Far From the Madding Crowd

I picked up Bradshaw for 2 reasons.

First, I’ve been interested in the catnip response for a while, curious how common it is, why it varies from country to country, and what alternatives there are, and thought Bradshaw might be useful.

The second was my cat.

Back in 2017, my cat began having problems, urinating bloody urine and then not urinating at all; coming right before I was about to take a month-long trip and having some experience as a kid with the swiftly fatal consequences of a cat not urinating from my previous cat (which killed her on Christmas day, just to twist the knife), I rushed him back and forth to the vet’s, a task complicated by the fact that during the first trip he was so upset he urinated in the cat carrier and an urine sample couldn’t be obtained, but where the eventual diagnosis was “idiopathic urinary cystitis”³, temporarily patched by painkiller injections to allow urination, mostly caused by the standard dry cat food I fed him and fixed by never again feeding him dry food but wet cat food, and in helpfully specific advice founded no doubt on extensive empirical research, noted that the cystitis was possibly stress-exacerbated in some fashion or other (maybe by relatives visiting & the neighboring cat). Thankfully, switching in the prescription wet food “Crystal Diet” did the trick; in time, he rejected it, refusing to eat⁴, so I replaced it with regular wet food which is only somewhat more expensive (although eventually he began turning his nose up to some degree at that, preferring only the salmon pate, so eventually I gave up and began ordering only that⁵). I thought I was a good owner. Given how expensive and stressful the experience was for the both of us, I decided some insight into cat psychology was worth obtaining and Bradshaw came reasonably recommended.

Bradshaw, it turns out, does not once mention catnip or cat psychoactives. That was a little disappointing.

But he does have a lot of advice about cat psychology & communication & how to keep a cat sane. He emphasizes the degree to which a cat reacts to its environment and is stressed by it.

As an example of their sensitivity, he mentions (pg134) that cats will notice and investigate any changes in their environment. To test this claim, I began making small harmless changes while he was outside, such as moving a box or bowl to the side, and sure enough, upon jumping back through the cat flap, much of the time he would look around the room and immediately jump down to investigate the changed object. I was impressed how observant he turned out to be. I would never have noticed those changes.

Based on Bradshaw’s advice, I tried a number of things: I replaced a noisy box fan & put rubber vibration-absorbing pads on the bottoms of all the fans/air-filters/dehumidifiers/computers (unclear efficacy); I bought a Feliway cat pheromone diffuser spray (no apparent benefit and the Feliway-sponsored studies left me skeptical); I bought a large water bowl to encourage drinking and eventually began adding water to the wet food; moved his feeding station to a more hidden corner; I bought two ‘puzzle treat’ balls, simple and complex, to put dry food or treat bits in for him to play with (a big hit, although use must be strictly rationed to avoid triggering cystitis again, and the simple treat ball, which was an empty sphere, turned out to be far too easy to get treats out of⁶), and added on a ‘puzzle box’ which he also seemed to like; bought 2 ‘cat condos’ which are cubes similar to cat perches (which he frequently sleeps on although again I don’t know how much difference that makes); red/blue/purple/green laser pointers off eBay to supplement the wand for playing chase (initially highly effective but he quickly lost interest & I think limitations of cat color vision may make some colors much less effective⁷); a Sphero Mini (cool toy but he remained afraid of it so after a year I gave it to my sister for her ferret); a replacement cat flap door (previous one was breaking down & jamming & sometimes he struggled to get in); “oat grass”/“wheat grass” seeds for growing oat/wheat shoots to nibble on⁸ (which he sometimes did but it wasn’t worth the trouble & I had problems with over-watering causing mold); bird seed for window-watching birds & squirrels (cheap & highly effective); freeze-dried chicken breast (expensive, only somewhat preferred to regular food & much less than “Greenies”, lamb liver & salmon failed); taurine supplement powder (failed); bought a large shelving unit with extra shelves in the hope that he would find it a useful hiding-place and would jump up to various levels (he sometimes sleeps at the bottom but my efforts to get him to experiment with higher levels failed); the vet, during the next visit which went poorly (as usual: Volk et al 2011/Volk et al 2014)⁹, gave me a 3-pill sample of gabapentin¹⁰ to try during relatives’ visits or future appointments (when I tried one dose, it made a little difference but not a lot, so I reserved the remaining 2 for the next vet visit, and 2×100mg turned out to be much more effective although the visit was still difficult for both fo us); and replaced the opaque cardboard/foam insulation around the cat-flap with an acrylic sheet from Lowe’s I cut to fit so he could more easily watch outside while laying on the window ledge. I also began periodically putting him in the cat carrier and carrying him around either by hand or in my car to try to gradually reduce his aversion to it. One particular success was using ‘videos-for-cats’: I had a hard time getting him to pay attention to the computer monitor long enough to realize that it was displaying videos of birds, but when I turned on the sound, he noticed and instantly became addicted (although this too eventually tolerated, and I had to start using it sparingly). Of these, the most worthwhile changes seem to be the wet cat food, puzzle treats, cat condos, bird seed, videos-for-cats and exposure therapy.

One case study matched him almost exactly, but most of the relevant solutions were inapplicable: he already has his own litter box, water bowl, food dish, apartment, and places to hide, and the outside was visible only from the cat perch & ledge. To do any better, I would have to eliminate visitors and nearby cats entirely—I can’t do much about those major stressors, unfortunately, and in fact another neighborhood cat has been coming around occasionally at night, which doesn’t help. But while he has taken a disliking to the litter box in favor of peeing in my bath tub, the cystitis has not repeated itself. I’ll take what I can get.

Egypt

One of Bradshaw’s most interesting points about domestication is about Egypt. If wildcats are so untameable even adopted as kittens (as documented by case-studies like Mary Frances Pitt & Smithers & Tomkins’s attempts with Scottish wildcats), and we have not been domesticating cats ourselves, where does the original domestication come from? Whose seed-corn have we been eating?

He points to the dizzyingly long history of cats in Ancient Egypt—in few places other than ancient Egypt can authors so casually skip 1,000 or 2,000 years between examples—well displayed in Malek’s The Cat in Ancient Egypt illustrations, which I have since read & scanned, and does include the humorous cartoons of cats Bradshaw mentions. Cats back then were, apparently 15% larger than contemporary domestic cats (one of at least two anomalous changes in domestic cat sizes, the other being a “staggering and unexplained 70% reduction in bone-lengths…between the 11^th & 14^th centuries”), but more intriguing is the role of cats in Egyptian religion.

