Chapter 1
Wildcats and Witches
Cat said, "I am not a friend, and I am not a servant. I am the Cat who walks by himself, and I wish to come into your cave."
-Rudyard Kipling, The Cat That Walked by Himself
I stood in the corridor outside the walk-in cat pen at the rescue center and watched through the wire mesh door. The center manager, Ann, already inside the pen, approached the big glaring ginger cat who was crouched against a side wall, eyes like saucers, fur fluffed to the maximum, hissing and growling in a truly terrifying manner. Undeterred, Ann wielded her syringe of vaccine and, with fearless skill and dexterity, quickly jabbed him with the needle. Big Ginger, as we later named him, launched himself. Not at Ann, but up the wall, across the ceiling, down the other side, and into a box to hide in the blink of an eye. Retracing his route with my eyes, I asked Ann, "Did he actually just run over the ceiling?" She smiled. "The ferals often do that." Rookie postgrad that I was, I had to confess to her this was my first proper experience with feral cats, which are unsocialized domestic cats that have reverted to a semi-wild existence. People had laughed when I said I was going to study domestic cat behavior for my doctorate. "Domestic cats? Aren't they a bit boring? Don't you want to go abroad and study big wildcats somewhere?" I figured this one was probably wild enough for me.
While Big Ginger and the other cats from his colony were being looked after at the rescue center, my colleagues and I visited the cats' future home, a farm. We put up a shed as a base from which to feed them and, lining the shelves inside with beds, cut a cat-size hole in the door so they could use it for shelter too. A few months later, to offer them some extra cover, next to the shed we built a square wooden structure with a hinged lid containing four compartments, separated from one another internally and each with its own entrance hole. We grandly named it the "catterama."
The day after the cats were released at the farm, I stood hopefully by the shed, a tin of cat food in my hand, and surveyed the land around. There was not a cat in sight. Occasionally a flash of black and white or ginger would catch my eye and then be gone. At one point I could just about make out two little eyes reflecting back at me from the darkness of the bushes nearby. Hmm, so much for a "study" colony, I thought-would any of them ever venture out into the open again?
As I embarked on my studies of cats and their communication, words like tame, feral, domestic, socialized, and wildcat floated through the literature in a bewildering fashion. So much to disentangle. What did they all mean? Can you tame a wildcat? What, really, is a domesticated animal? And is a feral cat still a domestic cat? Slowly, as I learned more about Big Ginger, his colony mates, and their ancestors, I began to find answers to my questions. I realized that when looking at how my colony cats communicated, it was important to consider the history of cats, and how they have adapted and changed. For example, the life of a wildcat is so different from that of a domestic cat, there surely had to be differences in their language too.
Domestication
Is the "domestic" cat actually domesticated? It is a question that's been asked time and time again, the cause of endless debates and raised fur among cat-loving and cat-hating communities around the world. Looking for an answer requires some consideration of the difference between a tame animal and a domesticated one and where the modern-day cat fits in.
Taming describes the process whereby an animal becomes biddable and often friendly toward the handler over the course of its lifetime. It applies to a single animal, not a population or species. Wild individuals of many species are tamed by people and have been for millennia.
Domestication, on the other hand, is a much longer process that involves genetic change in a whole population over time. Humans have been trying to domesticate animals, to adapt them to living with us under our terms, for thousands of years. While we have succeeded with some-like dogs-for other species it has proved an impossible challenge. Often the best result we can achieve is taming, and with many animals, even that option remains elusive.
The challenge is that for domestication to occur, a species needs certain qualities. The first, and most important, is approachability and the potential to be handled by humans-that is, they must possess the capacity to become tame. For tameness to develop into domestication, the general rule of thumb is that the animals must have the ability to live in social groups or herds controlled by a leader (and be accepting of humans in this role). They must also be flexible with their diet, eating whatever we have available to feed them. In particular, for domestication to progress, animals must be able to breed in captivity, again under the control of humans who select individuals that possess the most favorable traits. All in all, a big ask for many species of animal-not least the cat.
