The Science of Looks, Woofs and Meows
The emotional bonds forged over the centuries are so strong that humans, cats, and dogs have come to understand each other, and even want to talk. Scientists are exploring this aspect of a special relationship that could evolve further with AI.
[This article is taken from issue 1812 of Courrier international, “All crazy about our animals”, on sale from July 24, 2025 to August 13, 2025]
“It’s all right, it’ll be all right.” With a lick of his tongue, journalist Sam Pyrah’s 10-year-old terrier, Morris, reassured her, she says. But “wasn’t his look asking for a biscuit? Was he just licking a bit of mayonnaise off my cheek?” she wonders in The Guardian . It’s not easy to get into someone else’s head, but science is there to answer some questions.
“Humans are particularly attentive to the feelings of the animals they live with, and it seems that this regard for one another is reciprocal,” notes Nature . This ability to understand one another is often described by dog and cat owners. But how reliable are they, given that many of them naturally fall into anthropomorphism and exaggerate their pets’ emotions and cognitive abilities?
In fact, this ability to recognize emotions is scientifically documented by ethologists, animal behavior specialists. For example, they recently showed that dogs can differentiate between human facial expressions and are affected by emotional contagion, meaning they can even sense their owner's emotions.
This could be linked to the hundreds of years of coexistence between the two species, says Nature, and also fueled by the ability of dogs to form extremely strong emotional bonds that researchers have highlighted in brain imaging. “Dogs experience pleasure when they smell the scent of a familiar person: we observe an activation of neurons in the ventral striatum, an area of the brain that is part of the reward circuit. In some dogs, the stimulation of the striatum can even be more powerful when they are congratulated [by their owner] than when they receive a biscuit,” describes La Repubblica .
Can the same be said for cats? “We would have misunderstood our cats,” revealed New Scientist in 2023. And “part of the confusion has come from the fact that they are not as demonstrative as dogs.” Atsuko Saito of the University of Tokyo noticed in 2019 that their ears and tails move differently when they hear recordings of their owners saying their names, as opposed to other familiar words.
But “cats have not evolved to respond to human signals. They communicate with humans when they want to,” she told the British weekly. Various experiments have also concluded that cats have a strong emotional attachment to their owners. For researcher Saho Takagi of Azabu University in Japan, whose comments are reported by Science , “Cats pay attention to what we say in everyday life, and they try to understand us – more than we realize.”
Regarding the relationship between cats and human language, we have known since 2019 that these small feline companions know their name , but also, since 2022, the names of the humans in “their” family and of the other cats they are used to seeing . According to a study published in October 2024, “cats learn to associate images and words more quickly than babies do,” says Science in this popular article.
Cats understand us and also have “things to tell us,” as Scientific American magazine headlined in June, noting that “ Felis catus is a talkative species that, over thousands of years of domestication, has learned to talk to the particular primate that opens the refrigerator door.” It seems, in fact, that it modifies its meow depending on what it wants to say to its human.
Researchers have been able to distinguish between the meow “give me some food” and the one asking “where are you?” or the one begging “brush me” using different acoustic fingerprints. This paves the way for automatic cat-human translators based on artificial intelligence algorithms. Moreover, according to Scientific American, the Chinese multinational Baidu “has filed a patent application for what it describes as a method of transforming animal vocalizations into human language.”
On the canine side, communication through sound buttons seems to be about to enter homes. This is the case with FluentPet, an interspecies communication system presented in January at the last Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and spotted by the site TechCrunch . Drinking, eating, ball, water… When the dog presses a particular button with its paw or nose, a sound recording of its owner's voice is triggered and corresponds to what the animal wants to "say" to its owner.
The fact remains that the language used is that of the human world. However, our pets experience the world in a completely different way than we do. Do these communication devices reflect what animals have to say to us or what their owners would like to hear? These questions and how we can avoid the excesses of AI will be at the heart of the work of the Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience, located at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), which will open on September 30, reveals The Guardian.
“We appreciate our pets behaving like humans, and thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, our interactions with them will take on a whole new dimension,” Jonathan Birch, the future director of the center, explained to the British newspaper. He warned , “The problem is that AI often generates fanciful responses to please the user instead of taking objective reality into account. This risks being a disaster for animal welfare.”