The common assumption I shared, that cats were naturals for domestication because they are such good vermin exterminators, is apparently not well-supported as there were many alternatives, some superior to cats in ways. Instead, Bradshaw suggests that the key to their domestication may be—and this is speculative, I should caution—their essentially arbitrary role as popular sacrifices, requiring countless ‘catteries’ attached to temples, and at least millions of sacrifices on a scale staggering to contemplate: “more than 4 million mummified ibis, a medium-sized wading bird that the Egyptians bred in captivity, were recovered from catacombs at Tuna el-Gebel, and an additional 1.5 million from Saqqara.” This is only the tip of a grisly iceberg:

We will never know how many cats were sacrificed this way. The archaeologists who discovered these sites wrote of vast heaps of white cat bones, and dust from disintegrating plaster and linen blowing across the desert. Several other cemeteries were excavated wholesale, and their contents ground up and used as fertilizer—some was used locally, some was exported. One shipment of cat mummies alone, sent to London, weighed 19 tons, out of which just one cat was removed and presented to the British Museum before the remainder were ground into powder. Out of the millions that were mummified, only a few hundred now survive in museums, and these come from a mere handful of the many cemeteries constructed over a period of several hundred years.

The iceberg becomes even more gruesomely impressive when you remember that cats are obligate carnivores (unable to be fed on non-meat products which lack the amino acids they have lost the ability to synthesize such as taurine which is vital for their health)¹¹, and the Egyptian cat mummies were kept well-nourished & healthy right up to being carefully strangled, implying expensive meat consumption, and surprisingly to a cynic like myself, Bradshaw specifically notes “almost all the mummies that were produced to look like cats actually do contain a complete cat skeleton”. So:

The cat had rivals for the role of vermin exterminator: other carnivores of similar size were tamed, including various members of the weasel family, and the genet and its cousin the Egyptian mongoose…Very probably, cats did not have the edge as vermin controllers. The answer, therefore, must lie elsewhere, possibly in the cat’s biology. The connection between cats and religion is unlikely to have been crucial, since Egyptians sometimes venerated both mongoose and genet as well.

More likely, the cat managed to become more profoundly domesticated than any of its rivals. However, which was the cause and which the effect? Are cats more “trustworthy” and predictable than ferrets because they have evolved ways of communicating with humans, or is it the other way around? Since we do not know precisely how the domestic cat’s direct ancestors behaved, such questions are impossible to answer. Nevertheless, the cat’s capacity to evolve not only into a pest controller but also into a pet animal—its present-day roles—must have been central to its success in the first 2,000 years of its domestication. So what set the cat apart on its millennia-long journey into our homes?

Here, the cat’s involvement in Egyptian religion may well have been crucial. It is possible that the Egyptians’ veneration of cats that gave the cat the time required to evolve fully from wild hunter to domestic pet; otherwise, it might have remained a satellite of human society and not an intrinsic part. It is even possible that the factories that produced the cat mummies forced the evolution of cats that could tolerate being kept in confined spaces and in close proximity with other cats, both qualities that are signally absent from today’s strongly territorial wildcats but that are essential to life as an urban pet. Although of course most of the cats that carried the relevant genes died young—that was how they were being bred, after all—some must have escaped into the general population, where their descendants would have inherited an improved ability to deal with the close confines of urban society. Such changes take only a few decades in captive carnivores, as exemplified by the Russian fur-fox experiment that turned wild animals docile in just a few generations.

Is it possible that today’s apartment-dwelling cat owes its very adaptability to the inhabitants of those gruesome Egyptian catteries?

That is, the earliest cats which were tamed by humans starting somewhere around 9,000 years ago (given the population bottlenecks indicated by available genomes), were then merely one of many animals humans might associate with. But they were not truly domesticated: they were more like hand-reared wildcats. These basal cats were good enough to create a human-associated cat population which could gradually spread, but they couldn’t take on major roles, like the dog or horse. It was then the Egyptian period which did implicit selection on a set of highly-polygenic traits which would polish cats for social life with humans. Since we do not (yet) have polygenic scores for such traits, it is hard to prove or disprove this scenario—the easily observed population genetic history of cats would not reveal this soft selection, nor can we easily quantify any Egyptian influence nor even any trait differences across cat populations (any such difference could be post-Egyptian).¹²

Cats gradually spread post-Egypt, particularly by sea (leading to some interesting cases like islands of all-black cats due to founder effects), but without any signal events aside from an unfortunate period of persecution by the Catholic Church (itself anomalous inasmuch as cats were long popular with ecclesiastics) and occasional mistakes like 200,000 cats being killed because of London’s Great Plague of 1665^–₃₀₁1966_58ya.

At this point, Bradshaw turns from the history of cats, such as it is understood, to what sort of psychology we expect from a creature evolved for the cat niche, with its uniquely difficult nutritional needs, and then the practical implications of this psychology for cats as pets. Other reviews of Cat Sense complain that it is repetitive, which I didn’t really notice (there is a difference between being repetitive, and revisiting a central point from different angles) or that it focused too much on summarizing past research (a positive aspect for me) or Bradshaw’s research (write what you know, and such criticisms would be more convincing if they mentioned what key papers Bradshaw was neglecting in favor of his own), or that they already knew everything Bradshaw said and were deeply bored by it (in which case they must be far more expert on cats than I am and perhaps should be writing the papers themselves), or seem to be reading the wrong book entirely and should be reading the later The Trainable Cat.

More

Miscellaneous points I learned about cat psychology & biology:

• the Greek for cat, aielouros, is literally “waving tail”; Egyptian girls were being named miw not long after miws started being pets (hence “catgirls” were present almost from the beginning)

• long-haired cats are disadvantaged less by heat than by fur matting, causing infections/infestations

• cat fur colors are something of a mystery; despite surprisingly complex genetics & some specific pleiotropic associations with traits like deafness, they appear to have little practical effect or known purpose:

  • despite stereotypes, correlations with aggressiveness are currently small & dubious¹³ (background)

  • cats appear to have no fur color preferences in mating

  • coat colors appear to be generally neutral in terms of fitness in the wild, as feral populations do not seem to change their colors markedly compared to the original cats (pg68)

  • coat colors also appear to be irrelevant to cats themselves:

    What seems to be missing here is any trace of each cat’s own preferences. Although never studied directly, we have no evidence for “color prejudice” among cats. Tabby females do not seem to spurn black toms in favor of other tabbies: a white bib and socks seems to be neither an advantage nor a disadvantage when it comes to finding a mate, except perhaps indirectly, if the cat’s conspicuousness has resulted in it catching less prey and thus looking less healthy than its better-camouflaged rival. Whatever criteria cats use to choose a mate, coat color seems to be well down the list.

  • there is no known explanation for why black cats are so common, especially given that humans dislike black coats and black cats are seen as less friendly¹⁴

    However, this continued prevalence of black cats, despite their disliked & easily-selected against phenotype, does imply that net human control over cat genetics is near-zero—perhaps because the cats we favor are immediately neutered and therefore we genetically destroy the cats we prefer (Clark1975).

• cats are “obligate carnivores”, unable, among other things, to make vitamin A or vitamin D or taurine and needing extra niacin & thiamine, and actually require meat/fat to make hormones to reproduce at all, while they can smell tomcat urine for the sulfuric ‘felinine’ to gauge hunting success.

  Because of this, it is quite difficult to make a healthy vegetarian diet for a cat, and nutritionally-complete cat food apparently has been “widely available for only 35 years or so”. (I wonder how well urban cat’s-meat men compare?)

