How Does Your Cat Say, I Love You?
April 3, 2020
Cats offer great comfort especially during uncertain times. Their purring can calm your nerves, their antics can bring a smile to your face, and their affectionate natures can make you feel complete. But is your cat trying to tell you something?
Cats have many ways of communicating with their caregivers and many of us know our pets well enough to recognize the signs. But have you ever noticed your cat squinting or blinking at you?
Cat’s Eye Contact
Mostly, cats communicate with us when they’re hungry and hankering for a snack, but they also have some weird and wonderful ways of telling us how much they love us. Research out of the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine shows that squinting or blinking signals love, affection and trust.
Looking a cat directly in the eye would be interpreted as confrontational and your cat would either back away or take a swat at you. So when your cat wants to sneak a peek at you, he or she will half close their eyes and gaze at you affectionately, and if you’re lucky, with admiration.
The Kitty Blink-Blink Experiment
To test if this is true, try running your own experiment. When you’re interacting with your cat, try blinking slowly at them and see how they react. If your cat adores you, they will inevitably blink back at you. But if your cat is still a kitten or a recent addition to your household, you may still have to build trust and work on bonding before you’ll get a wink back.
Pulling Out All The Stops
Your cat has learned many ways of showing their affection for you. Often your cat will approach you, purring and rubbing against you before launching into some serious sweater kneading. But notice how these actions usually precede the slow blinking. Your cat is pulling out all the stops with these gestures and doing everything they can to get some love and affection, giving the only reason you’ll ever need: Because they love you.
Now that we’re all home sheltering from the coronavirus pandemic and spending more time with our cats, it’s a good opportunity to show how much we love our cats by blink-blink-blinking our way through self-isolation. What could be more purrfect?