How do we tell if a species is domesticated? In 1868, Charles Darwin noted, with some intrigue, how domesticated mammals have certain behavioral and physical characteristics in common with one another compared with their wild ancestors. As well as the expected increase in friendliness toward people, there were odd things such as smaller brains and coat color variations. Ninety years later, in a remote research station in Siberia, what is probably the most famous ongoing domestication study in history began. Russian scientists Dmitri Belyaev, Lyudmila Trut, and their team re-created the domestication process starting with a captive population of silver foxes that had originally been reared for their luxurious fur. Although the foxes all appeared very wild, there was some natural variation in their behavior toward people. Belyaev selected those that were least reactive to approach by humans and bred from them. He then chose the tamest offspring of these matings and bred from them and so on until, after only ten generations, he had a small population of friendly, waggy-tailed, vocal, and interactive foxes. As more generations were bred, the foxes started to display physical changes, too, such as spotted coats, floppy ears, and shorter, curlier tails. Amazingly, these traits appeared simply as a side effect of selection for tameness.
Domestication syndrome, as it is now described, refers to an array of both physical and physiological traits exhibited by species that have undergone domestication. The list has grown over the years as Belyaev's fox study and others have identified additional traits, including smaller teeth, a tendency toward more juvenile facial features and behavior, reduced stress hormone levels, and a change in the reproductive cycle.
Most domestic animals exhibit a selection of these changes but rarely all of them, their expression varying among species. With so much variability, some scientists have begun to question whether domestication "syndrome" as such exists. Even Belyaev's studies have come under deeper scrutiny with the discovery that the original foxes on his farm came from fur farms in Canada and may therefore have already undergone some previous selection for handleability. While the debate about an overall syndrome continues, there seems little doubt that domestication does bring about some physical as well as genetic changes in many species compared with their wild ancestors.
Interestingly, these types of changes have also been observed in contemporary populations of certain undomesticated species. With more and more species adapting to thrive near people, some are starting to exhibit traits similar to those of domesticated species. In the UK, for example, red foxes have become increasingly present in urban areas where they show reduced fear of people. Some of these urban foxes have been found to have shorter and wider snouts and narrower brain cases compared with rural foxes, physical changes that resemble those associated with domestication in other species.
"Domesticated" cats show a few physical features that distinguish them a little, but not a whole lot, from their wildcat ancestors. Their legs are a bit shorter, their brains slightly smaller, and they have longer intestines. Domesticated cats' coats vary in color and pattern, too, compared with the consistently striped (mackerel) tabby markings of the wildcat. Floppy ears, however, do not occur, and neither do shorter, curlier tails. That there are so few obvious physical differences between them and the wildcat has caused many to question how domesticated the cat is.
So just how qualified are cats in the domestication stakes? They certainly have the capacity to become tame. On the whole, they seem happy to eat what we feed them (apart from those who have perfected the art of fussiness)-their longer intestine compared with that of wildcats is thought to be an adaptation to feeding off human scraps. They have also adapted to living in groups, although mostly only where necessary or advantageous to them. However, the list fizzles out around there. That cats regard humans as their "leaders" seems highly questionable. And perhaps because of this there is another, much bigger gap in the cat's qualification for true domestic status. Although cats are able to reproduce in captivity, selective breeding by humans to produce those with known pedigrees is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating from around the late 1800s. The popularity of such pedigreed cats as pets has grown in recent years, yet surveys indicate that still only 4 percent of owners in the US and 8 percent in the UK acquire their cats from a specialist breeder. Most domestic cats are what are known as random bred, with mixed or unknown parentage. Some are lucky enough to live as well-cared-for pets, either permanently indoors or with outdoor access, but millions of cats worldwide have no home and live very different lives, often quite independently from humans. Today many pet house cats are neutered, itself a form of breeding control by humans, albeit preventive rather than selective in nature. However, huge numbers of pet cats remain unneutered, many of them wandering freely outdoors, and these cats, along with the millions of unowned ones, form a vast reproductively intact cat population on the lookout for mates. These cats breed indiscriminately, very much not under the control of people, although often literally right on our doorsteps. Some say this widespread lack of human influence over cats' choice of mates means that they aren't fully domesticated. As a result, cats have been variously described as semidomesticated, partially domesticated, or commensal in their unique relationship with humankind.
