Cats – Part 5
Modern cat history and modern cat needs.
In this last essay on the world history and science of cats, we’ll explore modern cat history and modern cat needs.
As Abigail Tucker writes in her book The Lion in the Living Room: How Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World:
Cats were often excluded from early American pet-owning guides, but perhaps this is because they didn’t need much care, living most or all of their lives outdoors. They were underrepresented, too, in nineteenth-century pet-purchasing catalogues, one of which boasted thirty-four dog breeds, seven types of squirrels, four monkey varieties but only two kinds of cats. This may be because cats were already so numerous that the idea of paying money for more seemed insane. Since pampered pet felines were an exception and most cats were more or less unattached, in the early twentieth century many municipalities simply ignored the stray cat population, which grew with the new megacities and, later, suburbs. Even as cities hired dog catchers and drafted nuisance laws to curtail feral dogs, there were no cat catchers, because footloose cats were so much less visible and dangerous than dogs, not to mention much harder to apprehend. Their reputation as pro bono exterminators probably didn’t hurt either. The problem of cat overpopulation compounded in the second half of the twentieth century, when cats’ popularity as house pets really took off. Technology may have hastened this change: in 1947, the invention of kitty litter allowed cats to more elegantly undertake an indoor existence and become constant companions instead of occasional visitors. Around this period, too, effective rat poisons permanently relieved cats of their supposed mousing duties, and perhaps our firesides were as good a place to retire to as any. But more sweeping social changes also drove the trend. Ongoing urbanization, with the new skyscrapers soaring a hundred stories above the nearest dog park, made cats an increasingly appealing pet. The entry of women into the workforce, which left no one at home to feed Lassie, has been another feline blessing, as is the rapidly aging population of the Western world. (Even the frail can crack open a can of Friskies.) Since the 1970s, the number of pet cats has been skyrocketing.
And with the greater domestication of cats came a greater influence of humans on their evolutionary development. As mentioned in a previous essay in this series, modern housecats are remarkably similar genetically to their ancient ancestors. As Tucket writes:
When researchers from Washington University in St. Louis recently compared the genome of house cats and their wild relative, Felis silvestris lybica, they found just a handful of genetic differences, especially unimpressive considering the changes that domestic dogs have undergone … [Housecats today] appear almost identical to a full- grown wild lybica. House cats do have pigmentation anomalies, in the form of white bellies, facial blazes, and other unusual markings. But these embellishments apparently are quite new. Evidence suggests, for instance, that house cats’ coats began to vary only in the last millennia or so. Before then, it seems, cats came in just one color. Ancient Egyptian funerary reliefs, for instance, don’t feature tuxedo cats— the pet felines are all brown mackerel tabbies, à la the wild lybica, though cats had already been in human company for thousands of years. The first evidence of changing coats, [Carlos] Driscoll says, comes from a medical writer who mentions it about AD 600.
But when modern technology met modern cat preferences, things began to change, but only very recently. As Jonathan Losos writes in his book The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savana to Your Sofa:
[F]or thousands of years, our [human] role was unintentional; cats drove the bus, evolving on their own terms to live around us … Ancient Egyptian cats … looked a lot like North African wildcats, though perhaps a bit lighter in color. That’s hardly a surprise given their ancestry. What is interesting, though, is that there is no evidence of variation, no hint of the great variety of colors and patterns that we know in today’s cats … But in the last fifteen decades, the shoe has been on the other paw, and in many ways we have pushed the evolution of cats—at least some of them—in very new directions … [C]at fanciers desire to create new breeds and what science tells us about how it happens … A small minority of cats are members of specific breeds (the rest are lumped into the category “domestic shorthairs and longhairs,” a more polite equivalent of “mutt”). A breed is a group of individuals that share a distinctive set of traits that distinguish them from other members of the species. The distinctiveness of a breed is maintained by mating members of a breed only with each other generation after generation, firmly establishing the genes for these traits throughout the breed … [Today,] many cat breeds diverge greatly from the ancestral physique and behavior … When and why did this cat kaleidoscope emerge?