• due to their desert descent, they have small water-efficient kidneys (though this has unfortunate consequences like quickly succumbing to kidney failure and being easily killed by home pollutants like essential oils)

• kittens have a much shorter window of plasticity than puppies, who can tolerate lack of human contact for up to seven weeks with any harm, but by that point, kittens have already been damaged.

  By seven weeks, a kitten should already be learning play signals and mock fights and signals to stop playing (apparently, the ‘stop play’ signal is to “arch their back, curl their tail upward, and then leap off the ground”; I don’t think I’ve ever seen that one before). Similarly, kittens raised as litter-mates will get along closely, as indicated by things like grooming each other or laying touching another or happily eating side by side; while cats who met as adults will never, rarely, or never (respectively) do those behaviors no matter how cordial. And kittens raised with friendly dogs will be fine with dogs in the future, which is not something which could be said of all (or even most?) cats who encountered dogs as adults…

  • Cat research has publication problems. Of the plasticity window, Bradshaw then notes: “Remarkably, this revolutionary work has never been published in peer-reviewed journals; however, no one since has fundamentally disagreed with its conclusions.” On another occasion, “The late Penny Bernstein conducted a detailed study of stroking, details of which sadly remained unpublished when she died in 2012_12ya.” And Bradshaw himself omitted the key behavioral details from his 1999 cat dysgenics paper.

    Cat research has issues with publishing & propagating knowledge—among catnip researchers, consider the ignorance of Villani2011 or the never-published catnip GWAS.

• the ‘scruffing reflex’ or ‘clipnosis’ is a quick (and amusing) way to immobilize a cat; I tested it myself on several cats. (My vet prefers to use a method of wrapping the whole cat tightly in a towel so they can’t see anything.)

  Incidentally: Do male cats ever carry around kittens/other cats? Do females do this instinctively, or does it only happen because of motherhood leading to learning the behavior via trial-and-error? It occurs to me that I’ve never seen a spayed/neuter cat do it that I know of, either in person or via media; all the cats carrying around kittens are either mothers or I don’t know their history/status.

• “cat flu” is one of the major killers of kittens, rather than starvation or accident, especially in cat colonies, and a perennial problem in animal shelters (getting in the way of good socialization)

• Mother cats can’t/don’t recognize their young, and are perfectly happy to suckle a random kitten quietly slipped into their litter.

  Apparently cuckoos are not a problem; anything which acts like a kitten gets milk. (This suggests that cat colonies are rare enough or genetically homogenous enough to not evolve strong offspring recognition skills as the occasional mistake doesn’t reduce inclusive fitness enough to matter—if all the queens in a cat colony are closely related, they might as well rear any kitten in their nest.)

  This attitude may also be reflected in how mother cats will occasionally kill & eat one of their kittens. It is speculated this is to remove particularly weak kittens, avoid contagious disease, or recuperate from a particularly difficult pregnancy—as no one is bring the mother food and their physical reserves will be exhausted, risking the entire litter.¹⁵

• in addition to the famous reflecting layer, cat eyes achieve night vision by having 10× fewer nerves, each nerve accounting for a larger bundle of rods spread further out, allowing greater sensitivity to dim light, at the cost of precision in bright light; they see only blue & yellow but even there appear bad at discriminating.

  “Any other difference between objects—brightness, pattern, shape, or size—seems to matter more to cats than does color.” Peculiarly, lacking muscles to focus their eyes, they ‘scan’ objects instead, and Bradshaw suggests that “perhaps because it is just too much effort, they often don’t bother to focus at all”. The inability to see things nearby is presumably compensated by whiskers.

  This farsightedness has a peculiar psychological consequence: cats appear to have a special memory system to memorize what is in front of them, in order to step over obstacles; if they haven’t stepped over it and are distracted, they then forget (and need to look around before they can start walking again), but if they have stepped over it, they automatically remember for the next 10 minutes and their hindlegs will automatically step over it. (A decerebrated cat can still walk, so there seems to be quite a bit going on in the rest of the feline nervous system.) I found that quite bemusing.

  One thing Bradshaw doesn’t cover is how cats step in precisely the same place with their back paw as the front paw, which is called “direct registering” and is useful in quietly navigating cluttered environments; this explains why cats can jump on and off desks for years without knocking off a single thing—accidentally knocking things off would be shamefully dog-like. (Cats, of course, only knock things off intentionally.)

  On the other hand, they can hear ultrasound and unusually low-frequency noises because of an unusual double-chambered chamber in their head, and localize even ultrasonic sounds—elegantly, if the ears’ repointing doesn’t work because of high frequencies, the chamber then starts to work. (This sensitivity to both ultrasound & low-frequency, exemplified by the “pspspspsps” cat call made famous by social media, might be why they are so freaked out by vacuum cleaners, canned air & air compressors, computer printers, and leafblowers: on the plus side, they know the instant a can is opened in the kitchen, but on the down side, they must involuntarily hear all sorts of ordinary metal or ceramic sounds… If cats designed the world, it would use more plastic.)

• when showing a cat something interesting, like cat thyme leaves (a much rarer cat psychoactive), I’ve noticed them do an odd rictus grin to breath deeply; this turns out to be a way of invoking the vomeronasal organ for hormone smelling, called the Flehmen response. Primarily used in social situations, such as the cheek rubbing, which marks things with the glands in the cheeks. (If you’ve ever wondered why your cat likes rubbing its cheeks on you…)

• cat toys simulate hunting, and boredom appears to reflect a combination of habituation and frustration. Changing color of a cat toy will restore interest, and being given a toy they can change or destroy also maintains interest.

  Commercial toys do neither. Bradshaw notes that cats appear to be cautious around large toys, and never learn that they are in fact harmless, which matches my experience with trying to get him to play with the Sphero Mini, his great interest in the puzzle treats (getting a treat after fighting with it is isomorphic to hunting, after all, and eating the pellet definitely changes it), and with being able to restore his flagging interest in a laser pointer by switching to a different color. It seems like commercial cat toys may be suboptimal. (One exception I haven’t tried yet is the Ripple Rug, a 2-layer carpet, which is reminiscent of how cats play with things under sheets or behind curtains and which is inherently scrunchable & rearrangeable for novelty; the positive reviews of it describe it in ways which line up with this mutability theory of cat play.)

• there are a bizarre number of possible cat hybrids: domestic cats can hybridize with a remarkable number of other species in Felidae, including South American cats with different chromosome counts (and the domestic cat × Geoffroy’s cat = ‘Safari’ cats are even fertile!)

• cats can be trained, but it is difficult. (Tellingly, one often refers to ‘untrained’ or ‘poorly-trained dogs’, but never to an ‘untrained cat’. It is just assumed that cats will go along improvising regardless of how maladaptive a behavior is, and cannot be taught better.)

