We have three furry babies in our family. Our boys, Buttercup and Blacky, and our girl, Mimi, mean the world to us. We adopted them when they were just a bunch of furry-balls back in 2012 (well except for Mimi; we found her in our car engine…). Now they are all in the 7th year of their lives – healthy, happy and enjoying life mostly as the apple of our eyes. Our “buah hati pengarang jantung” so to speak.
Kitam and Baby posing ala Brit-Indie rock band’s CD cover…
Buttercup, Blacky, and Mimi – those are actually the names registered in the Global Pets database (the trusted vet clinic/pet store since they were little kitties). But at home they own varieties of nicknames depending on their mommy’s mood. Buttercup could be “Baby”, “Beb”, “Bebot”, “Bobot” or “Abbot” because of his whining nature (obviously). Blacky is “Kitam” most of the time (the name given by their Atok apparently….), but he could also be “Kitamkitom” or “Petampetom” at times. Mimi, on the other hand could be “Amimi” or “Princess Amimi” or “Emot” or even “Cik-kok”, but when she started being a “kehpohchi” then her mommy (reactively) will started screaming “Siti NurAmimi!!!!” at her (depending on her daily antiques that is…).
Mimi strikes a “diva-ish” pose…
As they grow older, one thing that I noticed is their abilities to communicate with us. They can actually use distinctive meows or similar sounds to convey messages to us. Impressively, they can even contextualised their choices of meows depending on the situations or circumstances. Mimi can actually says “Nyaakkk” (which means “I waaannttt” in Malay) every time she wants people to hand-feed her some kibbles (yup…she’s been hand-fed since little). Baby calls me “Maaa” every time he enters my bedroom. And Kitam always greets us with his special “Ae-Yeoy” whenever we got home from work.
Baby trying to be a spiderman…
At this age, they also know their names very well. This is confirmed by the way they responded to us, for e.g. to my Dad every evening when he yelled out “Kitaammm….baliiikkkk” (i.e. “Kitaammm…get inside now”) and Kitam will galloping home right away.
Mimi every time her mommy is busy marking exam papers…
How cats responded to their names have been studied by a group of Japanese researchers. The article entitled Domestic cats (Felis catus) discriminate their names from other words by Atsuko Saito, Yuki Ito and Toshikazu Hasegawa has now published in Nature ( DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-40616-4 ) and has been featured in APA’s Monitor on Psychology (July/August 2019 edition).
As highlighted on APA’s website, among the findings (and I quote): “The researchers found that the cats reacted more strongly to their names than to the other words, whether the speaker was their owner or a stranger”. We can actually read the synopsis of article via this link: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/07-08/inbrief
So the next time my sister and I want to gossip about Baby, Kitam or Mimi, we’ll make sure we do it without them around. Or else one of them will come and will cynically asks us “meow, meow, meow?…” (“you two talking about me?”….).
Kitam won’t let his mommy doing the work…Grrrrrr…..