Humans sensitive to cat's cry within purr

FALMER, England, July 15 (UPI) -- Cats give an indication of human sensitivity to cues relevant to nurturing, a British scientist suggests.

The study, published in Current Biology, says humans find it annoyingly difficult to ignore "solicitation purring" -- a mixed signal of urgency embedded in a cat's otherwise pleasant purr.

"The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response," study leader Karen McComb of the University of Sussex in England said in a statement.

McComb says this form of "solicitation purring" is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, but is not found in all cats. It seems to most often develop in cats having a one-to-one relationships with their owners. In fact, the cats were unwilling to engage in solicitation purring in the presence of researchers, so the cat owners had to be trained to record their cats' cries.

However, even people who did not have cats of their own reported a sense of urgency when they heard the recordings -- suggesting the cry does tap -- perhaps sublimely into an inherent human sensitivity.