Rescue responds

Tony Jones from Aberystwyth says his Cats Protection rescue cat Daisy doesn’t respond to her name but she does respond to his singing.

He has even filmed a video to prove his point in which he’s heard calling Daisy’s name from the next room in his home.

He then starts singing Etta James’s I’d rather go blind, which appears to make Daisy come and see him in the next room, jump up on the table and nuzzle into him.

Tony said: “I'm an amateur songwriter and sometimes sing along to karaoke on the tablet from YouTube. For some reason Daisy finds this very exciting. She is a fun, talkative cat.”

Tony recently read an article quoting Cats Protection behaviour expert Daniel Warren-Cummings about whether cats could be trained like dogs.

Tony said: “I found it so fascinating I was moved to prove, scientifically, that our cat loves my singing.”

Tony and his wife Marian Jebb adopted nine-year-old Daisy through Cats Protection in Aberystwyth in 2014. After previously living in a caravan as a kitten, Daisy is now surrounded by fields. Tony added: “She loves her field and patrols it when the weather is good enough. She likes to play with her humans for 20 minutes first thing in the morning, and an hour last thing at night. Plus a bit of Chase Game.”

Cats Protection’s Central Behaviour Officer Daniel Warren-Cummings said: “Cats have remarkable hearing and Daisy could definitely be responding to her owner’s dulcet tones.

“Some think certain sounds within human singing may be a sound cats are ‘hard-wired’ to respond to. However, it’s just as likely that the cat is wanting to investigate an unusual or different stimulus in the house.

“Initially the cat could have been responding out of curiosity but may start to link the singing with something positive like fuss and attention. “The cat may respond to the singing and not to their name being called because there is a much clearer link that has been positively reinforced. Every time the owner sings, the cat comes to investigate and gets a fuss.

“However, owners use their cat’s names often without much or any reinforcement. It becomes white noise to the cat. If an owner started by only saying the cat’s name then throwing the cat a treat, very quickly the cat would start to build a clear association with the name. Remember, cats don’t know they have names, it’s just another sound to them, unless it is ‘taught’ to them and well reinforced.”