Purring

When I went to visit Banjo in his cage at the veterinary clinic he purred loudly. I left him there for the night and went home feeling greatly relieved. when cats purr it means they're happy doesn't it? It was only recently that I learned that cats can also purr when they are injured.

Today I started reading a book by Jonathan Balcombe called 'Pleasurable Kingdom.' In it he mentioned an hypothesis proposed by Elizabeth von Muggenthaler of the Fauna Communication Research Institute in North Carolina. She thinks it is possible that cat purring has therapeutic properties.

I looked up the paper she presented at the 142nd annual Acoustical Society of America, American Institute of Physics, International Conference. In humans, vibrations between 20-140 Hz are therapeutic for:

• bone growth/ fracture healing
• pain relief/ swelling reduction
• wound healing
• muscle growth and repair/ tendon repair.

She says that, although it would be very difficult to carry out an investigation on cats to test whether their purring promotes healing, it is well within the bounds of possibility since they create frequencies that fall directly in the range that has been shown to be therapeutic in humans.