Cat

The cat is the only member of the cat family that chose to live with us, and it is fair to say it negotiated good terms.

Domestic cats descend from the Near Eastern wildcat, and the partnership began around 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. Farmers started storing grain, grain attracted mice, and mice attracted wildcats. The cats that tolerated people did well, and the arrangement stuck.

What makes a cat interesting is how little it has changed. A house cat is still a complete predator, with the hearing, night vision, reflexes and teeth of a hunter. It simply does that job in a kitchen now.

The domestic cat’s scientific name is Felis catus. You will also see Felis silvestris catus, which treats it as a subspecies of the wildcat; both appear in scientific writing, and the disagreement is about how separate a domestic animal really is from its wild ancestor.

• Kingdom: Animalia
• Phylum: Chordata
• Class: Mammalia
• Order: Carnivora
• Family: Felidae
• Genus: Felis
• Species: Felis catus

Genetic work on nearly a thousand cats traced every domestic cat alive to a single wildcat subspecies, Felis silvestris lybica, from the Near East. Not Egypt, as people long assumed, and not several places at once.

The oldest hard evidence is a grave on Cyprus, where a person and a cat were buried together about 9,500 years ago. Cyprus had no wildcats of its own, so somebody carried that animal across the sea on purpose.

All domestic cats are one species. The breeds are varieties within it, much as dog breeds are.

Registries recognize somewhere between about 45 and 70 breeds depending on who is counting, from the hairless Sphynx to the long-haired Maine Coon to the vocal Siamese. Most cats on Earth belong to none of them. They are simply domestic shorthairs and longhairs: mixed-ancestry cats, and generally the healthiest.

Cat breeding is also recent. People have shaped dogs for thousands of years, selecting for herding, hunting and guarding. Deliberate cat breeding is mostly a matter of the past century or two, which is one reason cats vary far less in size and shape than dogs do. There is no cat equivalent of the gap between a chihuahua and a great dane.

A typical adult is 18 to 20 inches long in the body, about 9 to 10 inches at the shoulder, with a tail of another 11 inches or so, and weighs 8 to 12 pounds.

Nearly every part is hunting equipment.

• Eyes. A reflective layer behind the retina bounces light back through it, so a cat sees in roughly one sixth the light a person needs. That layer is also why cat eyes glow in a torch beam.
• Ears. Thirty-two muscles each, able to swivel independently, and tuned to the high-pitched squeaks of rodents, well above human hearing.
• Whiskers. Rooted deep and wired to nerves. They read air currents and gaps, and roughly match the width of the cat’s body.
• Claws. Retractable, so they stay sharp. Dogs cannot do this.
• Spine and collarbone. Unusually flexible, with a collarbone that floats free rather than joining the shoulder, which is how a cat fits through any gap its head will pass.
• Tongue. Covered in backward-facing hooks that work as a comb for grooming and strip meat from bone.

Cats now live on every continent except Antarctica, and on a great many islands, because people took them everywhere. Sailors carried them for centuries to protect stores from rats.

They come in three broad situations: pet cats living indoors or part-time outdoors, stray cats that once had homes, and feral cats living entirely wild. Feral colonies survive in cities, farmland, deserts and remote islands.

That adaptability is the root of the problem discussed further down. A cat dropped almost anywhere can make a living.

Cats are obligate carnivores, and the word obligate is doing real work. A dog can manage on a mixed diet. A cat cannot.

Cats must get certain nutrients from animal tissue, above all an amino acid called taurine. Without it they go blind and develop heart failure. They also cannot make vitamin A from plant sources the way many animals do. A vegetarian diet is not a lifestyle choice for a cat; it is a medical emergency.

They also cannot taste sweetness at all. The gene for the sweet receptor is broken in cats, which makes sense for an animal that has eaten nothing but meat for millions of years.

In the wild a cat eats many small meals, hunting ten to twenty times a day with most attempts failing. Prey is mainly rodents, birds, lizards and insects.

Cats sleep a great deal, commonly 12 to 16 hours a day. Hunting in short explosive bursts is expensive, and resting between them is the strategy, not laziness.

They are most active at dawn and dusk, which is when their prey moves, and it is also why a cat may decide 5 a.m. is a reasonable hour to start the day.

Communication is worth understanding. Adult cats rarely meow at each other. Meowing is something they developed largely for humans, after noticing it works. With other cats they rely on scent, body position, tail posture and ear angle.

Purring remains partly mysterious. Cats purr when content, but also when injured, frightened or giving birth, and the vibration sits in a frequency range that some researchers think may aid healing. Nobody has settled it.

The righting reflex is real: a falling cat can twist itself upright using its flexible spine and no collarbone to speak of. It is not magic, it does not always work, and cats are still badly hurt in falls.

Cats breed fast. A female can have her first litter before she is a year old, and pregnancy lasts only about 63 to 65 days.

Litters are usually three to five kittens, and a female can produce two or three litters a year. Kittens are born blind and deaf, open their eyes at about a week, and are weaned by eight weeks.

One litter can have kittens with different fathers, which is why a litter sometimes looks like it came from several cats. It did.

Indoor cats commonly live 13 to 17 years and often reach 20. Cats living outdoors full time average far less, usually only a few years, because of traffic, disease, predators and fights.

Outdoor cats are hunted by coyotes, foxes, large owls, eagles, dogs and, in some regions, big cats. Kittens are vulnerable to much more.

The larger dangers are everyday ones: cars, infectious disease, poisons such as antifreeze and rodent bait, and injuries from fighting.

Domestic cats are not assessed by the IUCN, because they are a domestic animal rather than a wild species. There are hundreds of millions worldwide and they are in no danger whatsoever.

The conservation question runs the other way. Free-ranging cats are efficient predators in places that never evolved alongside them, and the estimated toll is very large: studies put it at billions of birds and mammals a year in the United States alone, with feral cats responsible for most of it. On islands especially, introduced cats have contributed to the extinction of birds and small mammals that had no defense against them.

These figures are estimates and are argued over, but the direction is not in doubt. The practical responses are keeping pet cats indoors or supervised outdoors, fitting a collar bell, neutering to prevent unwanted litters, and managed programs for feral colonies.

None of this is a fault in the cat. It is doing exactly what it evolved to do, in places we put it.

Three different things get called wild cats, and they are worth separating.

• A feral cat is a domestic cat, Felis catus, living wild. Same species as a pet. It is unsocialized rather than a different animal.
• The wildcat, Felis silvestris, is a genuinely wild species and the ancestor of the domestic cat. It looks like a stocky tabby with a thick blunt-tipped tail, and it does not tame.
• Big cats such as the tiger and leopard belong to other genera entirely. A rough rule: the big cats roar and cannot purr continuously, while small cats purr and cannot roar.

Compared with its wild ancestor, the domestic cat has a slightly smaller brain, a longer gut suited to a more varied diet, and far more tolerance of other cats and of people. Beyond that, remarkably little separates the animal on the sofa from the one in the desert.