Top Quotes: “Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet” — John Bradshaw

Introduction

“The domestic cat is the most popular per in the world today. Across the globe, domestic cats outnumber “man’s best friend,” the dog, by as many as three to one. As more of us have come to live in cities — environments for which dogs are not ideally suited — cats have, for many, become the lifestyle pet of choice, About one-third of US households have one or more cats, and they are found in more than a quarter of UK families.”

“The cartoon cat “Hello Kitty” has appeared on more than 50,000 different branded products in more than sixty countries, netting her creators billions of dollars in royalties.”

“The dog’s mind has been radically altered from that of its ancestor, the gray wolf; cats, on the other hand, still think like wild hunters. Within a couple of generations, cats can revert back to the independent way of life that was the exclusive preserve of their predecessors some ten thousand years ago. Even today, many millions of cats worldwide are not pets but feral scavengers and hunters, living alongside people but inherently distrustful of them.”

“Cat-phobics were likely at the forefront of the religious persecution that led to the killing of millions of cats in medieval Europe.”

“In parts of Australia and New Zealand, cats are defined as “alien” predators introduced from the Northern hemisphere, and are banned from some areas and subject to curfews or compulsory microchipping in others.”

“Insofar as they are concerned, the greatest threat to their subjective wellbeing comes not from people, but instead from other cats. In the same way that cats are not born to love people — this is something they have to learn when they are kittens — they do not automatically love other cats; indeed, their default position is to be suspicious, even fearful, of every cat they meet. Unlike the highly sociable wolves that were forebears to modern dogs, the ancestors of cats were both solitary and territorial. As cats began their association with humankind some 10,000 years ago, their tolerance for one another must have been forced to improve so that they could live at the higher densities that man’s provision of food for them — at first accidental, then deliberate — allowed.

Cats have yet to evolve the optimistic enthusiasm for contact with their own kind that characterizes dogs. As a result, many cats spend their lives trying to avoid contact with one another. All the while, their owners inadvertently compel them to live with cats they have no reason to trust — whether the neighbors’ cats, or the second cat obtained by the owner to “keep him company.” As their popularity increases, so inevitably does the number of cats that each cat is forced into contact with, thereby increasing the tensions that each experiences. Finding it ever harder to avoid social conflict, many cats find it nearly impossible to relax; the stress they experience affects their behavior and even their health.”

“The first role for cats in human society was that of pest controller; some 10,000 years ago, wild cats moved in to exploit the concentrations of rodents provided by our first granaries, and adapted themselves to hunting there in preference to the surrounding countryside. Realizing how beneficial this was — cats, after all, had no interest in eating grain and plant foods themselves — people must have begun to encourage cats to stay by making available their occasional surpluses of animal products, such as milk and offal. The cats’ second role, which undoubtedly followed hard on the heels of the first but whose origins are lost in antiquity, is that of companion. The first good evidence that we have for pet cats comes from Egypt some 4,000 years ago, but women and children in particular may have adopted kittens as pets long before this.”

“Unlike dogs, only a small minority of cats has ever been intentionally bred by people — and furthermore, when there has been deliberate breeding, it has been exclusively for appearance. No one has bred cats to guard houses, to herd livestock, or to accompany or assist hunters.”

“The friendliest, most docile cats are nowadays neutered before leaving any descendants, while the wildest, meanest ferals are likely to escape the attention of cat rescuers and breed at will, thus pushing the cat’s evolution away from, rather than toward, better integration with human society.”

Origins

“Conventional accounts of the domestication of the cat, based on archaeological and historical records, propose that they first lived in human homes in Egypt about 3,500 years ago. This theory, however, has recently been challenged by new evidence coming from the field of molecular biology. We can safely discount the earliest date in this range — anything earlier than about 15,000 years ago makes little sense in terms of the evolution of our own species, since it is unlikely that stone-age hunter-gatherers would have had the need or resources to keep cats. The minimum estimate, 10,000 years, presumes that domestic cats are derived from several wild ancestors that came from several different locations in the Middle East. In other words, the domestication of the cat happened in several widely separated places, either roughly contemporaneously or over a longer period of time. Even if we assume that cats started to become domesticated around 8,000 years BCE, this leaves us with a 6,500-year interval before the first historical records of domestic cats appear in Egypt. So far, few scientists of any kind have studied this first — and longest — phase in the partnership between human and cat.”

“By 8,000 BCE, humankind’s relationship with the domestic dog had already progressed to the extent that dogs were routinely buried alongside their masters in several parts of Asia, Europe, and North America, whereas burials of cats first became common in Egypt around 1,000 BCE. If cats were indeed domesticated pets during this time, we should have far more tangible evidence of that relationship than has been uncovered.

Our best clues on how the partnership between man and cat began come not from the Fertile Crescent, but instead from Cyprus. Cyprus is one of the few Mediterranean islands that have never been joined to the mainland, even when that sea was at its lowest level. Consequently, its animal population has had to migrate there by flying or swimming that is, until humans started to travel there in primitive boats some 12,000 years ago. At that point, the Eastern Mediterranean had no domesticated animals, with the likely exception of some early dogs, so the animals that made the crossing with those first human settlers must have been either individually tamed wild animals or inadvertent hitchhikers. Therefore, while we cannot possibly tell whether ancient remains of cats on the mainland are from wild, tame, or domesticated animals, cats could clearly have reached Cyprus only by being deliberately transported there by humans — assuming, as we safely may, that cats of that era were as averse to swimming in the ocean as today’s cats are. Any remains of cats found there must be those of semidomesticated or at least captive animals, or their descendants.

On Cyprus, the earliest remains of cats coincide with and are found within the first permanent human settlements, some 7,500 years BCE, making it highly likely that they were deliberately transported there. Cats are too large and conspicuous to have been accidentally transported across the Mediterranean in the small boats of the time: we know very little about seagoing boats from that period, but they were likely too small to conceal a stowaway cat. Moreover, we have no evidence for cats living away from human habitations on Cyprus for another 3,000 years. The most likely scenario, then, is that the earliest settlers of Cyprus brought with them wildcats that they had captured and tamed on the mainland. It is implausible that they were the only people to have thought of taming wildcats, so capturing cats and taming them were likely already an established practice in the Eastern Mediterranean. Confirming this, we also have evidence for prehistoric importations of tamed cats to other large Mediterranean islands, such as Crete, Sardinia, and Majorca.