As Losos describes it:
Non-tabbies start showing up in the historical record two thousand years ago. The first surviving pictorial representation of a non-wildcat-looking moggie is a mosaic tile from southern France illustrated with a black cat and thought to be from early Roman Empire times. Several centuries later, the Greek physician Aetius wrote about both black and white cats. Skipping ahead a few years, there definitely were black cats in twelfth-century Europe because we know there were superstitions about them; hysteria was then accelerated thanks to a papal decree in the thirteenth century that led to centuries of black cat massacre. White cats appear in some European paintings and frescoes in medieval times. A thirteenth-century encyclopedia records orange, white, and black cats, and possibly long-haired ones. By the sixteenth century, a great variety of cat colors and patterns are evident in beautiful Renaissance paintings, not to mention some lovely sketches of solid-colored cats by Leonardo da Vinci. To the east and a thousand years ago, cats of many different colors and patterns are present in Chinese paintings … [O]ver the course of a millennium and a half, Felis catus around the world transformed from a wildcat-looking mackerel tabby to a species exhibiting a riot of colors and patterns … The great variety of modern housecats—the colors, patterns, hair length, and other features not seen in African wildcats—is the result of mutations that arose within the last two thousand years. But why don’t those features occur in wildcats? Is it because the mutations never occurred in wildcats or because they did occur but failed to persist? Wildcats have been around for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years and have undoubtedly experienced countless mutations, many of them similar to those present in domestic cats today … [I]t’s much more likely that many of these mutations appeared in wildcats at some point but failed to become established. The reason for the impermanence of these mutations is natural selection. The mackerel tabby pattern provides excellent camouflage for a wild cat trying to blend into scrubby savanna or dark forest vegetation. Imagine a population of African wildcats living in, say, Sudan. Suppose a kitten is born with a mutation that makes him orange or white, or maybe a calico. Lacking camouflage, his prey would see him coming at a great distance. Just as importantly, his predators—of which wildcats have many—would also easily detect him. He wouldn’t last long, and with his demise, the mutation would disappear from the gene pool. But now let’s think of early domestic cats, still looking like African wildcats, but no longer living in the wild. Sheltered from predators—most of which stay away from human habitations—and perhaps fed table scraps and so not needing to hunt, these cats would experience relaxed selection pressures. In this setting, being born orange, white, or tortie might not be disadvantageous. The most obvious source of positive selection for new traits among domestic animals, especially pets, is human preference. People like novelty. There’s an evolutionary biology term for this—“negative frequency-dependent selection”—that is, traits are favored when they’re rare. Imagine seeing an orange cat for the first time, or a black-and-white one. Pretty cool! Over the last two millennia, people may have favored individuals with new traits, feeding them more, taking better care of them, even intentionally breeding them, and this artificial selection may be responsible for the great variety of domestic cats today.
Losos makes a side-note of the particularly unfortunate history of human perceptions of black felines:
Black domestic cats have a long and often unhappy history. Identified as witches’ “familiars” and even thought to be sorceresses transformed into feline form, black cats were brutally slaughtered throughout the Middle Ages. Some hold that this massacre, which often extended to all cats, may have been responsible for population explosions of rats and, subsequently, the Black Death plagues resulting from fleas that traveled on the rodents’ backs. Even today, black cats are considered by some to be an ill omen and are abused more frequently and adopted less often than non-black cats.
Given the genetic and behavioral similarity of modern housecats and their ancient feline ancestors, modern housecats are particularly resilient, but they also have specific needs related to their genetic heritage. As Thomas McNamee writes in his book The Inner Life of Cats: The Science and Secrets of Our Mysterious Feline Companions:
Given how little they’ve changed from their ancestors, it shouldn’t be surprising that cats are the only domestic animal that can survive on its own in the wild nearly anywhere. Pigs can manage, too, in some habitats—many fewer habitats, however, than the ecotypes in which domestic cats can make a living on their own—but within a few generations the domestic swine begin to revert to a sort of wild boar appearance and behavior, and they readily interbreed with wild boar. Cats stay cats, and can live in deserts, jungles, grasslands, forests, and beaches—as well as parks, golf courses, shopping malls, back yards, alleys, and even Roman ruins.