  It is just harder: training & reinforcement are inherently ambiguous/under-determined¹⁶; unlike dogs, who can be trained with fairly sloppy mapping between action and reward, are eager to please, and are rewarded just by human praise, cats have no particular drive to please or human theory of mind (people think that meows and other sounds are communication but as cat owners are unable to interpret other cats’ sounds, the meows generally seem to represent an arbitrary language learned by each cat by trial-and-error) and require food treats, must be trained backwards starting from the final step, and require very tight action/reward feedback—a reward must be provided within seconds. As it’s not easy to dispense a cat treat within seconds of an action, the easiest way to do this is clicker training: use a small gizmo which makes click sounds, and give them a treat every time you click it; after a while, the click itself becomes a reward, and it’s easy to make a click quickly, perhaps at a distance, delivering instant feedback.¹⁷

  I found this useful to know for how to ‘train’ him but also for how to not train him to do things. One thing people often do with pets or small children is accidentally train them to do bad things. The pet/child wants something, makes trouble to get it, the person gives in and gives the thing, and one iteration of training has occurred. Dogs barking to get something is one I hear a lot, but cats can do it too—my grandparents have ‘trained’ their cat to wake them up at 6AM so he can go out. The problem, of course, is that they gave in too quickly, and he learned the lesson well. Now, when my cat tries out being a nuisance (to get some food, usually), and it’s a legitimate need, I avoid reinforcing him by deliberately waiting a few minutes until he’s given up and enough time has passed that then giving him whatever would not lead to any learning.¹⁸

  • the lack of trainability apparently has an exception, Bradshaw states: food can trigger learning of powerful associations even hours after consumption. This would make sense as an anti-bad-food defense, but unfortunately, this is yet another maladaptation in the modern context: “…this mechanism occasionally has unexpected consequences: a cat that succumbs to a virus may then go off its regular food even after it has recovered, because it has incorrectly associated the illness with the meal that happened to precede it.”^{19 20}

  • people ascribe vague & indefinite mental powers to cats and think they are more intelligent than they are, simply because cats’ trial-and-error can go further than one thinks (example, or Charles Mingus noting a toilet-trained cat will learn to flush by accident as it does the ‘burying’ pawing motions & hits the toilet handle).

    For example, mothers can teach kittens simply by interacting with an object, and then the kittens will spend time interacting with it too—not imitating her actions, just acting at random on their own—and may reinvent a reward (in the cited experiment, a food lever), while ignoring unrelated female cats. (I’ve long noticed that if I want a cat to learn something, putting them into the situation works better than trying to demonstrate it. To teach him to use the cat flap, I just shoved him through it several times in both directions. He got the idea.) I was amused to recall some instances of operant conditioning: for example, when I ran out of my original blue bottle of Purina tuna treats and happened to buy various other fish treats, he refused them all, including similar-seeming tuna treats; eventually I realized that it wasn’t the flavor that was the problem, the problem was that the treats were coming out of the wrong container! When I dumped them all into the blue bottle, he was happy to eat them all. I exploited this to train him to tolerate nail-clipping by starting with as little clipping as possible and reinforcing with treats within a second of letting go, and patiently expanding over a year to clipping all of his front claws before treats.

    This use of trial-and-error fuzz testing leads to a signature blend of stupidity & genius familiar to anyone who has spent much time in statistics or AI or computer security—I was amused to think while reading Cat Sense that, as described, cats have all the strengths (& weaknesses) of contemporary AI research’s deep reinforcement learning (especially DQN): generalized, sample-inefficient, demonstrating the perverse genius of trial-and-error, sleep()s all the time while blocking (the door), their poor exploration benefits from expert demonstrations, they are reward hackers (who optimize for getting the treat not what you wanted), hairy to train, black boxes, who are unable to generalize, solve short-term credit assignment problems only, are unable to model or plan, and overly-averse to states which were harmful without realizing which disentangled factor was responsible (cat/hot stove etc), as Mark Twain put it (ch11 of Following the Equator, 1897_127ya):²¹

    We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.

• while cats have few abstractions or mental models of the world (and are merely very good at associations/trial-and-error)²², they do have mental maps as they can take physical shortcuts which go out of sight of a target or the ‘wrong’ direction for a while

• cats are deeply inflexible about their territory and not adaptable like dogs, deeply anxious about establishing a territory and stopping other cats from entering their territory, and this appears to be a major cause of cat behavioral problems and disease like, incidentally, cystitis, and according to the UK Cat Protection, inability to get along is one of the most common reasons for a cat to be returned to their pounds. (This point made me think back to when I visited the pound and the cat room: festooned in cat trees and shelves and nooks and crannies, the ~20 cats there had all carefully arranged themselves equidistantly—which made it easy for me to play with each one separately, at least.)

  Famous cat photographer Walter Chandoha needed to acclimate cats to his photography studio over days, and gingerly expose them to strobe lights, while his wife, a ‘cat whisperer’ coaxed the into relaxing & posing; Chandoha quit photographing cats after she died. (To highlight how severe the consequences of poor adaptation can be to both the cat and owner, I would have mentioned how frequently cat bites from even extremely friendly cats will send people²³, including my grandmother, to the emergency room, due to the narrowness of cat fangs & ease of blood infection.) Maren Huck describes her informal observations of her ‘catcam’ research (Huck & Watson2019):

  Cats are seen as relatively lazy, especially compared to dogs. But we saw that when they were outside, they became superalert.²⁴ They scanned their surroundings, sometimes for a half-hour or more on end. And even though cats are highly territorial, they didn’t always fight with other cats they encountered. Often, they just sat a couple of meters away from each other for up to a half an hour. They may have been sizing each other up. Sometimes they would engage in a greeting, briefly touching noses. When they were in their homes, the cats spent a lot of time following their humans around. They liked to be in the same room. A lot of my students were surprised at how attached cats were to people.

  Bradshaw:

  …cats’ emotional needs are still the cause of widespread misapprehensions. Cats are widely perceived as being far more socially adaptable than they actually are. Owners polled for a recent survey said that half of pet cats avoid (human) visitors to the house; almost all pet cats either get into fights with cats from neighboring houses, or avoid any contact with them; and half of the cats that share households with other cats either fight or avoid one another.¹ Research confirms that cats find such conflicts highly stressful: they experience fear during the event itself, and anxiety in anticipation of the next encounter. They are constantly hypervigilant through cues we are unaware of, such as the odor of a rival cat. Chronic anxiety can lead to deteriorating health and may reduce life expectancy. Unfortunately, we do not know enough about how to mitigate this situation, made worse by the ever-increasing number of cats kept as pets.

  …Simply replacing random-bred cats with cats from today’s pedigree breeds will not only perpetuate those genetic problems that already exist, it also cannot solve the problems that the cat is facing as a species. A reduced motivation to hunt and kill prey is just one of several factors that will enable cats to adapt better to twenty-first-century living. Allowing a little anthropomorphism: if cats could write themselves a wish list for self-improvement, a set of goals to allow them to adapt to the demands we place on them, it might look something like this:

  • To get along better with other cats, so that social encounters are no longer a source of anxiety.

  • To understand human behavior better, so that encounters with unfamiliar people no longer feel like a threat.

