Catwatching

by Desmond Morris

  At the same time this resilience is to blame for a great deal of feline suffering. Because cats can survive when thrown out and abandoned, it makes it easier for people to do just that. The fact that most of these animals must then live out their years in appalling urban conditions slum cats scratching a living among the garbage and filth of human society – may reflect how tough they are, but it is a travesty of feline existence. That we tolerate it is one more example of the shameful manner in which we have repeatedly broken our ancient contract with the cat. It is nothing, however, compared with the brutal way we have sometimes tormented and tortured cats over the centuries. They have all too frequently been the butt of our redirected aggression, so much so that we even have a popular saying to express the phenomenon: ~… and the office boy kicked the cat', illustrating the way in which insults from above become diverted to victims lower down the social order, with the cat at the bottom of the ladder.

  Fortunately, against this can be set the fact that the vast majority of human families owning pet cats do treat their animals with care and respect. The cats have a way of endearing themselves to their owners, not just by their 'kittenoid' behaviour, which stimulates strong parental feelings, but also by their sheer gracefulness. There is an elegance and a composure about them that captivates the human eye. To the sensitive human being it becomes a privilege to share a room with a cat, exchange its glance, feel its greeting rub, or watch it gently luxuriate itself into a snoozing ball on a soft cushion. And for millions of lonely people – many physically incapable of taking long walks with a demanding dog – the cat is the perfect companion. In particular, for people forced to live on their own in later life, their company provides immeasurable rewards. Those tight-lipped puritans who, through callous indifference and a sterile selfishness, seek to stamp out all forms of pet-keeping in modern society would do well to pause and consider the damage their actions may cause.

  This brings me to the purpose of Catwatching. As a zoologist, I have had in my care, at one time or another, most members of the cat family, from great Tigers to tiny Tiger-Cats, from powerful Leopards to diminutive Leopard-Cats, and from mighty Jaguars to rare little Jaguarondis. At home there has nearly always been a domestic moggie to greet my return, sometimes with a cupboard-full of kittens. As a boy growing up in the Wiltshire countryside, I spent many hours lying in the grass, observing the farm cats as they expertly stalked their prey, or spying on the hayloft nests where they suckled their squirming kittens. I developed the habit of catwatching early in life, and it has stayed with me now for nearly half a century. Because of my professional involvement with animals I have frequently been asked questions about cat behaviour, and I have been surprised at how little most people seem to know about these intriguing animals. Even those who dote on their own pet cat often have only a vague understanding of the complexities of its social life, its sexual behaviour, its aggression or its hunting skills. They know its moods well and care for it fastidiously, but they do not go out of their way to study their pet. To some extent this is not their fault, as much feline behaviour takes place away from the home base of the kitchen and the living room.

  So I hope that even those who feel they know their own cats intimately may learn a little more about their graceful companions by reading these pages.

  The method I have used is to set out a series of basic questions and then to provide simple, straightforward answers to them. There are plenty of good, routine books on cat care, which give all the usual details about feeding, housing and veterinary treatment, combined with a classificatory list of the various cat breeds and their characteristics.

  I have not repeated those details here. Instead I have tried to provide a different sort of cat book, one that concentrates on feline behaviour and gives replies to the sort of queries with which I have been confronted over the years. If I have succeeded, then, the next time you encounter a cat, you should be able to view the world in a more feline way. And once you have started to do that, you will find yourself asking more and more questions about their fascinating world, and perhaps you too will develop the urge to do some serious catwatching.

  The Cat We know for certain that 3,500 years ago the cat was already fully domesticated. We have records from ancient Egypt to prove this. But we do not know when the process began. The remains of cats have been found at a neolithic site at Jericho dating from 9,000 years ago, but there is no proof that those felines were domesticated ones. The difficulty arises from the fact that the cat's skeleton changed very little during its shift from wild to tame. Only when we have specific records and detailed pictures – as we do from ancient Egypt – can we be sure that the transformation from wild cat to domestic animal had taken place.

  One thing is clear: there would have been no taming of the cat before the Agricultural Revolution (in the neolithic period, or New Stone Age).

  In this respect the cat differed from the dog. 'Dogs jhad a significant role to play even before the advent of farming. Back in the palaeolithic period (or Old Stone Age), prehistoric human hunters were able to make good use of a four-legged hunting companion with superior scenting abilities and hearing. But cats were of little value to early man until he had progressed to the agricultural phase and was starting to store large quantities of food. The grain stores, in particular, must have attracted a teeming population of rats and mice almost from the moment that the human hunter settled down to become a farmer. In the early cities, where the stores were great, it would have become an impossible task for human guards to ambush the mice and kill them in sufficient numbers to stamp them out or even to prevent them from multiplying. A massive infestation of rodents must have been one of the earliest plagues known to urban man. Any carnivore that preyed on these rats and mice would have been a godsend to the harassed food-storers.

  It is easy to visualize how one day somebody made the casual observation that a few wild cats had been noticed hanging around the grain stores, picking off the mice. Why not encourage them? For the cats, the scene must have been hard to believe. There all around them was a scurrying feast on a scale they had never encountered before.