Yet as Tucker writes:
[But] today, over 60 percent of the American-owned cat population spends every waking moment inside, and millions of additional pet cats are indoors for the majority of their time, or at least at night … [F]rom the perspective of species-wide world conquest, coming inside was a brilliant stratagem. Though they account for a small proportion of cats worldwide, inside cats are vital ambassadors for their kind. Without indoor diplomacy, alley cats would probably not have so many human Allies, and, politically speaking, it would be a lot easier to purge fragile ecosystems of felines.
An indoor environment and a predatory personality create special needs for indoor cats. As Tucker writes:
One study indicated that just 7 percent of pet owners spend all day with their cats, while half hang out with their dogs around the clock. Another revealed that, in 210 minutes of observation, cats and humans came within a meter of each other for just 6 minutes, and mutual exchanges were likely to last less than one minute.
This means human time spent with indoor cats should emphasize satisfying cats’ inherent predatory instincts. As Losos writes:
[O]utdoor cats can cover a lot of ground, but indoor cats don’t have this opportunity (though the giant hamster wheels now sold for cats may solve this problem for felines lucky enough to have one) … All experts—from PhD behavioral scientists to cat whisperers on TV—agree that cats need mental stimulation, such as a variety of toys, boxes to jump in, and high places to ascend. And novelty is important—toys should be rotated, furniture rearranged, food hidden, new smells provided. Cats like to hunt, so playing with them in ways that let them express their predatory behaviors is particularly important … [Consider] switching cats to high-quality food prepared from fresh meat and without any grain. Cats receiving this diet substantially decreased the number of rodents and birds brought home. Playing with cats using toys that simulate hunting led to a thirty-five percent reduction in the number of mammals (rabbits and wood mice) brought home, but had little effect on bird predation. This result suggests that such play satisfied the cats’ urge to hunt small mammals, but not the desire to go after birds … [Many cats’] favorite toy is a long pole with an object dangling on a string attached to the end … [C]ats will chase this endlessly, often jumping to snag the wiggling object in midair. I’ve often worried that perhaps I’m training the cats to catch birds, but this study suggests the opposite, that such play may satisfy their predatory urges. Not all interventions reduced cat hunting, however. Wearing a bell had no effect, and playing with puzzles actually increased rodent predation by a whopping twenty-seven percent for reasons unknown (perhaps the games revved up the cats’ mental machinery, whetting their appetite for more mental stimulation, or helped hone some key skill—your guess is as good as mine).
McNamee summarizes this advice for cat playthings:
Even a just sort of nice house is not esthetically improved by one of those ghastly cat condos you get at Petco or wherever, with their multiple levels of cheap-rug-covered platforms and little hidey-houses and dangling balls and such—but I gotta tell ya, cats love them. If you can stand to put one of those eyesores next to a window with a bird feeder outside, if you can find the sweet spot for the litter box and you clean it religiously every day, if you’ve got scratching posts modestly tucked away but actually all over the place, if the cat can find a cozy lookout post atop the kitchen cabinets or the refrigerator … A toy to grab and bite, or even just a little crunchy treat after a minute or two of laser chase, will satisfy your cat’s craving for prey … There are some excellent interactive toys—some as simple as a ball in which you hide crunchy treats, requiring the cat to chase and bat the ball around to get the treats out.