The most likely reason for taming wildcats is also evident from the first settlements on Cyprus. Right from the outset, these habitations, like their counterparts of the time on the mainland, became infested by house mice. Presumably these unwanted mice were stowaways, accidentally transported across the Mediterranean in sacks of food or seed corn. The most likely scenario, therefore, is that as soon as mice became established on Cyprus, the colonizers imported tame or semidomesticated cats to keep them under control. This might have been ten years or a hundred years after the first settlements were established — the archaeological record cannot reveal such small differences. If this is correct, it suggests that the practice of taming cats to control mice was already entrenched on the mainland as long as 10,000 years ago.”

“The first culture to be bedeviled by house mice was that of the Natufians, who by extension are the people most likely to have initiated the cat’s long journey into our homes. The Natufians inhabited the area that now comprises Israel-Palestine, Jordan, southwestern Syria, and southern Lebanon from about 11,000 to 8,000 BCE. Widely regarded as the inventors of agriculture, they were initially hunter-gatherers like other inhabitants of the region; soon, however, they began to specialize in harvesting the wild cereals that grew abundantly all around them, in a region that was significantly more productive then than it is today.”

“10,000 years ago several species lived in the region, all of which would have been attracted by concentrations of mice. We know that later on, the ancient Egyptians kept tame jungle cats, Felis chaus, in considerable numbers; jungle cats, though, are substantially heavier than wildcats, weighing between ten and twenty pounds, and large enough to kill young gazelle and chital. Although their normal diet includes rodents, they may have been too obtrusive to get regular access to granaries. Alternatively, they may simply have been temperamentally unsuited to living alongside man, We do have evidence that the Egyptians tried to tame and even train them as rodent controllers, but apparently without any lasting success.”

“Every member of the cat family, from the noble lion to the tiny black-footed cat, can trace its ancestry back to a medium-sized catlike animal, Pseudaelurus, that roamed the steppes of central Asia some 11 million years ago. Pseudaelurus eventually went extinct, but not before unusually low sea levels had allowed it to migrate across what is now the Red Sea into Af-rica, where it evolved into several medium-sized cats, including those we know today as the caracal and the serval. Other Pseudaelurus traveled east across the Bering land bridge into North America, where they eventually evolved into the bobcat, lynx, and puma. Some 2 to 3 million years ago, following the formation of the Panama isthmus, the first cats crossed into South America; here they evolved in isolation, forming several species not found anywhere else, including the ocelot and Geoffroy’s cat. The big cats — lions, tigers, jaguars, and leopards — evolved in Asia and then spread into both Europe and North America, their present-day distributions but a tiny relict of where they used to roam a few million years ago. Remarkably, the distant ancestors of today’s domestic cats seem to have evolved in North America about 8 million years ago, and then migrated back into Asia some 2 million years later. About 3 million years ago, these began to evolve into the species we know today, including the wildcat, the sand cat, and the jungle cat; a separate Asian lineage, including Pallas’s cat and the fishing cat, also began to diverge at about this time.”

“Out of all these various wild cats, only one was successfully domesticated. This honor goes to the Arabian wildcat Felis silvestris lybica, as confirmed by their DNA.”

“The wildcat Felis silvestris is currently found throughout Europe, Africa, and central Asia, as well as western Asia, the area where it probably first evolved. Like many predators, such as the wolf, it is now found only in isolated and generally remote areas where it can avoid persecution from man. This has not always been the case. Five thousand years ago, wildcats were evidently regarded as delicacies in some areas; the rubbish pits left by the “lake dwellers” of Germany and Switzerland contain many wildcat bones. The cats must have been abundant at the time; otherwise, they could hardly have been trapped in such large numbers. Over the centuries they became less common, displaced by the felling of their forest habitat for agriculture, and forced farther into the woods by development and loss of habitat. The invention of firearms led to wildcats being hunted to extinction in many areas. During the nineteenth century, various European countries, including the UK, Germany, and Switzerland, classified them as vermin, due to the harm they supposedly caused both wildlife and livestock. Only recently, due to the establishment of wildlife reserves and a more informed attitude to the important role that predators play in stabilizing ecosystems, are wildcats returning to areas such as Bavaria, where they have not been seen for hundreds of years.

The wildcat is now divided into four subspecies or races. These are the European forest cat Felis silvestris silvestris, the Arabian wildcat Felis silvestris lybica, the Southern African wildcat Felis silvestris cafra, and the Indian desert cat Felis silvestris ornata. All these cats are rather similar in appearance, and all are capable of interbreeding where their ranges overlap. A possible fifth subspecies is the very rare Chinese desert cat Felis bieti, which according to its DNA split off from the main wildcat lineage about a quarter of a million years ago. It’s possible that these cats actually form a separate species, as no hybrids are known to exist, but they live in such a small and inaccessible region — part of the Chinese province of Sichuan — that this may be due to lack of opportunity rather than physical impossibility.

Wildcats from different parts of the world differ markedly in how easily they can be tamed. Domestication, moreover, can start only with animals that are already tame enough to raise their young in the proximity of people. Those offspring that are best suited to the company of humans and human environments are, perhaps unsurprisingly, more likely to stay and breed there than those that are not; the latter will most likely revert to the wild. Over several generations, this repeated “natural” selection will, even on its own, gradually change the genetic makeup of these animals so that they become better adapted to life alongside people. It is also likely that, at the same time, humans will intensify that selection, by feeding the more docile animals and driving away those prone to bite and scratch. This process cannot start without some genetic basis for tameness existing beforehand, and in the case of wildcats, this is far from evenly distributed. Today, some parts of the world have little raw material for domestication, while others seem more promising.”

