Catwatching (2 page)

The argument will always go on – feline self-sufficiency and individualism versus canine camaraderie and good-fellowship. But it is important to stress that in making a valid point I have caricatured the two positions. In reality there are many people who enjoy equally the company of both cats and dogs. And all of us, or nearly all of us, have both feline and canine elements in our personalities. We have moods when we want to be alone and thoughtful, and other times when we wish to be in the centre of a crowded, noisy room.

Both the cat and the dog are animals with which we humans have entered into a solemn contract. We made an unwritten, unspoken pact with their wild ancestors, offering food and drink and protection in exchange for the performance of certain duties. For dogs, the duties were complex, involving a whole range of hunting tasks, as well as guarding property, defending their owners against attack, destroying vermin, and acting as beasts of burden pulling our carts and sledges. In modern times an even greater range of duties has been given to the patient, long-suffering canine, including such diverse activities as guiding the blind, trapping criminals and running races.

For cats, the terms of the ancient contract were much simpler and have always remained so. There was just one primary task and one secondary one. They were required to act firstly as pest-controllers and then, in addition, as household pets. Because they are solitary hunters of small prey they were of little use to human huntsmen in the field.

Because they do not live in tightly organized social groups depending on mutual aid to survive, they do not raise the alarm in response to intruders in the home, so they were little use as guardians of property, or as defenders of their owners. Because of their small size they could offer no assistance whatever as beasts of burden. In modern times, apart from sharing the honours with dogs as the ideal house-pets, and occasionally sharing the acting honours in films and plays, cats have failed to diversify their usefulness to mankind.

Despite this narrower involvement in human affairs, the cat has managed to retain its grip on human affections. There are almost as many cats as dogs in the British Isles, according to recent estimates: about five million cats to six million dogs. In the United States the ratio is slightly less favourable to felines: about twenty-three million cats to forty million dogs. Even so, this is a huge population of domestic cats and, if anything, it is probably an underestimate. Although there are still a few mousers and ratters about, performing their ancient duties as vermin destroyers, the vast majority of all domestic cats today are family pets or feral survivors. Of the family pets, some are pampered pedigrees but most are moggies of mixed ancestry. The proportion of pedigree cats to moggies is probably lower than that for pedigree dogs to mongrels. Although cat shows are just as fiercely contested as dog shows, there are fewer of them, just as there are fewer breeds of show cats. Without the wide spectrum of ancient functions to fulfil, there was far less breed specialization in the early days. Indeed, there was hardly any. All breeds of cat are good mousers and ratters, and no more was required of them. So any modifications in coat length, colour or pattern, or in body proportions, had to arise purely on the basis of local preferences and owners' whims. This has led to some strikingly beautiful pedigree cat breeds, but not to the amazing range of dramatically different types found among dogs. There is no cat equivalent of the Great Dane or the Chihuahua, the St Bernard or the Dachshund. There is a good deal of variation in fur type and colour, but very little in body shape and size. A really large cat weighs in at around eighteen pounds; the smallest at about three pounds. This means that, even when considering almost freakish feline extremes, big domestic cats are only six times as heavy as small ones, compared with the situation among dogs, where a St Bernard can weigh 300 times as much as a little Yorkshire Terrier.

In other words, the weight variation of dogs is fifty times as great as in cats.

Turning to abandoned cats and those that have gone wild through choice the feral population – one also notices a considerable difference.

Stray dogs form self-supporting packs and start to breed and fend for themselves without human aid in less civilized regions, but such groups have become almost non-existent in urban and suburban areas. Indeed, in modern, crowded European countries they hardly exist anywhere. Even the rural districts cannot support them. Ifa feral pack forms, it is soon hunted down by the farming community to prevent attacks on their stock.

Feral cat colonies are another matter. Every major city has a thriving population of them. Attempts to eradicate them usually fail because there are always new strays to add to the pool. And the need to destroy them is not felt to be so great, because they can often survive by continuing their age-old function of pest control. Where human intervention has eliminated the rat and mouse population by poisoning, however, the feral cats must live on their wits, scavenging from dustbins and begging from soft-hearted humans. Many of these back-alley cats are pathetic creatures on the borderline of survival.

Their resilience is amazing and a testimony to the fact that, despite millennia of domestication, the feline brain and body are still remarkably close to the wild condition.

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 reflected 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.