  • To overcome the compulsion to hunt even on a full stomach.

  The corresponding requests from owners:

  • I’d like to have more than one cat at a time, and for my cats to be company—not just for me, but also for one another.

  • I wish my cat didn’t disappear into the bedroom to urinate on the carpet every time I have visitors.

  • I wish my cat didn’t bring gory “presents” through the cat-flap.

  Suffering is all the more cruel when those suffering do not & cannot understand why.

  A lot of otherwise-amusing cat behaviors look like hyper-active fear and danger responses. Consider the famous “cats and cucumbers” prank. (We may also underestimate dog fear/anxiety by thinking it funny.)

• Cat territories do not need to be large: I’ve been surprised how rarely I see him venture far from home considering how much undeveloped area there is around my house which should be perfect for exploring/hunting, but small ranges are common for domestic cats (eg. Kays et al 2020), and being less than 91 meters is the usual even in natural areas, something like 10,000 times smaller than a wild or feral cat’s range, apparently without major psychological issue. (I’ve thought of getting a tracking collar because I am curious where he does go, but at >$120/year, I’m not that curious.)

  Bradshaw muses of the tracking data from his own cat²⁵ that:

  Splodge rarely ventured beyond the trees—to my great relief, since there was a busy road not far beyond. He would sometimes remain in the same location for hours at a time, usually one of a few favored vantage points such as a branch of a fallen tree, before moving on to another site or returning home. He rarely seemed to be hunting: occasionally, he caught a mouse or a young rat, but would let birds fly past him without batting an eyelid. I often wondered, and still do, what was going through his mind as he maintained his surveillance of the same small area, day after day, year after year.

  This seems strikingly connected to the lack of plasticity outside kittenhood and inability to befriend other cats as adults. (The tragedy of cats is their minds are as rigid as their bodies are limber.) But perhaps if cats are like humans, for whom anticipation is so often better than realization, then being safe while watching the world go by is a kind of heaven.

• cats prefer their food & water bowls separated; this apparently was well-known among cat researchers (although I can’t find any good experiments) and is explained as an anti-fouling behavior.

  I had somehow never heard of this! My family had always put out pairs of bowls for our cats just like our dogs, I’d always put out pairs for my cats & dogs, it seemed to work fine, the cats didn’t seem to mind…²⁶ I tried separating them for my cat, and sure enough, he stopped dragging chunks of wet food away to eat and seemed to be eating more as well. I tested this further: I’d been adding water to his saucer of wet food because I was concerned he wasn’t drinking enough water & adding water is something some cat owners do, and the saucer sometimes wound up dry, so I thought it was working. But the separate-food/water claim suggests it was actually bad. So, I used the “two-bowl test”: I split his food into two saucers with half each and water/no-water, and put them down simultaneously (alternating left/right); out of 4 trials, he showed a strong preference for the no-water one—he always ate the no-water-added wet food saucer first and left the water-added saucer for eating only hours later (or not at all), dragging food away from the water one or licking the dry saucer instead. Thus, I stopped doing that too, and after a while, I replaced the bowl entirely with a separate motion-activated water fountain to provide ‘running water’—if I was wrong about the placement of the bowl being acceptable, then maybe I was wrong about the stillness of the water too.

  • I also read that cats often prefer their wet food microwaved briefly, which makes the smell much stronger. The smell is indeed overwhelming, but in 8⁄10 pairwise trials, my cat preferred the cold wet food he’d had for the past 4 years. (So it may well be true but his preferences are locked-in now.)

• the coolest term in cat biology is “primordial pouch” (the baggy part of their stomach all cats have); the uncoolest is definitely “Flehmen response” (is that the facial expression you make when offered sauerkraut while watching men in Lederhosen play Glockenspiels?)

• One undiscussed question: “What is it like to be a cat (tail)?”

  Anyone who has seen a cat (or dog) whack itself in the face with its tail, attack its tail after being surprised by it, or lay with their tail lashing only to abruptly lick it (apparently “trying to calm it down”), must have wondered what is going on & if tails have minds of their own. This seems plausible.

  If we look at split-brain patients, or octopuses (whose arms contain 3⁄5^ths its neurons, and which when cut off, can still grab food & attempt to pass it back to the mouth), body schema problems like phantom limbs & treatment like mirror therapy (or using VR to induce fake-limb mental ownership, or speechjammers), the Krista and Tatiana Hogan joined-at-the-head twins (who, Peter Watts notes, avoid using the pronoun “we”), the inability of the sane to tickle themselves without an artificial delay, PRISM/pain etc, one gets the inescapable impression that personal identity is a continuum closely linked to a triangle of latency/bandwidth/predictability: brains perceive subsystems as part of themselves, rather than external objects, only if they can be sufficiently accurately modeled & controlled. At a certain point (akin to VR “presence”), identity “snaps” into place.

  A well-designed tool simply feels unconsciously part of ourselves, while a poor tool constantly causes errors & problems & is hard to control quickly, repeatedly feeling alien to us, forcing its way into consciousness to be laboriously processed (a good tool transitions from “present-at-hand” to “ready-to-hand”). Our hands feel so much closer to us than our feet (cf. the sensory homunculus), and our eyes feel so much more us than our big toe because it provides such rich information to the brain, with such low latency (being but inches away), and the saccades of our eyes are the fastest and most precise muscular movements in the body—we are entirely unconscious of eye focusing & movement, or the blind spot, because our eyes work so well. The 2 hemispheres of our brain are likewise so tightly linked by such high-speed & high-bandwidth neural connections that we have no conscious experience of lateralization, and cannot even conceive ‘what it would be like’ after they are surgically severed—to be just the left hemisphere or just the right hemisphere. Or more fundamentally, we are unable to notice or perceive the extensive processing brains must do to laboriously extract colors, edges, objects, temporal persistence, even when an optical illusion reveals to us the tricks and we stare at it trying to will it away: you still can’t feel the vision processing as separate from you. It just works too well, too fast, too often.

  How do cat tails fit in with these other examples? A cat tail is as far away from the cat brain possible (a tail might be as long as the body itself!), and is an extension of the neuron-filled spine. A cat tail exists mostly for the sake of balancing (as opposed to being an escape decoy, distraction, stinger, spare hand for tree climbing etc). Balancing in feline acrobatics like pounces is an extremely rapid process which must happen in milliseconds, with potentially fatal errors; there is no time to chat back and forth with the main brain, the tail must be relatively autonomous. (Similar to how even decerebrated cats can still do things like walk or trot. The peripheral nervous system must be quite capable.) The tail is also quite separate from the rest of the body: tail adjustments have little to do with the neighboring rear legs, eg, much less the rest. A cat tail doesn’t contain remotely as many neurons as an octopus arm or elephant trunk does (as far as I can find out—but since octopuses have roughly twice as many as cats & put an absurd amount into their limbs, it seems highly likely), but this is a continuum. (Young elephants take a long time to learn to control their trunk, and young kittens too seem to have trouble with their tail; perhaps that’s why kittens are so adorably clumsy in part, because of an uncooperative tail?)