“The extent of hybridization between wildcats and domestic cats in South Africa and Namibia was recently revealed by DNA sequences from twenty-four supposed wildcats, eight of which bore the telltale signs of partial descent from domestic cats. In a survey of zoos in the United States, the UK, and the Republic of South Africa, I found that ten out of twelve South African wildcats displayed affectionate behavior toward their keepers, and of these, two would regularly rub and lick them. This kind of behavior strongly suggests that the latter were hybrids, while those that could not be handled at all were probably genuine wildcats. The eight that were moderately affectionate might have been either.”

“The Egyptians seem to have been extremely protective of cats, in ways that may seem absurd to us today. Herodotus reported that when a pet cat died from natural causes, all members of the household shaved their eyebrows as a mark of respect. He even reported seeing Egyptians struggling to prevent cats from entering a burning building in preference to putting out the fire itself.”

“For a female cat to be orange, it must carry the orange mutation on both chromosomes. If it has only one, it will have a tortoiseshell coat. Although tortoiseshells are much more common, ginger cats can be female. Almost without exception, males are either orange, or they’re not; in fact, tortoiseshell males do crop up from time to time — they have two X chromosomes and a Y chromosome, the result of an abnormal cell division.”

“The mummified cats were also 10 percent larger than African wildcats are today. It may be that the Egyptians deliberately favored large wildcats because they were more effective rodent controllers, and that domestic cats have subsequently become smaller as they gradually transformed from full-time pest controllers into pets.”

“In Hedeby, Germany, cats of the ninth through eleventh centuries were roughly the same size as they are today, but in Schleswig, also in Germany, some of the cats recovered from eleventh-through fourteenth-century remains were tiny. A staggering and unexplained 70-percent reduction in bone lengths seems to have occurred between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries: many of the cats found in Schleswig, which seem to have left no descendants, would look tiny compared to a typical twenty-first-century cat. We might be tempted to ascribe this miniaturization to the persecution that began in the fourteenth century, but we have no direct evidence that this was the case; indeed, the reduction in size in England predates the Papal proclamation. As such, the cause of these shifts toward smaller cats remains a mystery, and we do not know when cats grew larger again.”

“In the Northeastern United States — New York, Philadelphia, and Boston — settled in by Europeans in the 1650s, only about 45 percent of cats carry the blotched tabby gene, but this is considerably more than in originally Spanish-settled areas, such as Texas, at around 30 percent — where cats look much like those in Spain today.”

“In temperate climates, the main disadvantage of long hair is not that the cat overheats, but that its coat easily becomes matted, which, if left unattended, leads to infection or infestation of the skin. Long-haired cats are rarely seen in feral colonies, testifying to their unsuitability for a life without attention from humans.

The striped tabby pattern evidently suits wildcats the best, possibly because it provides the most effective camouflage for hunting. Presumably, mutations that affect appearance have occurred from time to time, but the wildcats that happened to carry them fared worse than their “normal” counterparts, so the mutation quickly died out. For a domestic cat, camouflage is probably less critical, allowing other coat colors to spread through the population.”

“In 1233, the Catholic Church began a concerted attempt to exterminate cats from continental Europe. On June 13 of that year, Pope Gregory IX’s notorious Vox in Rama was published In this papal Bull, cats- especially black cats — were identified specifically with Satan. Over the next 300 years, millions of cats were tortured and killed, along with hundreds of thousands of their mainly female owners, who were suspected of witchcraft. Urban populations of cats were decimated.”

Diet

“At some point many millions of years ago, the ancestral cat became such a specialized meat-eater that it lost the ability to live on plants: it became a “hypercarnivore.” Once lost, such capabilities rarely re-evolve. Domestic cats might have been more successful if they could have gotten by, as dogs can, living on scraps, but they are stuck firmly in the nutritional dead end their ancestors bequeathed to them.

Cats require far more protein in their diet than dogs or humans do, because they get most of their energy not from carbohydrates but from protein. Other animals, faced with a shortage of protein in the diet, can channel all the protein they do get into maintaining and repairing their bodies, but cats cannot. Cats also need particular types of protein, especially those that contain the amino acid taurine, a component that occurs naturally in humans, but not in cats.

Cats can digest and metabolize fats, some of which must come from animal sources so that the cat can use them to make prostaglandins, a type of hormone essential for successful reproduction. Most other mammals can make prostaglandins from plant oils, but cats cannot. Female cats must get enough animal fat during the winter to be ready for their normal reproductive cycle, mating in late winter and giving birth in the spring.

Cats’ vitamin requirements are also more stringent than ours. They need vitamin A in their diet (if need be, we can make ours from plant sources), sunshine doesn’t stimulate their skin to make vitamin D as ours does, and they need lots of the B vitamins niacin and thiamine. None of this is a problem if the cat can get plenty of meat although raw fish, which contains an enzyme that destroys thiamine, can cause a deficiency if eaten in excess. It is slightly possible to construct a vegetarian diet for cats, but only if every single one of the cat’s nutritional peculiarities are carefully compensated for.

Their taste buds also differ substantially from our own, having evolved to focus better on an all-meat diet. They cannot taste sugars; instead, they are much more sensitive than we are to how “sweet” some kinds of flesh are, compared to others, which they find bitter.

Cats do have two notable nutritional advantages over humans. First, their kidneys are very efficient, as expected for an animal whose ancestors lived on the edge of deserts, and many cats drink little water, getting all the moisture they need from the meat they eat. Second, cats do not require vitamin C. Taken together, these make cats well suited to shipboard life.”

“These cats demonstrated a primitive “nutritional wisdom,” as if they assumed that eating a variety of food was more likely to produce a balanced diet than simply eating the food that was easiest to find.”

