There is something of a tradition in the blogosphere of writing about cats. Does their individualism and their take-it-or-leave-it psychological self-sufficiency appeal to the blogging mind? Possibly.
My own motive for wanting to learn more about cats is that not so long ago I finally learned a bit about dogs, from my sister and her husband, who live out in the wondrous wilds of West Wales. I've always liked cats, and we always had a cat in our home when I was young. (Too bad my current home is not cat-appropriate.) Also, I get along with and feel that I understand cats, or like to think that I do, although I'm sure I have much to learn about them too.
And I think I have now found an excellent cat book to enable me to do this, namely The Character of Cats by Stephen Budiansky. (As is my usual habit, I got it for next to nothing in a London remainder shop.)
Happily, this is a book based on science, and not just on down-market chatsy anecdote. Books like this, which present the latest scientific evidence and thinking about this or that topic in an accessible yet non-patronising way are, in my opinion, one of the great unsung glories of our culture. The writing of the best of these books is as good as writing gets, yet there are none of those self-consciously arty affectations which (if my prejudices are anything to go by) disfigure so much of contemporary 'literature'.
This, I think, is because these writers really do have important and interesting stories to tell. For all its faults and disappointments, our civilisation shows no sign of flagging scientifically, with new dramas and excitements being uncovered year by year. Nor is our culture flagging technologically, and new science owes a lot to new technology (for example the computer technology that is now being used to unscramble DNA), as new science always has.
Anyway, here are the first few pages of The Character of Cats. The opening paragraph is especially fine, I think. So did the publishers, because, along with the customary eulogies from other writers, they put it on the back cover of the book.
There are no search-and-rescue cats, guard cats, Seeing Eye cats, bomb-detecting cats, drug-sniffing cats, escaped-convict-tracking cats, sheep cats, sled cats, gun cats, obedience-trained cats, Frisbee-catching cats, or slipper-fetching cats. This is a matter of considerable relief. To tell the scientific story of dogs is to risk bringing down the wrath of legions of myth-soaked animal lovers, saturated as they are with tales of canine derring-do, loyalty, and "unconditional love," whatever that means. No one has any illusions about cats. Cats are cats, and any real cat owner knows it. That constant fraction of the human race that stalwartly admires and enjoys the company of cats long ago realized that they had better accept cats on their own terms, for the cats would have it no other way.
Dog science, inevitably, is about shattering myths. Cat science, rather more happily, is about explaining mysteries.
Of mysteries there is no shortage. Cats, with their shining eyes and silent footfalls, have always eluded explanation. Throughout the several thousand years of shared history between cats and human beings, cats have been a source of wonder and unease, reverence and superstition. Needless to say, given that man in his natural state is a simple and impressionable being, a certain amount of this mystification is the product of nothing more than man's own overworked imagination. Primitive peoples who lacked cats were perfectly capable of finding mystery and magic in rocks, trees, blades of grass, and cargo pallets dropped from Allied bombers.
But, in fact, cats really are mysterious. The ambivalent and superstitious emotions that the cat has evoked over the centuries mirror well the ambivalent and paradoxical place the cat truly occupies in nature and in the world of humans. Cats defy most of the normal rules about how and why animals came to enter the company of humans. The behavior of the cat in its association with human society is extraordinarily varied and complex: adaptive and perverse, affectionate and wary, gregarious and reclusive, dependent and aloof. The intelligence of the cat is an amalgam of extremes, of hard-wired instinct and adaptive learning. Cats have spread over the world in the company of man faster than man himself ever did, all the while keeping one foot in the jungle. Cats are the least tamed and the most successful of domestic species, the least altered within but the most changed in circumstance without.
So these mysteries are real – they are the product of nature, not merely our superstitious or ignorant imaginations – but even so they are our own doing in a way, because until recently science has ignored cats. The domestic cat's wild counterpart, the European, African, and Asiatic wildcat Felis silvestris, is among the least studied of wild felines. It is a small, elusive, mostly forest-dwelling animal, and scientists were not able to find out much about the behavior, ecology, and genetics of small, elusive felines until the tools of molecular genetics and radiotelemetry lately began to change things. There has been a degree of scientific snobbery at work, too. Real wildlife biologists don't study pussycats. They don their safari jackets, clamber aboard their Land Rovers, and plunge down some rough and foreboding dirt track in dangerous pursuit of lions and tigers and bears (oh my). The flawed but longstanding belief held by many zoologists and ethologists that domestic animals are all just a bunch of sappy degenerates unworthy of serious scientific scrutiny has not helped, either. So the kind of insights that only science can offer – to help us understand why cats do the things they do, how they perceive their universe, and how they came to share, with such remarkable success, our homes and lives and hearts – has been notably absent from the considerable literature of the cat.
On the other hand, domestic cats did figure prominently in early studies of intelligence and learning and psychology, largely because they were so readily available and so cooperative. And in part because of that foundation there has been a great deal of new research on cognition and brain perception and the neurochemistry of emotion involving cats in recent years. A newfound recognition that all domestic animals represent a vibrant evolutionary story of adaptation and change has also brought newfound and well-deserved attention to the cat from evolutionary biologists and conservation biologists. And perhaps most of all, there is a cadre of basic research scientists today in fields ranging from the neuroscience of vision to molecular genetics who simply like cats, and who are eager to apply the tools of their trades to understanding what makes them tick. It doesn't hurt that many genetic diseases in humans, including hemophilia, diabetes, and Tay-Sachs disease, also occur in cats and that more than twenty-five genes responsible for such inborn diseases have been found in cats. That gives cat genome research a practical payoff, of interest to the powers that be that dispense research grants. In doing this very practical medical research, however, a lot of other stuff comes tumbling out, for the genome of a species is not just a catalogue of ailments or even a blueprint for an organism but also a recorded history of that species, of its travels and fate over space and time.
Cat science is the biography of a species. It is an exploration of where cats came from and how they flourished in the company of man, how they changed and how they stayed the same; it is about their wants and needs, their thoughts and urges, their rationality and their perversity, their group mores and their individual distinctiveness. Like any good biography, it is a tale worth reading for its own sake, but it is also a story with a moral: Cats are not so much pets as fellow travelers, and we impose our hopes and wishes and expectations upon them to our peril. They have their own biological niche and destiny, their own rules of social interaction, their own ways of ordering and perceiving the world. Their astonishing adaptability has found them a place with us, but that one foot is ever in the jungle. Understanding the true nature of cats, with all that science has to offer, is enlightening to us, and good for cats.
