Cat Sense Part 8

2. James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relations.h.i.+ps, Canto ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stefan Seitz, "Game, Pets and Animal Husbandry among Penan and Punan Groups" in Beyond the Green Myth: Borneo's Hunter-Gatherers in the Twenty-first Century, ed. Peter G. Sercombe and Bernard Sellato (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2007).

3. Veerle Linseele, Wim Van Neer, and Stan Hendrickx, "Evidence for Early Cat Taming in Egypt," Journal of Archaeological Science 34 (2007): 208190 and 35 (2008): 267273; available online at tinyurl.com/aotk2e8.

4. Jaromr Mlek, The Cat in Ancient Egypt (London, British Museum Press, 2006).

5. This stone coffin is now in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo. On its side, alongside pictures of Ta-Miaut herself and the deities Nephthys and Isis, are several inscriptions. Words spoken by Osiris: "Ta-Miaut is not tired, nor weary is the body of Ta-Miaut, justified before the Great G.o.d." Words spoken by Isis: "I embrace you in my arms, Osiris." Words spoken by Nephthys: "I envelop my brother, Osiris Ta-Miaut, the Triumphant." See www.mafdet.org/tA-miaut.html.

6. At the same time, cats may have been implicated in the first outbreaks of bubonic plague. Although this disease was later spread into Europe by black rats, its natural host is apparently the Nile rat. Although the disease is usually transmitted from the Nile rat to humans via the rat flea, cat fleas are also sometimes responsible. See Eva Panagiotakopulu, "Pharaonic Egypt and the Origins of Plague," Journal of Biogeography 31 (2004): 26975; available online at tinyurl.com/ba52zuv.

7. Both genets and mongooses are occasionally kept as domestic pets, but these are genetically unaltered from their wild ancestors, not domesticated animals, and consequently difficult to keep.

8. From The Historical Library of Diodorus the Sicilian, Vol. 1, Chap. VI, trans. G. Booth (London: Military Chronicle Office, 1814), 87.

9. Frank J. Yurko, "The Cat and Ancient Egypt," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 61 (MarchApril 1990): 1523.

10. Mongooses have been introduced to many parts of the world in an attempt to control snakes, especially islands such as Hawaii and Fiji, which lack other predators of snakes.

11. Angela von den Driesch and Joachim Boessneck, "A Roman Cat Skeleton from Quseir on the Red Sea Coast," Journal of Archaeological Science 10 (1983): 20511.

12. Herodotus, The Histories (Euterpe) 2:60, trans. G. C. Macaulay (London & New York: MacMillan & Co., 1890).

13. Herodotus, Histories, 2:66.

14. From The Historical Library of Diodorus the Sicilian, Vol. 1, Chap. VI, 84, trans. G. Booth (London: Military Chronicle Office, 1814), 84.

15. Herodotus, Histories (Euterpe), 2:66.

16. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 10001.

17. Paul Armitage and Juliet Clutton-Brock, "A Radiological and Histological Investigation into the Mummification of Cats from Ancient Egypt," Journal of Archaeological Science 8 (1981): 18596.

18. Stephen Buckley, Katherine Clark, and Richard Evershed, "Complex Organic Chemical Balms of Pharaonic Animal Mummies," Nature 431 (2004): 29499.

19. Armitage and Clutton-Brock.

20. The "black panther," a melanistic form of the leopard, is common in the rainforests of southern Asia. Presumably so little light penetrates to the forest floor that camouflage is not as much of an issue as for a normally spotted leopard hunting in the African bush.

21. Neil B. Todd, who collected this data, instead suggests that the orange mutation first arose in Asia Minor (roughly, modern Turkey), even though it is less common there than in Alexandria. "Cats and Commerce," Scientific American 237 (1977): 10007.

22. Dominique Pontier, Nathalie Rioux, and Annie Heizmann, "Evidence of Selection on the Orange Allele in the Domestic Cat Felis catus: The Role of Social Structure." Oikos 73 (1995): 299308.

23. Terence Morrison-Scott, "The Mummified Cats of Ancient Egypt," Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 121 (1952): 86167.

24. See chapter 16 of Frederick Everard Zeuner's A History of Domesticated Animals (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

25. This rapid acceptance of cats contrasts with the j.a.panese refusal to admit dogs for thousands of years after they had become widely adopted in China.