Development

“Unlike much infantile behavior, in some cats the “scruff” reflex mother cats use when carrying their kittens persists into adulthood. For those individuals, scruffing can be used as a gentle and humane method of quieting a fearful cat. The cat is simply grasped firmly by the skin on the back of its neck and, if the reflex is triggered, may go into what appears to be a trance, enabling it to be picked up and carried; its weight must be supported by the other hand. Veterinary nurses sometimes use a hands-free version, applying a line of several clothespins to the area of skin between the top of the head and the shoulders. By doing so, the nurses can complete an examination of the cat without causing it too much stress.”

“Kittens are likely born with a template as to what another kitten looks like, but this is easily overwritten if there are no other kittens available. Thus, a kitten raised in a litter of puppies accepts the puppies as its littermates, and does not appear to “know” that it itself is a kitten. However, if a puppy is introduced into a litter of kittens, even though they are perfectly friendly toward the puppy, the kittens still prefer one another’s company.”

“Introducing a kitten to a wide variety of people before the age of eight weeks seems to produce an approachable cat. Doing so seems to block the development of a strong attachment to one person, and instead builds a general picture of the human race in the cat’s mind. Whether (say) three categories — men, women, children — develop simultaneously, or whether kittens learn to place all humans in a single category is unknown, but the end result is self-evident: a cat that is not fearful of humans.

Kittens need a lot of daily exposure to people to become optimally socialized to them. In one study, fifteen minutes handling each day produced a kitten that would approach people, but not as enthusiastically as a kitten that had been handled for forty minutes per day. Likewise, the fifteen-minute kitten would not stay on a lap for as long as the forty-minute kitten.”

“The cat’s social brain changes suddenly at about eight weeks of age, and altering its basic social inclinations after that is usually impossible.

The general rule is, once a feral, always a feral — unless it experiences severe physical and mental trauma, such as being hit by a motor vehicle. Occasionally, some kindhearted soul will take a feral cat that has been the victim of an accident to a veterinarian. Many such cats are beyond saving, but those that cheat death and are nursed slowly back to health can go through an unexpected change in personality; they become attached to whoever has looked after them the most, in a manner reminiscent of a hand-raised kitten. Researchers have recorded similar changes in cats that have suffered severe and protracted fevers. Apparently, the deluge of stress hormones released in a cat that is close to death can scramble the brain enough to go through the socialization process all over again.”

Senses

“Cats also show little interest in color, among mammals, color seems a uniquely primate, especially human, obsession. Like dops, cats have only two types of cones and see only two colors, blue and yellow; in humans, we call this red-green color blindness. To cats, both red and green probably look grayish. Moreover, even colors they can distinguish seem to be of little relevance to them.Their brains contain only a few nerves dedicated to color comparisons, and it is difficult to train cats to distinguish between blue and yellow objects. Any other difference between objects — brightness, pattern, shape, or size — seems to matter more to cats than does color.”

“The cat’s hearing range extends two octaves higher than ours, into the region that — because we can’t hear it — we refer to as ultrasound. This extended range enables cats to hear the ultrasonic pulses bats use to orient themselves while flying in the dark, and the high-pitched squeaks of mice and other small rodents.”

“Cats’ hearing is superior to ours in many ways, but inferior in one respect: the ability to distinguish minor differences between sounds, both in pitch and intensity. If it was possible to train a cat to sing, it couldn’t sing in tune (bad news for Andrew Lloyd Webber). Human ears are outstanding at telling similar sounds apart, probably an adaptation to our use of speech to communicate, and, within that, our ability to recognize subtle intricacies of intonation that indicate the emotional content of what we are hearing — even when the speaker is trying to disguise his or her voice. Such subtleties are probably lost on cats, although they do seem to prefer us to talk to them in a high-pitched voice. Perhaps gruff male voices remind them of the rumbling growl of an angry tomcat.”

“As with hearing, the cat’s sense of touch features refinements that help with hunting. Cats’ paws are exceptionally sensitive, which explains why many cats don’t like having their feet handled. Not only are a cat’s pads packed with receptors that tell it what is beneath or between its paws, but the claws are also packed with nerve endings that enable the cat to know both how far each claw has been extended and how much resistance it is experiencing. Since wild cats generally first catch their prey with their forepaws before biting, their pads and claws must provide essential clues on the efforts the prey is making to escape.”

“The cat’s whiskers are basically modified hairs, but where the whiskers attach to the skin around the muzzle they are equipped with receptors that tell the cat how far each whisker is being bent back, and how quickly. Although cat’s whiskers are not as mobile as a rat’s, a cat can sweep its whiskers both forward, compensating for longsightedness when pouncing, and backward, to prevent the whiskers from being damaged in a fight. Cats also have tufts of stiffened hairs just above the eyes, triggering the blink reflex if the eyes are threatened, and on the sides of the head and near the ankles. All of these, in tandem with the whiskers, enable cats to judge the width of openings they can squeeze through.”

“When walking from place to place, cats pay close attention to where they are going. Because of their poor close vision, they have little reason to look down at their front feet, so instead they look three or four paces ahead and briefly memorize the terrain in front, allowing them to step over any obstacles in their path. Scientists have recently determined that if a cat is distracted with a dish of tasty food while walking, it forgets what the ground in its path looks like and has to have another look before setting off again. In the experiment, researchers switched off overhead lights while the cat was distracted into looking to one side; it then had to feel its way gingerly forward, indicating that its view of the path had vanished from its short-term memory. However if the cat was distracted after it had stepped over an obstacle with its front paws, and while the obstacle was right under its belly, it remembered that it should lift its hind paws when it started walking again, even after a ten-minute delay and even if the obstacle, unbeknown to the cat, had been moved out of the way. Somehow the visual memory of the obstacle is converted from ephemeral to long-lasting by the simple act of stepping over it with the front feet.

