MemeMachineGo!

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this article on cat communication.

Humans love eye contact — it is friendly. For a cat, prolonged eye contact is an assertive, or even threatening, signal. The classic case is when several people are in a room for a social occasion and the host’s cat walks in. It unerringly goes towards the person who doesn’t like cats. Is it simply being perverse? The answer is in eye contact. Cat lovers will be watching the cat, hoping it goes to greet them. Those who don’t particularly like cats will ignore it, hoping it will leave them alone. For the cat, the eye contact made by the cat lovers is somewhat threatening. It avoids them. The people who don’t particularly like cats are not making eye contact — to the cat, they are signalling that they pose no threat. They are being polite in cat terms, so it goes to socialise with them.