The Beginning
Where to start?
When I meet new people, I often struggle to make conversation. I’m not good at small talk. But you know what I am good at? I am a bastion of ridiculous fun facts. Did you know that sloths have evolved unique internal adhesions to effectively tape their organs to their rib cages, so they don’t suffocate under the weight of their own lungs hanging upside down? It’s a great conversation starter. Everyone loves sloths, right?
Okay, maybe not everyone. But I’ve spent enough time on the internet to know that just about everyone loves cats. I myself love a good cat video, but I never considered myself a cat person until a roommate got one. Now I have my own cat — a delightful little rescue boi named Vesper — and I’ll happily share photos and video of him doing weird cat things and then word vomit the increasing pile of cat facts ready to topple out of my brain at any given time. When cats walk, they always place their back foot in the exact place their front foot was. You’ve probably heard that when house cats bring you a mouse or a cotton ball or a catnip pie (Vesper’s current favorite) they’re really telling you they think of you as a weird overgrown kitten and they have to teach you to hunt. To be clear, this may or may not be true, and I genuinely believe that when we finally crack the code to ask our pets questions and get real answers in our native languages cats will lie to us about half the time, just enough so we never know what they’re really thinking. But what we do know for sure is that cats don’t really meow to each other, it’s essentially a kitten language that they adapted to speak to their humans.
Now, this is where the story gets really interesting to me. See, cats are not really domesticated in the way that dogs and horses are. Yes, there has been a degree of selective breeding for looks and personality in the last couple centuries, but that’s a drop in the bucket in terms of evolutionary change. That kitty sleeping on your armchair is not so far removed from the little wild cats that snuck into our silos at the dawn of the agricultural age. Much like wolves were drawn to our fires because we had food, cats found their midnight snacks attempting to eat through our hard-earned grain. Keeping these animals around us was mutually beneficial. With canines, we developed an active partnership, hunting and guarding. But with feline, we had already adopted a more sedentary lifestyle. We didn’t need to take them out with us, we just needed to let them do their own thing, and we would let them make use of our shelters for their work mousing. Or rather, they just needed us to do our thing, collecting more grain than we could ever possibly use (more on that in an upcoming post), attracting the mice and rats and making their hunting that much easier. Neither of us needed to change our behaviors for the other. Until, of course, we began sharing our spaces more intimately. Even when we brought our cats into our homes though, it was our behavior that adjusted more than theirs. We cater to their wild instincts, encouraging them to hunt feathers on strings and red laser pointers. We let them dig and hide to do their business inside. We set up scratching posts, cat trees, and ledges for them to sit on so they can observe. Look at a photo of a leopard in a tree or snow leopard on a cliff and tell me it doesn’t look just like a house cat lounging on the arm of your couch.
Which really just makes the time they spend climbing into our laps and asking for pets that much more special, doesn’t it?