  Given the tail’s role and distance, and how personal identity works, it seems entirely possible that a cat doesn’t quite ‘own’ its tail the way it does more tightly-integrated limbs like its forepaws, and genuinely can be surprised by what its tail ‘decides’ to do.

  So, what is it like to be a cat tail? It would be an extremely limited sort of mind (far above a thermostat, but far below the main brain): little or no memory beyond the seconds-scale, with senses confined to the tactile; always trying to find a more comfortable position based on signals about being in equilibrium coming from without (the main brain), sometimes successfully adjusting within milliseconds, but still periodically bothered by intense feelings of discomfort or predicted pain, which it attempts to fix with new positions (usually futile), until equilibrium signals are restored for unknown reasons.

  Eh. It’s a living.

• Why do cats pee in tubs/sinks? Particularly when stressed?

  Those are bad places, because there’s no way to bury it, and they are clearly bothered by the odor. And they also clearly do not prefer bath tubs and sinks, or else they would use them regularly. (Cats do not use litter boxes to please humans despite disliking them, the way a dog might, and so stress might undermine their willpower; no willpower or training is necessary, they simply prefer litter boxes because they can follow their burying instinct.) Saying “it’s a habit” is not an answer, because that fails to explain why it would start, what reinforces it, and would be so consistent across cats. And if they are going to go outside their litterbox, why don’t they go anywhere at random, like on the floor or carpet? And if those aren’t good because they aren’t semi-enclosed or vaguely resemble a litterbox, why not use the actual litterbox?

  My theory is that it’s “cold diuresis”, otherwise known as “why does walking barefoot on a cold bathroom floor suddenly make me need to pee?”

  Defecation requires relaxation, which is difficult when severely stressed. Tubs and sinks are made of unusually thermally-conductive materials like enameled porcelain or aluminum, which, despite being room temperature, will feel much colder than more insulating materials like carpet or kitty litter. So a cat when stressed will not be able to go in its preferred litter box, and will eventually seek out a tub to walk on, triggering cold diuresis and defecation.

• incidentally, here’s one I rediscovered myself (and may have solved): why do cats like human earwax so much?

Are Cats Domesticated?

This is all well and good, but what I took away from Cat Sense, which I was not expecting, was a deeper appreciation of cat problems and a pessimism. Cats are not acceptable cats. They can be much better.

Bradshaw’s overall thesis is this: think of a cat as a small solitary desert ambush predator which happens to have some limited cognitive plasticity in kittenhood and some basic social skills enabling it to, on rare occasions, live in unstable ‘colonies’ of usually-related individuals focused around a rich food source; this desert predator happens to have become insinuated throughout human society but it has no real understanding of humans or “theory of mind” and to survive, relies heavily on what learning it manages about humans & other cats in that short window of plasticity, the simple social skills of a cat colony, trial-and-error, and treating humans as either dangerously unpredictable predators or large mother cats.

As pet cats are universally ‘fixed’, cat reproduction is now primarily done by those feral cats who are able to escape the traps and being neutered, with the most secretive surviving toms endlessly searching suburbia for the rare fertile female in heat. To be reproductively fit, a cat must always be able to survive on its own and evade humans, and remain hyper-alert to foreign cats or predators which might damage it (leaving it unable to hunt effectively on its own causing a downward spiral of starvation), sensitive to dangerous foods²⁸ & places & people, passing up nutritious food if there’s even a small chance of being disablingly poisonous, and is unable to cope with too much novelty and may be entirely unable to understand humans or other cats if it was not properly acculturated as a kitten during its window of plasticity.

Bradshaw remarks that a cat raised only by humans, without experience with kittens, reacts to meeting another cat for the first time with “a bizarre combination of fascination and fear…Others…barely seem to realize they are cats at all…Hand-reared kittens may develop extreme personalities” (pg236; the word ‘fear’ comes up a lot in Cat Sense). This description reminded me of my neighbor’s cat, who was found as a tiny kitten in a cat nest of 5 kittens in a field by a farmer while mowing, and then adopted by them when the farmer took them to his vet. Thus, he was raised solely by humans & dogs; he is Maine Coon-ish, and friendly to humans & dogs²⁹, and we often remark that “he seems to think he’s a human”, just as predicted. But he also reacted just as described by Bradshaw when I brought my own cat home, who seems to have been the first cat he ever encountered close up, and was an obsessive bully initially—years later, he still seems to both loathe & be fascinated by my cat³⁰, while he is much less interested in dogs.

In other words, the reason “cats are cats everywhere” is because so-called domestic cats are barely domesticated.

Domestic cat admixture appears to contaminate ‘wild cat’ populations³¹ and vice versa, which aside from slowing any kind of domestication, also indicates the successful flow of ‘domestic’ cats back into the wild. We could also note that before the invention of cat litter in the 1940s, keeping a cat indoors was challenging due to the awful stench of their urine & difficulty feeding them (where does one get all the meat if the cat is not hunting for itself and there are no cat’s-meat men?) and most people had outdoor cats, and farm cats were more tolerated than anything. Cats don’t exhibit a clear ‘domestication syndrome’ of small skulls, floppy ears, no longer going into heat, piebald coats, etc. (The domesticated foxes do; more obscurely, pet rats may too, with the “dumbo” mutation.) Dogs have been molded by humans to a far greater degree than cats, as we can see by comparing the range of dog breed traits to cats: there are no cat breeds which differ in size as much as, say, chihuahuas and St Bernards.³² Indeed, even mice may be more domesticated than cats—“today’s house mice rarely breed successfully away from human habitation, especially where there are wild competitors, such as wood mice”! They have no theory of mind, and won’t look to a human for help and training must be done with food rewards. A cat without any human contact before 10 weeks will be near-feral (except in the case of severe trauma, apparently, where it may bond with its rescuer, analogous perhaps with “hitting bottom”). This is better than true wild cats, where even fairly young kittens are aggressive and difficult to handle adults, but it is still indicative of deep fragility, dependent on just the right rearing environment else lapsing back to wild-type. (Puppies, in contrast, are more robust to lack of human experience.)

On a behavioral level, cats aren’t very domesticated compared to even, say, the Russian silver foxes. The behavioral assay for the foxes was whether they would eagerly approach a quiet human; after half a century, they all do and are very friendly. While anyone who has visited many people with cats knows that the modal reaction to a stranger in a house is to run away & hide until they’re gone (and Bradshaw cites a survey to that effect). While looking for a cat after my dog died, I visited the local animal shelter where most of the cats, perhaps a good 30, were all in a play room, and I spent an hour inside it, sitting & waiting for cats to decide to come to me; despite being the only person in the room the entire time (and the only person to adopt a cat that day)—suggesting that they were not exactly blessed with a surfeit of human-recreation opportunities, unlike the cats in the San Francisco cat cafe I visited in early 2018—of that 30+, only a handful did, and I had to approach them to get any impression. I eventually coaxed my future cat out of his hidey-hole to try him, upon which he was very friendly & starved for affection (but in retrospect should’ve been a warning sign to me that I was not picking a bold cat which was well-equipped to deal with the stresses of the modern world).