26. Monika Lipinski et al., "The Ascent of Cat Breeds: Genetic Evaluations of Breeds and Worldwide Random-bred Populations," Genomics 91 (2008): 1221; available online at tinyurl.com/cdop2op.

27. Cleia Detry, Nuno b.i.+.c.ho, Hermenegildo Fernandes, and Carlos Fernandes, "The Emirate of Crdoba (756929 AD) and the Introduction of the Egyptian Mongoose (Herpestes ichneumon) in Iberia: The Remains from Muge, Portugal," Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011): 351823. The related Indian mongoose has been introduced into many parts of the world in an attempt to control snakes, especially islands such as Hawaii and Fiji, which lack other snake predators.

28. Lyudmila N. Trut, "Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment," American Scientist 87 (1999): 16069; available online at www.terrierman.com/russianfoxfarmstudy.pdf.

Chapter 3.

1. Perhaps fortunately for the domestic cat's popularity, the brown rat Rattus norvegicus, much larger and formidable than the black rat, did not spread across Europe until the late Middle Ages. As it advanced, it gradually displaced the plague-carrying black rat from the towns and cities; now, black rats are generally found only in warmer places. Most cats are not powerful or skillful enough to take on a full-grown brown rat, although they can be an effective deterrent to brown rat colonization or recolonization. See Charles Elton, "The Use of Cats in Farm Rat Control," British Journal of Animal Behaviour 1 (1953), 15155.

2. Researchers have found numerous examples of this in Britain, France, and Spain, so this superst.i.tion must have been widespread. A mummified cat/rat pair were even discovered in Dublin's Christ Church Cathedral, although the official story holds that they were trapped there by accident.

3. Translation by Eavan Boland; see homepages.wmich.edu/~c.o.o.neys/poems/pangur.ban.html. Bn means "white" in Old Irish, so presumably that was the color of the writer's cat.

4. Ronald L. Ecker and Eugene J. Crook, Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales-A Complete Translation into Modern English (Online Edition; Palatka, FL: Hodge & Braddock, 1993); english.fsu.edu/canterbury.

5. Tom P. O'Connor, "Wild or Domestic? Biometric Variation in the Cat Felis silvestris Schreber," International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 17 (2007): 58195; available online at eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/3700/1/OConnor_Cats-IJOA-submitted.pdf.

6. At this time, cats were also considered generally detrimental to good health. The French physician Ambroise Pare described the cat as "a venomous animal which infects through its hair, its breath and its brains," and in 1607 the English cleric Edward Topsell wrote, "It is most certain that the breath and savour of cats . . . destroy the lungs."

7. Carl Van Vechten, The Tiger in the House, 3rd ed. (New York: Dorset Press, 1952), 100.

8. J. S. Barr: Buffon's Natural History, Vol. VI, translated from the French (1797), 1.

9. Neil Todd, "Cats and Commerce," Scientific American 237 (May 1977): 10007.

10. Ibid.

11. Manuel Ruiz-Garca and Diana Alvarez, "A Biogeographical Population Genetics Perspective of the Colonization of Cats in Latin America and Temporal Genetic Changes in Brazilian Cat Populations," Genetics and Molecular Biology 31 (2008): 77282.

12. Even black cats carry the genes for one or other of the "tabby" patterns, but because the hairs that should be brown at the tips are black, the pattern doesn't show-at least, not until the cat gets old, when the hairs that would be brown if they weren't black fade to a dark, rusty color. A tabby pattern can also be just discernible in black kittens for a few weeks. Another variation of the tabby gene, "Abyssinian," restricts the black stripes to the head, tail, and legs, while the body is covered in brown-tipped hairs; this is quite rare except in the pedigree cats of the same name.

13. See Todd, footnote 9.

14. Bennett Blumenberg, "Historical Population Genetics of Felis catus in Humboldt County, California," Genetica 68 (1986): 8186.

15. Andrew T. Lloyd, "p.u.s.s.y Cat, p.u.s.s.y Cat, Where Have You Been?" Natural History 95 (1986): 4653.

16. Ruiz-Garca and Alvarez, note 11.

17. Manuel Ruiz-Garca, "Is There Really Natural Selection Affecting the L Frequencies (Long Hair) in the Brazilian Cat Populations?" Journal of Heredity 91 (2000): 4957.

