wife and she didn’t do much of that, but, though my son loves me without a doubt, I think that his and her relationship are something more. Who knows?

  27. Linguistics student here. Infants pay more attention to exaggerated prosody, but the reason is mysterious. It doesn’t seem to be for communicating additional information, though, as exaggerated prosody encodes almost nothing. Sentences like “Dave didn’t eat two cookies” are ambiguous, but even the most extreme stress fails to disambiguate sans context.

    1. Great book, but that’s actually incorrect. Everett explicitly mentions the “humming” form of the piraha language as a form of baby talk (as well as a form of whispering since their language is tonal). They treat young children as inexperienced adults, but they certainly don’t treat infants that way.

  29. Didn’t read the comments, but features of baby talk is apparently really consistent language to language; in particular, high-pitch and exaggeration of phonemes. I think there’s a really good case to be made that baby talk is essentially instinctive, particularly on the part of mothers, and that it’s evolved as part of the primary language acquisition process — it’s a necessary part of children learning how to speak their first language.

    Got this perspective from Dennett, incidentally. He had some folks from the MIT cognitive machines group talk to his philosophy of mind class and one thing they were doing at MIT is teaching words to a robot by playing it video/audio of mothers engaged in play/baby talk with children. Apparently baby talk is a great way to teach robots words as well.

    1. Jerry,

      I said a couple of days ago that Pinker’s your man for baby talk.

      Please, please, please get hold of your mate and ask him to copy and paste something he has over to here; I’ve Oxfammed my Pinkers. Tell him to quote the book title; might make him a few bob for Christmas.

      I particularly remember a great few paragraphs he has on the exponential increase in the complexity of language between the ages of 2 and 3.

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