Catwatching Read Free

Wiltshire countryside, I spent many hours lying in the grass, observing the farm cats as they expertly stalked their prey, or spying on the hayloft nests where they suckled their squirming kittens. I developed the habit of catwatching early in life, and it has stayed with me now for nearly half a century. Because of my professional involvement with animals I have frequently been asked questions about cat behaviour, and I have been surprised at how little most people seem to know about these intriguing animals. Even those who dote on their own pet cat often have only a vague understanding of the complexities of its social life, its sexual behaviour, its aggression or its hunting skills. They know its moods well and care for it fastidiously, but they do not go out of their way to study their pet. To some extent this is not their fault, as much feline behaviour takes place away from the home base of the kitchen and the living room.
    So I hope that even those who feel they know their own cats intimately may learn a little more about their graceful companions by reading these pages.
    The method I have used is to set out a series of basic questions and then to provide simple, straightforward answers to them. There are plenty of good, routine books on cat care, which give all the usual details about feeding, housing and veterinary treatment, combined with a classificatory list of the various cat breeds and their characteristics.
    I have not repeated those details here. Instead I have tried to provide a different sort of cat book, one that concentrates on feline behaviour and gives replies to the sort of queries with which I have been confronted over the years. If I have succeeded, then, the next time you encounter a cat, you should be able to view the world in a more feline way. And once you have started to do that, you will find yourself asking more and more questions about their fascinating world, and perhaps you too will develop the urge to do some serious catwatching.
    The Cat We know for certain that 3,500 years ago the cat was already fully domesticated. We have records from ancient Egypt to prove this. But we do not know when the process began. The remains of cats have been found at a neolithic site at Jericho dating from 9,000 years ago, but there is no proof that those felines were domesticated ones. The difficulty arises from the fact that the cat's skeleton changed very little during its shift from wild to tame. Only when we have specific records and detailed pictures – as we do from ancient Egypt – can we be sure that the transformation from wild cat to domestic animal had taken place.
    One thing is clear: there would have been no taming of the cat before the Agricultural Revolution (in the neolithic period, or New Stone Age).
    In this respect the cat differed from the dog. 'Dogs jhad a significant role to play even before the advent of farming. Back in the palaeolithic period (or Old Stone Age), prehistoric human hunters were able to make good use of a four-legged hunting companion with superior scenting abilities and hearing. But cats were of little value to early man until he had progressed to the agricultural phase and was starting to store large quantities of food. The grain stores, in particular, must have attracted a teeming population of rats and mice almost from the moment that the human hunter settled down to become a farmer. In the early cities, where the stores were great, it would have become an impossible task for human guards to ambush the mice and kill them in sufficient numbers to stamp them out or even to prevent them from multiplying. A massive infestation of rodents must have been one of the earliest plagues known to urban man. Any carnivore that preyed on these rats and mice would have been a godsend to the harassed food-storers.
    It is easy to visualize how one day somebody made the casual observation that a few wild cats had been noticed hanging around the grain stores, picking off the mice. Why