Have you ever wondered what is going through your cat's mind? While you may never find out its true thoughts, a cat's eyes can reveal many non-verbal signals and clues that can indicate what your feisty feline may be thinking.
'If you walk into a room as a stranger, a cat's usual response is to glance from side to side, and its pupils will dilate, going as wide as possible,' says Jackson Galaxy, a Los Angeles-based cat behavourist since 2002. 'The cat is looking for an escape route. And, as a predator and prey at the same time, it always has to be on guard.'
Whenever the cat behavourist meets an unfamiliar cat, he employs an amazing blinking technique to relax the feline. 'By assuming a posture that is completely non-aggressive, I try to establish a line of communication with a slow blink. I'm trying to say that I'm not a threat,' says the resident cat expert on Animal Planet's television series Cats 101. He adds cats will usually relax and return the blink.
Roger Tabor, British television cat expert and chairman of the British Naturalists' Association, says cat blinking developed as a reassurance signal to other felines. The signal informed nearby cats that the situation didn't warrant aggression and 'it's alright to settle down and relax'.
By studying the habits of feral cats for more than 30 years, Tabor says felines need a way to indicate their intentions around other cats, unlike dogs that naturally have a non-verbal vocabulary for submission.
'Dogs are social animals that hunt and kill together, so they have a system that says 'I give up and don't kill me' to an aggressive, dominant dog. But, apart from the lion, the bulk of cats and their behaviour is all about the self,' says Tabor, who has written 10 books on cats, including The Wild Life of the Domestic Cat.
According to Tabor, when feral cats have a local food source, there are suddenly social problems. Thus, as an aberration, feral cats become social animals that need to coexist. As a cat begins to relax within the group, he adds, 'the eyes get heavy and shut down ... they can only do that if the bad guys are not around. So if there are other cats in a feral group, a cat will react to another with a 'I know you and I can blink'.