Studies show that human beings and cats have been living together for about 9,500 years. Dogs have lived with humans longer than cats. Dogs are domesticated, meaning they have been trained to do what people want them to do. As cat owners know well, cats do not obey humans in the same way dogs do. In fact, some scientists claim that cats have trained us to take care of them. As a result, many people have come to think that maybe cats simply do not understand human language. A report in the scientific journal Nature shows that cats understand human beings well enough to recognize their own names. The report describes a series of experiments with house cats in Japan. These tests involved having people say four words that were similar to a cat’s name. Each word had the same number of syllables as the name and some of the same sounds. The cats seemed to lose interest after the speaker said a few of the words. Then the person said the cat’s name. The cats moved their ears or turned their head when they heard their names. They also moved their feet or bodies very little; not a surprising result.