A cat’s gravity-detecting system is most impressive when it either jumps voluntarily or accidentally slips and falls. Less than a tenth of a second after all four feet lose contact with a surface, the balance organs sense which way up the head is, and reflexes cause the neck to rotate so that the cat can then look downward toward where it will land. Other reflexes cause first the forelegs and then hind legs to rotate to point downward. All this happens in thin air, with nothing for the cat to push on. While the front legs are being rotated, they tuck up to reduce their inertia, while the back legs remain extended; then the front legs are extended while the back legs are briefly tucked up. Ice skaters use the same principle to speed up spins, simply by retracting their arms and the spare leg. The cat also briefly curves its flexible back away from its feet as it rotates, which helps to prevent the twist at the back end cancelling out the twist at the front. Many cats also counter-rotate their tails to stabilize their fall. Finally, all four legs extend in preparation for landing, while the back is arched to cushion the impact.

While this intricate midair ballet is happening, the cat could have already fallen as far as ten feet. As such, it’s possible for a short fall to injure the cat as much as, and possibly more than, a longer fall, if there is insufficient time for the cat to prepare itself for landing. If a cat falls out of a high-rise building or a tall tree, it has another trick available: forming a “parachute” by spreading all four legs out sideways, before adopting the landing position at the last minute. Laboratory simulations suggest that this limits the falling speed to a maximum of fifty-three miles per hour. This tactic apparently allows some cats to survive falls from high buildings with only minor injuries.”

“Scientists do not yet understand why cats respond to catnip, a traditional constituent of cat toys. Not all cats respond to it. A single gene governs whether or not the cat responds, and in many cats, perhaps as many as one in three, both copies of this gene are defective, with no apparent effect on behavior or general health.”

“The behavior released by catnip is a bizarre mixture of play, feeding, and female sexual behavior, whether the cat itself is male or female. Cats may first play with a catnip toy as if they think it is a small item of prey, but they quickly switch into bouts of a seemingly ecstatic combination of face-rubbing and body-rolling, reminiscent of a female cat in season. Most cats also drool and attempt to lick the catnip. This behavior may continue for several minutes at a time, until the cat eventually recovers and walks away but if the toy is left where it is, the cat may repeat the whole sequence, albeit with less intensity, twenty or thirty minutes later.”

“[When] cats get stuck up trees, the problem is not their intelligence or their sense of balance, but rather that their claws all face forward, so they cannot be used as brakes when descending.”

Toys

“Our findings showed that, unsurprisingly, they like mouse-sized toys that are furry, feathered, or multi-legged toy spiders, for example. Even indoor cats that had never hunted showed these preferences, so they must be hardwired in the cat’s brain. The cats played with rat-sized toys covered in fake fur in a subtly different way from the mouse-sized toys. Instead of holding them in their front paws and biting them, most cats would hold the rat-sized toys at arm’s length and rake them with their hind claws just as hunting cats do with real rats. The cats were apparently thinking of their toys as if they were real animals.”

“As a hunting cat gets hungrier, it will hunt more intensely and become more inclined to take on larger prey than usual. We found exactly the latter when we offered toys to our cats. If their first meal of the day had been delayed, they played more intensely than usual with a mouse-sized toy — for example, biting it more frequently. Moreover, many of the cats that normally refused to play with a rat-sized toy at all were now prepared to attack it. This convinced us that adult cats do think that they are hunting when they’re playing with toys.

Cats don’t easily get “bored” with hunting, so we were still puzzled as to why our cats stopped playing with most toys so quickly. Indeed, they appeared to get “bored” with most commercially available toys and with the kinds of toys we made for our first experiments. The few toys that sustained our cats’ interest all shared one quality: they fell apart as the cat was playing with them. Although we had to abandon experiments that involved these toys, which came apart at the seams as our cats batted them about, we noticed that several of the cats were extremely reluctant to give them up. We then realized that our original swapping experiments mimicked one aspect of what happens when a cat rips a toy apart: when we exchanged the toy for a slightly different one, the cat’s senses told it that the toy had changed. It didn’t seem to matter to the cat that it had not caused the change itself; what was important was that a change seemed to have occurred.”

“The fourth mechanism is the source of the cat’s apparent frustration: if all that biting and clawing doesn’t seem to have any effect on its target, then either the target wasn’t a meal, or if it is prey, then it’s proving difficult to subdue. A toy that starts to disintegrate, or is taken away but looks different when it comes back (as in our original experiment), mimics the early stages of a kill, thus encouraging the cat to persist.”

Training

“Fundamentally, cats learn the same way as dogs, even though dogs are self-evidently much easier to train. Two factors lie behind this difference between cats and dogs. First, most cats do not find human attention rewarding in its own right, whereas dogs do; we therefore train cats using food as a reward, rather than affection. Second, dogs instinctively behave in ways we can easily shape into something useful: for example, the herding behavior of a sheepdog is composed of elements from the hunting behavior of the wolf, the dog’s ancestor. Cat behavior features little that we can usefully refine by training.”

“This simple learning has one major constraint: the events that a cat associates together must occur either at precisely the same moment or no more than a second or two apart. Say a cat has done something that its owner doesn’t like — for example, depositing a dead mouse on the floor. The cat’s owner finds the mouse several minutes after the cat has left it there and shouts at the cat. In this case, classical conditioning does not link the two events together: rather, it links the unpleasantness of being shouted at with whatever happened immediately before the shout — probably the owner’s arrival in the room.”

“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.

Cats can also learn spontaneously, when there is no obvious reward or penalty involved. This becomes especially useful when they are building up a mental map of their surroundings. A cat will learn that a particular shrub it passes every day has a particular smell. If the cat sees a similar shrub elsewhere, it will expect that shrub to have the same odor as the first one. If it turns out not to — perhaps because an unfamiliar animal has scent-marked it — the cat will give it an especially thorough inspection. Such “behaviorally silent” learning can be explained by classical Pavlovian learning — that is, if the cat spontaneously feels rewarded by the information it has gained. In other words, cats are programmed to enjoy their explorations; otherwise, they wouldn’t learn anything from them.

This kind of learning allows cats to relax in what must be, for them, the highly artificial indoor environments we provide for them. Domesticated cats are happy once they have been able to set up a complete set of associations between what each feature of that environment looks, sounds, and smells like. This explains why cats immediately pay attention to anything that changes — move a piece of furniture from one side of the room to the other, and your cat, finding that its predictable set of associations have been broken, will feel compelled to inspect it carefully before it can settle down again. To cope with such changes, cats can gradually unlearn assocations that no longer work, a process known technically as extinction.”