  Gone were the interminable waits in the undergrowth. All that was needed now was a leisurely stroll in the vicinity of the vast grain stores and a gourmet supermarket of plump, grain-fed rodents awaited them. From this stage to the keeping and breeding of cats for increased vermin destruction must have been a simple step, since it benefited both sides.

  With our efficient modern pest-control methods it is difficult for us to imagine the significance of the cat to those early civilizations, but a few facts about the attitudes of the ancient Egyptians towards their beloved felines will help to underline the importance that was placed upon them. They were, for instance, considered sacred, and the punishment for killing one was death. If a cat happened to die naturally in a house, all the human occupants had to enter full mourning, which included the shaving-off of their eyebrows.

  Following death, the body of an Egyptian cat was embalmed with full ceremony, the corpse being bound in wrappings of different colours and its face covered with a sculptured wooden mask. Some were placed in catshaped wooden coffins, others were encased in plaited straws. They were buried in enormous feline cemeteries in huge numbers literally millions of them.

  The cat-goddess was called Bastet, meaning She-of-Bast. Bast was the city where the main cat temple was situated, and where each spring as many as half a million people converged for the sacred festival. About 100,000 mummified cats were buried at each of these festivals to honour the feline virgin-goddess (who was presumably a forerunner of the Virgin Mary). These Bastet festivals were said to be the most popular and best attended in the whole of ancient Egypt, a success perhaps not unconnected with the fact that they included wild orgiastic celebrations and 'ritual frenzies'. Indeed, the cult of the cat was so popular that it lasted for nearly 2,000 years. It was officially banned in AD 390, but by then it was already in serious decline. In its heyday, however, it refl
ected the immense esteem in which the cat was held in that ancient civilization, and the many beautiful bronze statues of cats that have survived bear testimony to the Egyptians' appreciation of its graceful form. A sad contrast to the ancient worship of the cat is the vandalizing of the cat cemeteries by the British in the last century.

  One example will suffice: a consignment of 300,000 mummified cats was shipped to Liverpool where they were ground up for use as fertilizer on the fields of local farmers. All that survives from this episode is a single cat skull which is now in the British Museum. The early Egyptians would probably have demanded 300,000 deaths for such sacrilege, having once torn a Roman soldier limb from limb for hurting a cat. They not only worshipped their cats, but also expressly prohibited their export.

  This led to repeated attempts to smuggle them out of the country as high-status house pets. The Phoenicians, who were the ancient equivalent of secondhand car salesmen, saw catnapping as an intriguing challenge and were soon shipping out high-priced moggies to the jaded rich all around the Mediterranean. This may have annoyed the Egyptians, but it was good news for the cat in those early days, because it introduced them to new areas as precious objects to be well treated.

  Plagues of rodents that were sweeping Europe gave the cat a new boost as a pest-controller, and it rapidly spread across the continent. The Romans were largely responsible for this, and it was they who brought the cat to Britain. We know that cats were well treated in the centuries that followed because of the punishments that are recorded for killing one. These were not as extreme as in ancient Egypt, but fines of a lamb or a sheep were far from trivial. The penalty devised by one Welsh king in the tenth century reflected the significance to him of the dead cat.

  The animal's corpse was suspended by its tail with its nose touching the ground, and the punishment for its killer was to heap grain over the body until it disappeared beneath the mound. The confiscation of this grain gave a clear picture of how much a working cat was estimated to save from the bellies of rats and mice. These good times for cats were not to last, however. In the Middle Ages the feline population of Europe was to experience several centuries of torture, torment and death at the instigation of the Christian Church. Because they had been involved in earlier pagan rituals, cats were proclaimed evil creatures, the agents of Satan and familiars of witches. Christians everywhere were urged to inflict as much pain and suffering on them as possible. The sacred had become the damned. Cats were publicly burned alive on Christian feast days. Hundreds of thousands of them were flayed, crucified, beaten, roasted and thrown from the tops of church towers at the urging of the priesthood, as part of a vicious purge against the supposed enemies of Christ.

  Happily, the only legacy we have today of that miserable period in the history of the domestic cat is the surviving superstition that a black cat is connected with luck. The connection is not always clear, however, because as you travel from country to country the luck changes from good to bad, causing much confusion. In Britain, for instance, a black cat means good luck, whereas in America and continental Europe it usually means bad luck. In some regions this superstitious attitude is still taken remarkably seriously. For example, a few years ago a wealthy restaurant-owner was driving to his home south of Naples late one night when a black cat ran across the road in front of his car. He stopped and pulled in to the side of the road, unable to proceed unless the cat returned (to 'undo' the bad luck). Seeing him parked there on the lonely road late at night, a cruising police car pulled up and the officers questioned him. When they learned the reason, such was the strength of cat superstition that, refusing to drive on for fear of bringing bad luck on themselves, they also had to sit in their car and wait for the cat to return.

  Although these superstitions still survive, the cat is now once again the much-loved house pet that it was in ancient Egypt. It may not be sacred, but it is greatly revered. The Church's cruel persecution has long since been rejected by ordinary people and, during the nineteenth century, a new phase of cat promotion exploded in the shape of competitive cat shows and pedigree cat breeding.