I also note that most people are bad at dealing with cats, making what should be clear errors (again, despite cats being the #1 or #2 most common pet in the world & so ignorance should not be a problem): I don’t know how many times I have seen someone try to touch a cat’s belly, start petting it with a full-body stroke rather than a chin or head scratch, insist on scratching them at the butt-tail point, interpret tail-lashing (the opposite of dogs, ‘tail wagging’ is a bad thing!), or ears pinned back as good things, try to pick them up, or startle them by abrupt untelegraphed movements. In contrast, while I have seen many people with poor dog manners (such as not presenting their hand to be sniffed or even people oblivious enough to attempt to pet a growling dog with teeth bared), people generally seem to make fewer mistakes, the dogs more clearly communicate with the humans, and the dogs tolerate the inevitable mistakes better (rather than running away or biting).

Apropos of vet visits & dogs vs cats, Kirk2019 investigated the long-standing disparity in spending on cats & dogs’ care & medicine, and in her survey experiments, found that the ‘willingness to pay’ for dogs but not cats is not because owners just like dogs qua dogs but the difference is mediated largely by a sense of control³³—which may sound bad (“human owners are power-mad narcissists!”) but makes perfect sense if we think about the point of this control. It would be irrational to try to take cats to the vet as often as a dog given that we can’t control them & the visit may be completely wasted. We need that control for their own good in a modern context.

So, ‘domesticated’ might not be the right word. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe cats as ‘half-domesticated’, or merely, ‘tame’. (I increasingly think of cats as acting like small children—with PTSD & autism, especially given how much vets restraining cats by ‘squishing’ them under a blanket looks like weighted blankets. Or would schizoid personality disorder work better?)

Bibliography

Relevant cites in rough order of appearance in Cat Sense:

• O’Brien & Johnson 2007_17ya, “The Evolution of Cats”

• Driscoll et al 2009_15ya, “The Taming of the Cat”

• Driscoll et al 2007_17ya, “The Near Eastern Origin of Cat Domestication”

• Cameron-Beaumont et al 2002_22ya, “Evidence Suggesting Preadaptation to Domestication throughout the Small Felidae”

• The Historical Library of Diodorus the Sicilian, Vol. 1, Chap. VI, trans. Booth1814

• Yurko 1990_34ya, “The Cat and Ancient Egypt”

• von den Driesch & Boessneck 1983_41ya, “A Roman Cat Skeleton from Quseir on the Red Sea Coast”

• Buckley et al 2004_20ya, “Complex Organic Chemical Balms of Pharaonic Animal Mummies”

• Armitage & Clutton-Brock 1981_43ya, “A Radiological and Histological Investigation into the Mummification of Cats from Ancient Egypt”

• Morrison-Scott 1952_72ya, “The Mummified Cats of Ancient Egypt”

• Detry et al 2011_13ya, “The Emirate of Córdoba (756–929 AD) and the Introduction of the Egyptian Mongoose (Herpestes ichneumon) in Iberia: The Remains from Muge, Portugal”

• Trut 1999_25ya, “Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment”

• “Pangur Ban”, translation by Eavan Boland

• O’Connor 2007_17ya, “Wild or Domestic? Biometric Variation in the Cat Felis silvestris Schreber”

• Todd 1977_47ya, “Cats and Commerce”

• Ruiz-García & Alvarez 2008_16ya, “A Biogeographical Population Genetics Perspective of the Colonization of Cats in Latin America and Temporal Genetic Changes in Brazilian Cat Populations”

• Ruiz-García 2000_24ya, “Is There Really Natural Selection Affecting the L Frequencies (Long Hair) in the Brazilian Cat Populations?” Zoran & Buffington 2011_13ya, “Effects of Nutrition Choices and Lifestyle Changes on the Well-being of Cats, a Carnivore that Has Moved Indoors”

• Davis 1939_85ya, “Results of the self-selection of diets by young children”

• Pozza et al 2008_16ya, “Pinch-induced Behavioral Inhibition (‘Clipnosis’) in Domestic Cats”

• Bradshaw & Hall 1999_25ya, “Affiliative Behavior of Related and Unrelated Pairs of Cats in Catteries: A Preliminary Report”

• Collard 1967_57ya, “Fear of Strangers and Play Behavior in Kittens with Varied Social Experience”

• Casey & Bradshaw 2008_16ya, “The Effects of Additional Socialisation for Kittens in a Rescue Centre on Their Behavior and Suitability as a Pet”

• McVea & Pearson 2007_17ya, “Stepping of the Forelegs over Obstacles Establishes Long-lasting Memories in Cats”

• Hughes et al 2010_14ya, “Predators Are Attracted to the Olfactory Signals of Prey”

• Salazar et al 1996_28ya, “The Vomeronasal Organ of the Cat”

• Pageat & Gaultier 2003_21ya, “Current Research in Canine and Feline Pheromones”

• Bravo et al 1988_36ya, “Cats See Subjective Contours”; Wilkinson 1986_38ya, “Visual Texture Segmentation in Cats”

• Hall et al 2002_22ya, [“Object Play in Adult Domestic Cats: The Roles of Habituation and Disinhibition”](#hall-et-al-2002}

• Grastyán & Vereczkei 1974_50ya, “Effects of Spatial Separation of the Conditioned Signal from the Reinforcement: A Demonstration of the Conditioned Character of the Orienting Response or the Orientational Character of Conditioning”

• Miklósi et al 2005_19ya, “A Comparative Study of the Use of Visual Communicative Signals in Interactions Between Dogs (Canis familiaris) and Humans and Cats (Felis catus) and Humans”

• Nicastro & Owren 2003_21ya, “Classification of Domestic Cat (Felis catus) Vocalizations by Naive and Experienced Human Listeners”

• Thorndike 1898_126ya, Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals, Chapter 2

• Seawright et al 2008_16ya, “A Case of Recurrent Feline Idiopathic Cystitis: The Control of Clinical Signs with Behavior Therapy”

• Chesler 1969_55ya, “Maternal Influence in Learning by Observation in Kittens”

• Herbert & Harsh 1944_80ya, “Observational Learning by Cats”

• Curtis et al 2003_21ya, “Influence of Familiarity and Relatedness on Proximity and Allogrooming in Domestic Cats (Felis catus)”; van den Bos 1998_26ya, “The Function of Allogrooming in Domestic Cats (Felis silvestris catus): A Study in a Group of Cats Living in Confinement”

• Say & Pontier 2004_20ya, “Spacing Pattern in a Social Group of Stray Cats: Effects on Male Reproductive Success”

• Carlstead et al 1992_32ya, “Urinary Monitoring of Adrenal Responses to Psychological Stressors in Domestic and Nondomestic Felids”

