Cats Are Feline Groovy Thanks To Whiskas' Radio

Today marks a special date in the cat-lover's calendar: it's Take Your Cat to the Vet day! Nope, us neither, but any excuse for a marketing exercise, eh? Especially if it involves fluffy felines...

Putting cynicism to one side, pet food purveyors Whiskas and BBDO Toronto have come up with a genuinely useful solution to the perennial problem of cats freaking out on the way to their annual check-up. As anyone who's ever wrestled a spitting, yowling, bristling moggy into the car will know, it's nigh-on impossible to get nervous cats to chill out on the journey to the vet's. But perhaps some soothing sounds might help?

Enter Cat Calm Radio, a streaming internet service tailored to your cat's musical tastes, which plays a 45-minute loop of relaxing tunes.

'Species-specific' musician David Teie was brought in to create the playlist, which features sounds that are supposed to settle frazzled feline nerves, such as suckling milk, purring and scratching. Teie employed a mix of traditional and not-so-traditional instruments, like scratching on canvas, squeezing spray bottles and 'drumming on a toy football'. For added authenticity, the sounds play at the same frequencies cats use to communicate with each other.

The result? Well. some aspects, like the classic violin instrumental, are music to our ears. Less appealing is the sandpaper-like scratching, which would definitely get on our nerves on a long journey. But then again, we're not the target audience, and perhaps this really is the feline audio equivalent of whales mating under a full moon.

For more insight into the science behind 'species specific' composition, Teie's website is worth a peek. “Every species has an intuitive biological response to sounds based on their brain development and vocalizations. The idea is to use the recipe that we humans use for making music, but instead of using ingredients that are all designed by and for humans, species-specific music is created with ingredients taken from the voices and development of another species,” the site reads. “For example, we have a pulse in our music because we heard our mother’s pulse in the womb for four months before we were born as our brains were developing.”