18. Juliet Clutton-Brock, formerly of the British Museum of Natural History in London, pointed this out in her 1987 book A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals (New York: Cambridge University Press). Indian elephants, camels, and reindeer are among other domestic animals that exist, like the domestic cat, somewhere between wildness and full domestication.

19. For more detail on cat nutrition and how it interacts with their lifestyles, see Debra L. Zoran and C. A. T. Buffington, "Effects of Nutrition Choices and Lifestyle Changes on the Well-being of Cats, a Carnivore that Has Moved Indoors," Journal of the American Veterinary Medical a.s.sociation 239 (2011): 596606.

20. The idea of "nutritional wisdom" comes from Chicago-based pediatrician Clara Marie Davis's cla.s.sic 1933 experiment, which showed that human infants, allowed to choose from thirty-three "natural" foodstuffs, would choose a balanced diet, even though each infant preferred a different combination of foods.

21. Stuart C. Church, John A. Allen and John W. S. Bradshaw, "Frequency-Dependent Food Selection by Domestic Cats: A Comparative Study," Ethology 102 (1996): 495509.

Chapter 4.

1. I suspect-and this is only conjecture-that it is no coincidence that both cat and dog are members of the Carnivora.

2. Eileen Karsh, The Domestic Cat: The Biology of Its Behavior, 2nd ed., Dennis C. Turner and Patrick Bateson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 164. Professor Karsh and her team carried out their study at Temple University in Philadelphia. Remarkably, this revolutionary work has never been published in peer-reviewed journals; however, no one since has fundamentally disagreed with its conclusions.

3. M. E. Pozza, J. L. Stella, A.-C. Chappuis-Gagnon, S. O. Wagner, and C. A. T. Buffington, "Pinch-induced Behavioral Inhibition ('Clipnosis') in Domestic Cats," Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery 10 (2008): 8287.

4. John M. Deag, Aubrey Manning, and Candace E. Lawrence, "Factors Influencing the Mother-Kitten Relations.h.i.+p," in The Domestic Cat, 2339.

5. Jay S. Rosenblatt, "Suckling and Home Orientation in the Kitten: A Comparative Developmental Study," in The Biopsychology of Development, ed. Ethel Tobach, Lester R. Aronson, and Evelyn Shaw (New York: Academic Press, 1971), 345410.

6. R. Hudson, G. Raihani, D. Gonzlez, A. Bautista, and H. Distel, "Nipple Preference and Contests in Suckling Kittens of the Domestic Cat Are Unrelated to Presumed Nipple Quality," Developmental Psychobiology 51 (2009): 32232.

7. St. Francis Animal Welfare in Fair Oak, Hamps.h.i.+re, UK.

8. Female cats sometimes mate with several males in succession, such that the members of a litter may be half-siblings. See the chapter by Olof Liberg, Mikael Sandell, Dominique Pontier, and Eugenia Natoli in The Domestic Cat, 119147.

9. Hand-reared kittens often end up spending their entire lives with the person that hand-reared them. Whether this is because the kittens are difficult to home or whether their human foster parents cannot bear to give them away seems to be unknown.

10. John Bradshaw and Suzanne L. Hall, "Affiliative Behaviour of Related and Unrelated Pairs of Cats in Catteries: A Preliminary Report," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 63 (1999): 25155.

11. Roberta R. Collard, "Fear of Strangers and Play Behavior in Kittens with Varied Social Experience," Child Development 38 (1967): 87791.

12. Karsh, The Domestic Cat, note 2.

13. We measured the closeness of the relations.h.i.+p by asking the owners how likely they would be to turn to their cat for emotional support in each of nine situations-for example, after a bad day at work, or when they were feeling lonely. See Rachel A. Casey and John Bradshaw, "The Effects of Additional Socialisation for Kittens in a Rescue Centre on Their Behaviour and Suitability as a Pet," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 114 (2008): 196205.

14. Practical steps for minimizing the stress of being moved to a new house-for both kittens and cats-can be found on the Cats Protection website: www.cats.org.uk/uploads/doc.u.ments/cat_care_leaflets/EG02-Welcomehome.pdf.

