When cat’s communicate between one another, body language is more significant than vocal expression. The body language of the cat involves movements of the ears, whiskers, hair, spine, legs and tail. There are some experts today in fact who have claimed to have distinguished nine different facial expressions and sixteen body and tail postures. These expressions and postures can be used by the cat in a variety of ways to express subtleties of meaning – or a more accurately way of putting it, of reactions to events – only partly accessible to humans.
For example, let’s take aggression. Aggression is signaled by the raising of the cat’s tail, with the hair all fluffed out and the tail waving slightly. The cat’s facial whiskers will bristle forward, the ears erect but curled slightly backwards, and the pupils narrow to slits. The angrier the cat becomes, the more its ears will go back and its whiskers forward. And if the cat is going to go in for the attack, the ears will swivel even more and the tail will wave more briskly.