Socialization and Feralization
However we decide to label it, the modern-day "domestic" cat does possess a genetic predisposition for friendliness toward humans. It is only a predisposition, though, and cats aren't just magically friendly to humans from the minute they're born. Kittens must first meet humans at a very early age-between two and seven weeks old-in order to become tolerant of and friendly toward humans as adults.
Take this scenario. A friendly, socialized female pet cat, let's call her Molly, falls on hard times. Molly's owners move away and abandon her, so she resorts to a life on the street, finding food where she can. If unneutered, she may become pregnant courtesy of a wandering tomcat and give birth to kittens, tucked away wherever she can find a safe, sheltered spot. These kittens may not encounter a human in the first two months of their lives, even if Molly is still friendly toward people, because, to the best of her ability, she will hide her babies from any potential danger. If left long enough without human contact, the kittens will grow up nervous toward people and will avoid them for the rest of their lives, often hanging around human habitation to glean food but avoiding interaction. As these growing kittens then breed with other stray cats, their offspring and successive generations become increasingly wary of people.
These are known as feral cats. They are still genetically identical to domestic cats and retain the domestic cat's ability to live in close proximity to other cats when necessary. This is usually to exploit a local concentrated abundance of food, such as handouts from a restaurant or scraps from waste bins. Groups of feral cats often become established in an area, and if allowed to reproduce, they rapidly expand in number to form larger colonies.
It's not just a one-way process, though. Molly's kittens could become quite feral within a generation through missing out on socializing with people. But as domestic cats, they still retain and genetically pass on the ability to be friendly toward humans if socialized. The progeny of these potential ferals, if introduced to people early enough, could become properly socialized and live with people as happily adjusted pet cats, just like their grandmother Molly once did.
It was in just such a colony that Big Ginger started life. We have no idea how many generations of ferals had lived under the school buildings where we first met him and his colony mates, but it's safe to say Big Ginger was well and truly suspicious of people. As were most of the other adult cats. Four of the females gave birth to litters of kittens while in the rescue center-judging by the telltale ginger and tortoiseshell coats among them, we assumed Big Ginger was the father of at least some of them. Despite their antisocial dad, these kittens were young enough to be introduced to people and socialized at the rescue center before finding homes. This would not have been possible for Big Ginger. He would never be able to tolerate living in such close proximity to humans, although as time went on, he gradually accepted my daily presence outdoors at the farm and would sit politely some distance away waiting for his dinner.
The Origins of the Domestic Cat
Where did it all begin? It is only really in the past twenty years that we have discovered the true origins of today's domestic cat. Prior to that, from the many artistic portrayals of cats on ancient Egyptian tombs and temples from around three and a half thousand years ago, we simply knew that a special relationship with cats existed at that time. Images of cats sitting under people's chairs or on their laps led to the assumption that it was the ancient Egyptians who first domesticated the cat. But which "cat" did they domesticate? And did cat domestication only occur in ancient Egypt?
The first step toward finding the answers to these questions came in 2007, when a study of the DNA of the entire cat family-the Felidae-revealed that it was composed of eight distinct groups or lineages. These groups diverged from their common ancestor, the catlike Pseudaelurus, at different times, beginning with the Panthera lineage (containing, among others, lions and tigers) over ten million years ago. The very last group to branch off the family tree, around 3.4 million years ago, was a lineage containing various species of small wildcat-the Felis lineage. From genetic comparisons within the study, researchers found that the domestic cat fit within this lineage.
Copyright © 2023 by Sarah Brown, PhD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