  As already mentioned, the cat had not been bred into many different forms for different work tasks, like the dog, but there had been a number of local developments, with variations in colour, pattern and coat length arising almost accidentally in different countries.

  Travellers in the nineteenth century started to collect the strangelooking cats they met abroad and to transport them back to Victorian England. There they bred them carefully to intensify their special characteristics. Cat shows became increasingly popular, and during the past 150 years more than 100 different pedigree breeds have been standardized and registered in Europe and North America.

  All these modern breeds appear to belong to one species: Felis sylvestris, the Wild Cat, and are capable of interbreeding, both with one another and with all races of the wild sylvestris. At the very start of feline domestication, the Egyptians began by taming the North African race of Felis sylvestris. Until recently this was thought of as a distinct species and was called Felis lybica. It is now known to be no more than a race and is designated as Felis sylvestris lybica.

  It is smaller and more slender than the European race of Wild Cat and was apparently easier to tame. But when the Romans progressed through Europe, bringing their domestic cats with them, some of the animals mated with the stockier northern Wild Cats and produced heavier, more robust offspring. Today's modern cats reflect this, some being big and sturdy, like many of the tabbies, while others are more elongated and angular, like the various Siamese breeds. It is likely that these Siamese animals and the other more slender breeds are closer to the Egyptian original, their domestic ancestors having been dispersed throughout the world without any contact with the heavy-set northern Wild Cats.

  Although opinions have differed, it now seems highly improbable that any other species of wild feline was involved in the history of modern domestic cats. We do know that a second, bigger cat, Fehs chaus, the Jungle Cat, was popular with the ancient Egyptians, but it appears to have dropped out of the running very early on. We can, however, be certain that it was originally a serious contender for the domestication stakes, because examination of mummified cats has revealed that some of them possessed the much larger Jungle Cat skulls.

  But although the Jungle Cat is one of the more friendly cats in captivity, it is huge in comparison with even the heftiest of modern domestic animals and it is therefore unlikely that it played a part in the later domestication story.

  This is not the place to give details of the modern cat breeds, but a brief history of their introduction will help to give some idea of the way the modern cat 'fancy' has become established:

  The oldest breeds involved are the various Shorthaired Cats, descendants of the animals spread across Europe by the Romans. There is then a long gap until the sixteenth century, when ships from the Orient arrived at the Isle of Man carrying a strange tail-less cat the famous Manx.

  Because of its curiously mutilated appearance, this breed has never been widely popular, though it still has its devotees. At about the same time the first of the Longhaired Cats, the beautiful Angora, was brought into Europe from its Turkish homelands. Later, in the mid-nineteenth century, it was to be largely eclipsed by the even more spectacular Persian Cat from Asia Minor, with its enormously thick, luxuriant coat of fur.

  Then, in the late nineteenth century, in complete contrast, the angular, elongated Siamese arrived from the Far East. With its unique personality – far more extrovert than other cats – it appealed to a quite different type of cat-owner. Whereas the Persian was the perfect, rounded, fluffy child substitute with a rather infantile, flattened face, the Siamese was a much more active companion.

  At about the same time as the appearance of the Siamese, the elegant Russian Blue was imported from Russia and the tawny, wild-looking Abyssinian from what is now Ethiopia.

  In the present century, the dusky Burmese was taken to the United States
in the 1930's and from there to Europe. In the 1960's several unusual additions appeared as sudden mutations: the bizarre Sphynx, a naked cat from Canada; the crinkly-haired Rex from Devon and Cornwall; and the flattened-eared Fold Cat from Scotland. In the 1970's the Japanese Bobtail Cat, with its curious little stump making it look like a semiManx Cat, was imported into the United States; the crinkly Wire-haired Cat was developed from a mutation in America; and the diminutive DrainCat (so called because drains were a good place to hide in cat-scorning Singapore) appeared on the American scene, rejoicing in the exotic name of Singapura.

  Finally there was the extraordinary Ragdoll Cat, with the strangest temperament of any feline. If picked up, it hangs limply like a rag doll. It is so placid that it gives the impression of being permanently drugged. Nothing seems to worry it. More of a hippie-cat than a hip-cat, it seems only appropriate that it was first bred in California.

  This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it gives some idea of the range of cats available to the pedigree enthusiast. With many of the breeds I have mentioned there is a whole range of varieties and colourtypes, dramatically increasing the list of show categories. Each time a new type of cat appears the fur flies – not from fighting felines, but from the unseemly skirmishes that break out between the overenthusiastic breeders of the new line and the unduly autocratic authorities that govern the major cat shows. Latest breed to top the tussle-charts is the aforementioned Ragdoll: ideal for invalids, say its defenders; too easy to injure, say its detractors.

  To add to the complications, there are considerable disagreements between the different show authorities, with the Governing Council of the Cat Fancy in Britain recognizing different breeds from the Cat Fanciers' Association in America, and the two organizations sometimes confusingly giving different names to the same breed. None of this does much harm, however. It simply has the effect of adding the excitement of a great deal of heated argument and debate, while the pedigree cats themselves benefit from all the interest that is taken in them.