McNamee also points out that cat owners should also be careful not to overstimulate their cats:
[T]he source of a great deal of “crazy” behavior—the sudden outbursts of scratching or biting or panic that seem to come out of nowhere—is often nothing more than overstimulation, which, past a certain threshold, induces panic. It could begin with what is actually a good experience—slow, gentle petting, say—but if it’s too monotonous, or it starts as tolerable in a sensitive place but it goes on too long, then, in an instant, yeaow! comes the explosion. It can happen when you’re just playing with a toy. Too many episodes of chase, pounce, and kill may amp up a cat’s energy to the point where more than the toy starts to look like prey—your hand may all at once have turned magically into a bird. It’s not necessarily easy to learn to recognize overstimulation before it crosses the red line, but if you have a dangerously “unpredictable” cat, it can be worth the effort to keep a careful watch. Like: While you’re doing something with the cat that really needs your attention, don’t also have the TV on, or be texting your friends … Cat teaches you. Which stroke where, which direction, how hard, when finger when palm, yes there not there, okay, enough. You can get better at this for years if you keep paying attention. Pick me up, walk me around, I like looking out the window in your arms much better than sitting on the sill—look at that bird! (Feel his skin twitching all over?) Paying attention.
Litter box placement is also a big deal, due to cats’ genetic sense of territoriality. As McNamee writes:
Every cat person has to get over the ewww factor and realize that to every cat, without exception, the litter box is a very big deal. It’s at the heart of the species’ fiercely surviving, indomitable devotion to territoriality; and we must never forget that much of their experience of it has to do not only with how it smells—to them, not to you—but also with the finest points of its placement within a cat’s territory. In a multi-cat household, the rule is one litter box per cat, plus one more. And if you are even thinking about one of those auto-clean things, please stop thinking about it.
And because cats might also escape the confines of the house, McNamee recommends:
a collar with an identification tag that includes the cat’s name, your phone number, and your email address [and] an implanted microchip (registered with a tracking company) and a good current photograph (to put up on posters and flyers and the internet).
And if your cat is lost in the house, McNamee writes, “Really, really search your house, softly rattling a bag of treats as you go.”
And because cats have an instinctual tendency to hide any pain they might be experiencing (to prevent flagging their potential weakness to predators), McNamee add that “The international panel of veterinarians singled out three of their pain indicators that demand that you drop everything you’re doing and get your cat to the vet right away: panting, pupil dilation, and squinting.”
Finally, regarding the connection between cats and our human social media culture, Tucker points out that it’s the modern indoor environment of cats combined with their outdoor predatory instincts that may make them particularly interesting to watch on video:
The very recent trend toward complete feline confinement is also key, because cats’ invasion of our computers is a logical extension of their invasion of the indoors. When cats lived most of their lives outside, their secretive, slinking habits made them not only very tough to observe, but also extraordinarily difficult to photograph, film, and otherwise record. It’s telling that cat videos are almost always filmed in the living room, because imprisonment there is a prerequisite for their digital odysseys. And yet, though modern pet-keeping practices make Internet cats logistically possible, it’s cats’ wildest instincts—and indeed, their very predatory style—that ultimately gives them the edge over their cutest online competition: namely, dogs and human babies. “A typical cat video establishes a state of calm, then suddenly disrupts it,” [Radha] O’Meara writes in her media journal analysis. “The most popular cat videos seem to have the most sudden and striking disruptions as well as the most abrupt endings.” A cat bops a baby on the head without warning, or explodes from underneath the bed. She is describing an ambush. The web is also a uniquely visual platform, which of course means that cats get extra mileage out of the happy accident of their infant-like features, which we love to ogle.
As Tucker summarizes the historical odyssey of housecats:
Former lords of the jungle, lions are now relics, ruling nothing: 20,000 holdouts barely hanging on in a few African preserves and a single Indian forest, dependent on our conservation money and our mercy … Meanwhile, the lion’s little jester of a cousin, once an evolutionary footnote, has become a force of nature. The global house cat population is 600 million and counting, and more of them are born in the United States every single day than there are lions in the wilderness. New York City’s annual spring kitten crop rivals the wild tiger count. Worldwide, house cats already outnumber dogs, their great rival for our affections, by as many as three to one, and their advantage is probably increasing. The tally of pet cats in America rose by 50 percent between 1986 and 2006, and today approaches 100 million.
That concludes this essay series on the history and science of today’s household cats.