How can I intrepret my cat's feelings?

Victoria - It sounds like Teddy is a very, very contented cat because lying on its back like that is a very submissive posture which just means it very much trusts you, Mike, and really wants to be around you. You're head of the pecking order. But what that opening and closing of paws is about is actually, that's a feeding kind of stimulation. So when cats are kittens and they're suckling from their mothers, they actually paw at their mother's teets to try and stimulate lactation. That movement actually stimulates the milk flow. So that's what your cat is doing there. It's a reflex action and it's also a sign of complete contentment, so I think you have a very happy cat.

Mike - It waits for me and runs in the living room when I get up, and lies down waiting for me.

Chris - There was a story a few years ago by a lady at the University of Sussex. Her name was Karen McComb and she was working on something totally unrelated to this and she kept getting woken up in the middle of the night by her cat. It used to come and scratch at the door to say, "I want some attention" or "let me out!" or whatever. She thought she could detect a subtle difference in the purr of the cat when it wanted something so she actually recorded it, and took it into the lab. And she recorded the cat's sounds into a computer, looked at the audio spectrum and she saw that the cat's purr running along between 50 and 100 hertz was punctuated by these cycles of 300 hertz. That's the same frequency a baby cries at and so she theorised that what's going on is that the cat has learned to plug into your sensitive side, mimicking a baby so that you pay it some attention.