“Domestic dogs have evolved to be exceptionally observant of what people want from them, because virtually every use that humankind has ever had for them has favored dogs that could interpret human behavior from those that could not. Cats are surprisingly good at following simple pointing gestures, but when they encounter a problem they cannot solve, they tend not to look to their owners for help — something that dogs automatically do.”

“Like most animals (with the notable exception of dogs), cats can be trained only with food rewards. However, delivering the reward to the cat at exactly the right moment to reinforce the desired piece of behavior can be tricky, also, the cat may be distracted from what it is supposed to be leaming by the smell af the food “concealed” in the trainer’s hand. Cats can be trained much more easily if a secondary reinforcer is used — a distinctive cue that signals to the cat that a piece of food is on its way, and instantly making it feel good, thereby reinforcing the performance of whatever it was doing when the cue appeared.

Although in principle almost anything could be used as a secondary reinforcer, in practice distinctive sounds are the most convenient and practical, partly because they can be timed very precisely, and party because the cat cannot avoid perceiving them even if it is some distance away and looking in the opposite direction. Animal trainers used to use whistles, but nowadays the cue of choice is often the clicker, a tensioned piece of metal in a plastic case that makes a distinctive click-clack sound when pressed and released.”

“Cats must be taught to like the sound of the clicker, which has little or no instinctive significance for them, by classical conditioning. This is simply done by attracting the cat’s attention with a handful of its favorite treats when it’s hungry, and then offering the treats one at a time, each preceded with one click-clack from the clicker (Some cats are hypersensitive to metallic sounds — either hold the clicker away from the cat, or use a quieter sound, for example the plunger on a retractable ballpoint pen). After a few sessions, the sound of the clicker will have become firmly associated in the cat’s mind with something pleasant, and this sound will gradually become pleasant in its own right.

Once this has become established, the clicker can be used to reward other pieces of behavior. For example, many cats can be trained to come consistently when called, initially by clicking when they turn and start to approach, but then gradually delaying the click until the cat arrives at the trainer’s feet. Once the click has been established as a reward, it doesn’t have to be followed by food every single time, although if the cat hears the sound over and over again without food appearing, the association may start to be lost. It is therefore usually most effective to intersperse sessions of training to come when called (when it is impossible to deliver the reward immediately after the click, because the cat is too far away) with repeat sessions of the original click-treat pairings that reestablish the link.”

“More complex tricks and “performances” are usually taught piece by piece, each step becoming linked together in the cat’s mind through chaining. The easiest way to put a sequence together is to start at the end with the final action and its reward, and progressively add the preceding steps — backward chaining. For example, to train a cat to turn around once and then offer its paw to be shaken, the paw-shake is shaped first, and once that is perfected, the turn is shaped to precede it. Although it would seem more logical to train the first action first — forward training — most animals, including cats, find this much more difficult, indicating that their abilities to think ahead are limited.”

“Many cats learn how to open a door fitted with a lever-type handle by jumping up and grabbing it with their forepaws. A superficially “clever” trick such as this one can be explained by operant conditioning of course, doors that unlatch with a handle and swing open on hinges do not form part of the world in which cats have done most of their evolving, so the final, successful, version of this behavior cannot be natural. However, it most likely starts with something that cats will do instinctively when they are unable to get somewhere they want to go, which is to jump up onto a vantage point to see whether there is an alternative route. If the cat tries to jump up onto the lever, which from the ground will look like a fixed platform, it will find that when the lever moves, not only does it lose its footing, but also that the door may swing open. The cat then gets the reward of being able to explore the room on the other side of the door — and cats, as territorial animals, find exploration of novel areas rewarding in itself. The cat will remember the association between its action and the reward. After trying various alternative actions on the handle, it will progressively arrive at the most efficient solution, which is to raise a single paw and gently pull the lever downward.

Pet cats learn how to use the same techniques on their owners. Even the most ardent cat-lovers sometimes describe them as manipulative, but much of a cat’s so-called manipulative behavior is built up by operant conditioning. Feral cats are remarkably silent compared to domestic cats (except during fighting and courtship, notoriously noisy activities); in particular, such cats rarely meow at one another, whereas the meow is the pet cat’s best-known call. The meow is usually directed at people, so rather than being an evolved signal it’s more likely to have been shaped by some kind of reward.

Cats need to meow because we humans are generally so unobservant. Cats constantly monitor their surroundings (except when they’re asleep, of course) but we often fix our gaze on newspapers and books, TVs and computer screens. We do, however, reliably look up when we hear something unusual, and cats quickly learn that a meow will grab our attention. For a few cats this may be rewarding in itself, but the meow will often also produce the reaction that the cat is hoping for, such as a bowl of food.”

“Some cats then shape their own behavior to increase the precision of their request. Some will deliver the meow at specific locations by the door means “Let me out,” and in the middle of the kitchen means “Feed me.” Others find that different intonations lead to different results, and so “train” themselves to produce a whole range of different meows. These are generally different for every cat, and can be reliably interpreted only by the cat’s owner, showing that each meow is an arbitrary, learned, attention-seeking sound rather than some universal cat-human “language.” Thus, a secret code of meows and other vocalizations develops between each cat and its owner, unique to that cat alone and meaning little to outsiders.”

“If cats are in hot pursuit of a mouse or rat, they will often briefly take a more roundabout route, possibly to make their prey think that they have mistaken where it has hidden.”

Other Cats

“Although they depend on us for food, shelter, and protection, they have not done so for long enough to have evolved the average dog’s effusive greeting. That doesn’t mean that cats are incapable of love, merely that their ways of showing love are somewhat limited.”