• “The late Penny Bernstein conducted a detailed study of stroking, details of which sadly remained unpublished when she died in 2012_12ya. For a summary, see Tracy Vogel’s ”Petting Your Cat—Something to Purr About”, and Bernstein’s own review, ”The Human-Cat Relationship”, in The Welfare of Cats, ed. Irene Rochlitz (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2005_19ya), 47–89”

• Soennichsen & Chamove 2002_22ya, “Responses of Cats”

• Nicastro 2004_20ya, “Perceptual and Acoustic Evidence for Species-level Differences in Meow Vocalizations by Domestic Cats (Felis catus) and African Wild Cats (Felis silvestris lybica)”

• Lipinski et al 2008_16ya, “The Ascent of Cat Breeds: Genetic Evaluations of Breeds and Worldwide Random-bred Populations”

• Braastad et al 1999_25ya, “Frequencies of Behavior Problems and Heritability of Behavior Traits in Breeds of Domestic Cat”; “The social bond between man and cat”, Sandem & Braastad1999

• Marchei et al 2011_13ya, “Breed Differences in Behavioral Response to Challenging Situations in Kittens”

• Ledger & O’Farrell 1996_28ya, “Factors Influencing the Reactions of Cats to Humans and Novel Objects”

• Geigy et al 2007_17ya, “Does a Pleiotropic Gene Explain Deafness and Blue Irises in White Cats?”

• McCune 1995_29ya, “The Impact of Paternity and Early Socialisation on the Development of Cats’ Behavior to People and Novel Objects”

• Lowe & Bradshaw 2002_22ya, “Responses of Pet Cats to Being Held by an Unfamiliar Person, from Weaning to Three Years of Age”

• Mellen 1992_32ya, “Effects of Early Rearing Experience on Subsequent Adult Sexual Behavior Using Domestic Cats (Felis catus) as a Model for Exotic Small Felids”

• “B. J. Karl and H. A. Best, ”Feral Cats on Stewart Island: Their Foods, and Their Effects on Kakapo”, New Zealand Journal of Zoology 9 (1982_42ya): 287–93. Despite this study, the cats on Stewart Island were subsequently exterminated, but (as predicted from the study) the kakapo continued to decline, and eventually scientists moved all the survivors to another, predator-free island.”

• Lilith et al 2010_14ya, “Do Cat Restrictions Lead to Increased Species Diversity or Abundance of Small and Medium-sized Mammals in Remnant Urban Bushland?”

• Fair 2010_14ya, “The Hunter of Suburbia”

• Loss et al 2013_11ya, “The Impact of Free-ranging Domestic Cats on Wildlife of the United States”

• Baker et al 2008_16ya, “Cats about Town: Is Predation by Free-ranging Pet Cats Felis catus Likely to Affect Urban Bird Populations?”

• Møller & Ibáñez-Álamo 2012_12ya, “Escape Behavior of Birds Provides Evidence of Predation Being Involved in Urbanization”

• Childs 1986_38ya, “Size-dependent Predation on Rats (Rattus norvegicus) by House Cats (Felis catus) in an Urban Setting”

• The Governing Council of the Cat Fancy 2012_12ya, “The Story of the Ragamuffin Cat”

• Connolly 2003_21ya, “Bengals as Pets”

• Saulny 2004_20ya, “What’s Up, Pussycat? Whoa!”

• Bradshaw et al 1999_25ya, “Feral Cats: Their Role in the Population Dynamics of Felis catus”

• Allaby & Crawford 1982_42ya, The Curious Cat

• Smithers 1968_56ya, “Cat of the Pharaohs: The African Wild Cat from Past to Present” (account of raising pet African wild cats)

• The Domestic Cat: The Biology of Its Behavior, 2^nd ed, ed Turner & Bateson 2000_24ya (ISBN: 0-521-63648-5)

  • chapter 4, “Individuality in the Domestic Cat: Origins, Development and Stability”, Mendl & Harcourt2000

  • chapter 5, “The Signaling Repertoire of the Domestic Cat and Its Undomesticated Relatives”, Bradshaw & Cameron-Beaumont2000

  • chapter 7, “Density, spatial organisation and reproductive tactics in the domestic cat and other felids”, Liberg et al 2000

  • chapter 10, “The human-cat relationship”, Turner & Karsh2000

• The Behavior of the Domestic Cat, 2^nd ed, Bradshaw et al 2012_12ya (ISBN: 1780641206)

  • chapter 3, “Mechanisms of Behavior”

  • chapter 8, “Social Behavior”

  • chapter 11, “Undesired Behavior in the Domestic Cat”

  • chapter 12, “Physiological and Pathological Causes of Behavioral Change”

Further reading:

• McComb et al 2009_15ya, “The cry embedded within the purr”

• Delgado & Hecht2019, “A Review of the Development and Functions of Cat Play, and Future Research Considerations”

• Dawson et al 2019b, “Humans can identify cats’ affective states from subtle facial expressions” (they can, but most are quite bad at it; demo quiz); “Facial expressions of pain in cats: the development and validation of a Feline Grimace Scale”, Evangelista et al 2019; “Evolution of facial muscle anatomy in dogs”, Kaminski et al 2019 (easier with dogs because of selection for facial expressive capability?)

• Humphrey et al 2020, “The role of cat eye narrowing movements in cat-human communication”

• Fugazza et al 2020, “Did we find a copycat? ‘Do as I Do’ in a domestic cat (Felis catus)”; “Assessing cats’ (Felis catus) sensitivity to human pointing gestures”, Maeses & Wascher2022

• Krajcarz et al 2020, “Ancestors of domestic cats in Neolithic Central Europe: Isotopic evidence of a synanthropic diet”

• Camara et al 2020, “The daytime feeding frequency affects appetite-regulating hormones, amino acids, physical activity, and respiratory quotient, but not energy expenditure, in adult cats fed regimens for 21 days”

External Links

• “Cats rival dogs on many tests of social smarts. But is anyone brave enough to study them?”; “Attachment bonds between domestic cats and humans”, Vitale et al 2019; “The Family Dog Is in Sync With Your Kids: Dogs orient and move in synchrony with family members, which may have implications for the emotional development of people and pets”

• “How to stroke a cat, according to science”

• “The Story of My Cats”, Jean-Henri Fabre 1914

• “How Dogs Are Helping Cheetahs”

• “22 priceless photos of cats trying to hide from the vet” (not actually amusing)

• “Audiogenic reflex seizures in cats”, Lowrie et al 2016 (troubling)

• “Where there are girls, there are cats”, Li et al 2020

• “Against Dog Ownership”, Matt Lakeman

• “The hidden reason processed pet foods are so addictive: From potently smelly additives to offal concentrates, pet food companies turn to some surprising ingredients in the quest to make kibble delicious”

• “Does Your Cat’s Butthole Really Touch All The Surfaces In Your Home?”, Henry2021 (thankfully, no)

• “Gourmand Cat Fence” (Raspberry Pi for water spray to keep cat away from eating plants & barfing)

• “Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think” (on amateur experiments in cat/dog language capabilities)

• Discussion: Reddit

Appendix

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