Catwatching (3 page)

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.

The seriousness with which competitive cat-showing is treated also helps to raise the status of all cats, so that the ordinary pet moggies benefit too in the long run. And they remain the vast majority of all modern domestic cats because, to most people, as Gertrude Stein might have said, a cat is a cat is a cat. The differences, fascinating though they are, remain very superficial. Every single cat carries with it an ancient inheritance of amazing sensory capacities, wonderful vocal utterances and body language, skilful hunting actions, elaborate territorial and status displays, strangely complex sexual behaviour and devoted parental care. It is an animal full of surprises, as we shall see on the pages that follow.

The answer seems obvious enough. A purring cat is a contented cat.

This surely must be true. But it is not. Repeated observation has revealed that cats in great pain, injured, in labour and even dying often purr loud and long. These can hardly be called contented cats.

It is true, of course, that contented cats do also purr, but contentment is by no means the sole condition for purring. A more precise explanation, which fits all cases, is that purring signals a friendly social mood, and it can be given as a signal to, say, a vet from an injured cat indicating the need for friendship, or as a signal to an owner, saying thank you for friendship given.

Purring first occurs when kittens are only a week old and its primary use is when they are being suckled by their mother. It acts then as a signal to her that all is well and that the milk supply is successfully reaching its destination. She can lie there, listening to the grateful purrs, and know without looking up that nothing has gone amiss. She in turn purrs to her kittens as they feed, telling them that she too is in a relaxed, co-operative mood. The use of purring among adult cats (and between adult cats and humans) is almost certainly secondary and is derived from this primal parent-offspring context.

An important distinction between small cats, like our domestic species, and the big cats, like lions and tigers, is that the latter cannot purr properly. The tiger will greet you with a friendly 'one-way purr' – a sort of juddering splutter – but it cannot produce the two-way purr of the domestic cat, which makes its whirring noise not only with each outward breath (like the tiger), but also with each inward breath. The exhalation/inhalation rhythm of feline purring can be performed with the mouth firmly shut (or full of nipple), and may be continued for hours on end if the conditions are right. In this respect small cats are one up on their giant relatives, but big cats have another feature which compensates for it – they can roar, which is something small cats can never do.

Because it looks upon humans as 'mother cats'. Kittens are repeatedly licked by their mothers during their earliest days and the action of human stroking has much the same feel on the fur as feline licking. To the kitten, the mother cat is 'the one who feeds, cleans and protects'.

Because humans continue to do this for their pets long after their kitten days are behind them, the domesticated animals never fully grow up. They may become full-sized and sexually mature, but in their minds they remain kittens in relation to their human owners.

For this reason cats – even elderly cats – keep on begging for maternal attention from their owners, pushing up to them and gazing at them longingly, waiting for the pseudo-maternal hand to start acting like a giant tongue again, ming and tugging at their fur. One very characteristic body action they perform when they are being stroked, as they greet their 'mothers', is the stiff erection of their tails. This is typical of young kittens receiving attention from their real mothers and it is an invitation to her to examine their anal regions.

The usual answer is that the animal is sharpening its claws. This is true, but not in the way most people imagine. They envisage a sharpening-up of blunted points rather in the manner of humans improving the condition of blunted knives. But what really occurs is the stripping-off of the old, worn-out claw sheaths to reveal glistening new claws beneath. It is more like the shedding of a snake's skin than the sharpening of a kitchen knife. Sometimes, when people run their hands over the place where the cat has been tearing at the furniture, they find what they think is a ripped-out claw and they then fear that their animal has accidentally caught its claw in some stubborn threads of the fabric and damaged its foot. But the 'ripped-out claw' is nothing more than the old outer layer that was ready to be discarded. Cats do not employ these powerful 'stropping' actions with the hind feet. Instead they use their teeth to chew off the old outer casings from the hind claws.