“My colleague Rachel Casey, a veterinary surgeon specializing in cat behavioral disorders, regularly diagnoses anxiety and fear as the main factors driving cats to urinate and defecate indoors, outside the litter tray. Some cats spray the walls or furniture with urine, possibly to deter other cats from entering their owner’s house believing it to be cat-free; others find the point in the house farthest from the cat-flap and urinate there, seemingly terrified of attracting the attention of any other cat. Some will defecate on the bedsheets, desperately trying to mingle their own odor with their owner’s to establish “ownership” of the core of the house. When the conflict is between two cats that live in the same house, one may spend much of its time hiding, or obsessively groom itself until its coat becomes patchy.

The stress of being forced to live with cats it does not trust can often be severe enough to affect the cat’s health. One illness now known to be closely linked to psychological stress is cystitis, referred to by veterinarians as idiopathic cystitis because no disease or other medical cause is apparent. As many as two-thirds of cats taken to vets for urination problems — blood in the urine, difficult or painful urination, urinating in inappropriate places — have no obvious medical problems, other than inflammation of the bladder and intermittent blockage of the urethra by mucus thereby displaced from the bladder wall.”

“Cats undoubtedly recognize other cats as cats, and can evidently react to what they see them doing. However, even dogs, which are much more highly evolved socially than cats, show no evidence of understanding what other dogs are thinking, so it’s unlikely that cats can either. Moreover, cats seem to live in the present, neither reflecting on the past nor planning for the future. Still, at its heart, jealousy is an emotion first experienced in the here and now; it does not require the cat to understand what its rival is thinking, or even that it is capable of thinking at all. All that jealousy requires is that the cat merely perceive that another cat is getting more of something than it should. Thus, cats are almost certainly capable of feeling jealous, even if not quite as demonstratively, or as commonly, as dogs. Although not something that my cats have ever indulged in, countless owners have regaled me with stories of how one of their cats would always intervene when they tried to stroke the other.

Many people think that cats are capable of grief, because they behave oddly when another cat that they have known disappears. What they actually feel is probably temporary anxiety, which disappears once all traces of the missing cat have disappeared. A mother cat may search for her kitten for a day or two after it has been homed. She probably has a memory of that kitten, and may even count the remaining kittens to check that one is missing. This behavior would be the same if that kitten had temporarily gotten lost; in the wild, it would be in the mother cat’s interest to seek it out and continue to look after it until it was old enough to become independent of her. She cannot “know” that it has gone to a good home where it will be well cared for, as nothing in her evolution will have prepared her to embrace that concept. For a few days, the mother is reminded of that particular kitten by the lingering traces of its individual odor, the kind of cue that is often meaningless to us. We know that the kitten has gone because we can no longer see or hear it. Once the kitten’s odor has faded below her threshold, the mother cat probably forgets all about the departed kitten. While she can still smell it, she may well feel an anxiety that drives her to continue to look for it. This, however, is not the same as grief.”

“Biologists are uncertain about the precise origins of these family ties. They could be accidental, caused by female cats’ inability to distinguish their own kittens from others. Looking back to their wildcat ancestors, every female holds her own territory, which she defends against all other females, so the chance that two litters could ever be born in the same place is virtually zero. A female cat, wild or domestic, probably follows a simple rule of looking after all the kittens that she finds in the nest she has made: she sees no need to sniff each kitten carefully to check that it is not an interloper before settling down to nurse it.”

“It was sisters, not unrelated cats, that found it easy to learn from one another. Transmission of skills between family members may be mutually beneficial and give family groups an advantage over solitary cats, that can learn only by trial and error.

Whether young cats ever learn much from cats that are not members of their family is doubtful. Underlying distrust probably focuses their minds exclusively on staying out of trouble, overriding any curiosity about what another cat is doing.”

“In cat colonies, when two cats are working out whether to approach each other, one usually raises its tail vertically; if the other is happy to reciprocate, it usually raises its tail also, and the two will walk up to each other. If the second cat does not raise its tail and the first is feeling especially bold, it may approach nevertheless, but obliquely. If the second cat then turns away, the first cat occasionally meows to attract its attention among the very few occasions when feral cats meow. Otherwise, the first cat lowers its tail and heads off in another direction, presumably judging that the other is not in the mood to be friendly. Hesitation can be risky.”

Mating

“Because most owners have their cats neutered, mature tomcats are something of a rarity in western society. Few people keep them as pets, and many of those who try to do so are subsequently discouraged by the pungency of the urine tomcats spray around the garden (or, worse, the house); by the wounds they receive from stronger, more experienced tomcats in the neighborhood; and by their weeklong absences as they journey off in search of receptive females. Most owners of male cats never get to this point, taking the advice of their veterinarian to have their kitten neutered before testosterone starts to kick in at about six months of age. Male cats that have been neutered during their first year behave much more like females than males, and are usually as sociable toward other cats as a female would be under the same circumstances; that is, most will remain friendly toward other cats that they have known since birth (usually, but not necessarily, their blood relations), and a few will be even more outgoing.

Tomcat behavior gives us insight on how the cat may be evolving today. A tomcat’s main goal is to compete for the attention of as many females as possible. As a consequence, wildcat toms evolved to be 15 to 40 percent heavier than females. This is also true of domestic cats today; tomcats’ physicality appears to have been affected little by domestication.”

“A few seconds later, in apparent contradiction to her invitation, she screams in pain, turns on him, and drives him away, spitting and scratching. This abrupt change of mood is brought about by the pain she undoubtedly experiences during copulation: the male cat’s penis is equipped with 120 to 150 sharp spines, designed to trigger her ovulation (cats, unlike humans, do not ovulate spontaneously, but require this stimulus). Happily, she appears to forget this discomfort quickly; within a few minutes, she displays herself to the males all over again.”

“Female cats can be very choosy when it comes to selecting a father for their kittens, so tomcats need to advertise just how successful they are, preferably before they ever actually meet the female. They probably do this through the pungent smell of their urine – repellent to our noses, but presenting vital information to a cat’s.”