15. Although purring is not always a reliable indicator of how friendly a kitten is, it probably was in this instance.

16. Perhaps surprisingly, the "owners" of these half-wild cats didn't seem to mind-some people seem to value cats for their wildness, and may even deliberately choose a cat with a personality to match.

Chapter 5.

1. Birds, much more visual creatures than cats, see four colors, including ultraviolet, invisible to mammals of all kinds.

2. At least we know that people who are red-green color-blind see colors this way. A very small number of people also have one normal eye and one red-green color-blind eye, and can develop a normal vocabulary for color using their "good" eye, and then using that vocabulary to report what they see with only their color-blind eye open.

3. You can try this by placing a finger on the page of this book, and then moving the finger a little way toward your nose while continuing to focus on the print. We can choose to fix our gaze on either the print or the finger, but if we had a cat's eyes, at this distance, we would be unable to fix on the finger.

4. David McVea and Keir Pearson, "Stepping of the Forelegs over Obstacles Establishes Long-lasting Memories in Cats," Current Biology 17 (2007): R62123.

5. See also the animation at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_righting_reflex.

6. Nelika K. Hughes, Catherine J. Price, and Peter B. Banks, "Predators Are Attracted to the Olfactory Signals of Prey," PLoS One 5 (2010): e13114, doi: 10.1371.

7. A vestigial Jacobson's organ can be detected in the human fetus, but it never develops functional nerve connections.

8. Ignacio Salazar, Pablo Sanchez Quinteiro, Jose Manuel Cifuentes, and Tomas Garcia Caballero, "The Vomeronasal Organ of the Cat," Journal of Anatomy 188 (1996): 44554.

9. Whereas mammals seem to use their VNOs exclusively for social and especially s.e.xual functions, reptiles use them more diversely. Snakes use their forked tongues, which do not have taste buds, to deliver different samples of odorants to their left and right VNOs, useful when they are tracking prey or a snake of the opposite s.e.x.

10. See Patrick Pageat and Emmanuel Gaultier, "Current Research in Canine and Feline Pheromones," The Veterinary Clinics: North American Small Animal Practice 33 (2003): 187211.

Chapter 6.

1. However, science has recently revealed that some of our emotions never surface into consciousness but nevertheless affect the way we behave; for example, images and emotions that we never become aware of affect the way we drive our cars. See Ben Lewis-Evans, d.i.c.k de Waard, Jacob Jolij, and Karel A. Brookhuis, "What You May Not See Might Slow You Down Anyway: Masked Images and Driving," PLoS One 7 (2012): e29857, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0029857.

2. Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1915).

3. For details of the experiments, see M. Bravo, R. Blake, and S. Morrison, "Cats See Subjective Contours," Vision Research 18 (1988): 86165; F. Wilkinson, "Visual Texture Segmentation in Cats," Behavioural Brain Research 19 (1986): 7182.

4. Further details of the discriminatory abilities of cats can be found in John W. S. Bradshaw, Rachel A. Casey, and Sarah L. Brown, The Behaviour of the Domestic Cat, 2nd ed. (Wallingford, UK: CAB International, 2012), chap. 3.

5. Sarah L. Hall, John W. S. Bradshaw, and Ian Robinson, "Object Play in Adult Domestic Cats: The Roles of Habituation and Disinhibition," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 79 (2002): 26371. Compared to "cla.s.sic" habituation as studied in laboratory rats, the timescale over which cats remain habituated to toys is very long-minutes, rather than seconds. We subsequently found that the same applies to dogs.

6. Sarah L. Hall and John W. S. Bradshaw, "The Influence of Hunger on Object Play by Adult Domestic Cats," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 58 (1998): 14350.

7. Commercially available toys don't come apart for a good reason: occasionally a cat can choke on a piece of toy, or get fragments lodged in its gut.

8. Although cats will go out hunting whether they're hungry or not, they're more likely to make a kill if they're hungry; see chapter 10.

9. For a (very) alternative view, look online for comedian Eddie Izzard's "Pavlov's Cat," currently at tinyurl.com/dce6lb.

10. Psychologists generally cla.s.sify pain as a feeling rather than an emotion, but there is no doubt that both feelings and emotions are equally involved in how animals learn about the world.