Conclusion

“Even at the earliest stages of domestication, cats needed humans to protect and feed them during the times when the vermin thev were supposed to eradicate were in short supply. The cats that thrived were those that were able to combine their natural hunting ability with a newfound capacity to reward people with their company.”

“An affectionate relationship with people is not most cats main reason for living. Our cats’ behavior shows us that they are still trying to balance their evolutionary legacy as hunters with their acquired role as companions. They form strong attachments not just to the people they live with, but also to the place where they live — the “patch” that encompasses their supply of food. Most domestic dogs, in stark contrast, bond to their owners first, other dogs second, and their physical surroundings third. This is why it is easier to take a dog on a vacation than a cat: most cats must feel uneasy when they’re uprooted from their familiar surroundings, and certainly behave as if they do. They generally prefer to be left at home when their owner goes away.”

“Hunting puts cats at risk, so they possess a mechanism that dampens the need to hunt actively when they have not gone hungry for a long time. However, few of today’s pet cats are more than a small number of generations away from feral cats that have had to live on their own resources, and for whom a productive territory was a necessity. Going back a few generations further, when commercial cat food was neither universally available nor nutritionally complete, virtually every cat would have had to hunt for much of its food, and would therefore have to defend an area in which it had exclusive access to prey. Too few generations have elapsed for this instinctive need to have disappeared — however archaic it may seem to a pet cat’s owner.”

“Each cat’s desire to establish and then defend a territory inevitably brings it into conflict with other cats. In the countryside, pet cats live mostly in clusters, dictated by our habit of living in villages rather than evenly spread across the landscape — which would presumably be their preference, since that would match their own ancestral pattern. In this situation, they reduce conflict with other cats by each foraging out in different directions, the pattern of territories resembling the petals of a flower with the village or hamlet at its center. The somewhat relaxed notions of “ownership” of cats in rural areas, with farm cats becoming pets and vice versa, also mean that if two cats find themselves living too close together for comfort, one can usually find a vacant niche nearby.”

“To reduce conflict, they often set up separate, if overlapping, territories within the house, but may continue to scrap with each other sporadically. In surveys of owners with two cats, roughly one-third report that their cats always avoid each other if they can, and about a quarter say that they fight occasionally. The two cats will probably come to respect the others’ favorite places to rest — the larger or original cat will generally take the prime spots — but tension may remain if both cats are fed in the same room or if there is only one litter tray.

They may also compete for the cat-flap, if one cat claims it as being within its core territory. Feeding each cat in a different room and providing several litter trays in different locations (not the rooms used for feeding) can often make the situation more tolerable for both cats.”

“• Try using a puzzle feeder containing a small amount of dry cat food. A plastic drink bottle with a few holes of appropriate size cut in the sides will keep some cats busy for hours. More complex devices are available commercially.

• Provide a pot of live “cat grass.” Many cats like to chew on these oat seedlings, Avena sativa, although why they do it is somewhat obscure.

• Don’t overfeed; indoor cats are at greater risk of obesity than outdoor cats.

• If you don’t yet have a cat, consider getting two lit-termates: they will be good company for each other.

• If you already have one indoor cat, plan ahead before getting another cat for “company.” Cats that have never met before are unlikely to adapt spontaneously to sharing a confined space.”

“Even coat colors can be affected by the environment: for example, the darker “points” on a Siamese cat’s face, paws, and ears come from a temperature-sensitive mutation that prevents the hairs from taking up their usual color at normal body temperature. As newborns, these cats are whitish all over because their mother’s womb is uniformly warm. As they grow and the extremities of the body become cooler, the hair there grows darker, producing the characteristic “pointed” coat. Finally, as the cat enters old age and the circulation of blood in its skin deteriorates slightly, it gradually turns brown all over.”

“Siamese, Burmese, and other Oriental cat breeds are susceptible to developing an unusual form of pica, the eating of non-nutritive substances. For reasons we do not yet understand, some house cats develop the habit of chewing unusual items, such as elastic bands and rubber gloves, but a significant proportion of pedigree Oriental cats not only chew but also eat fabrics. Their fabric of choice is usually wool, closely followed by cotton; synthetic fabrics such as nylon and polyester are less popular. Most of these cats start by chewing woolen items: many then progress to swallowing the chewed-off fabric chunks, or move on to other materials. In these cases, the cats appear to confuse fabrics with food. I have seen a Siamese cat dragging an old sock up to its food bowl, and then alternately taking one mouthful of one, and one mouthful of the other.”

“We also have yet to understand their predilection for wool over other fabrics. One theory held that these cats might have a craving for the natural lanolin in wool, but when I tested this directly, this idea did not stand up.

Because wool eating is largely restricted to a small number of closely related breeds, it must have a genetic basis. However, it does not seem to be inherited directly.”

“Many of the fabric-eating cats did also show other types of abnormal behavior, such as biting their owners and excessive scratching. These also occur in non-pedigree cats and are often a sign of anxiety and stress. Among Oriental cats, fabric eating often starts within a few weeks of the cat being rehomed, when the cat may be feeling stressed by the change in its environment. Onset can also occur at around one year of age even without a move, when the cat is becoming sexually mature and starting to come into conflict with other cats either within the household or outside (even though they were valuable pedigree animals, few of the cats in my study were totally confined indoors).

Fabric eating may therefore start as a soothing oral behavior that these cats adopt when they feel especially stressed, rather like thumb sucking in human in-fants. Why they choose fabrics, and why chewing often turns into ingestion, is still unclear.”

“Sticklebacks, fish that sometimes swim in shoals, can be classed as either bold or shy. When a fish has a choice of shoals consisting entirely of bold or shy individuals, it will choose to join the bold shoal, irrespective of whether it is bold or shy itself. Bold shoals usually find more food, and a shy fish will find the middle of a shoal of bold fish a good place to hide. However, to keep up with the bold shoal, it must swim faster than usual, so it temporarily starts behaving more like a bold fish.”

“Despite the equivocal evidence, several Australian municipalities have pressed ahead with measures to reduce the impact of cats on wildlife. These include confinement of cats to owners’ premises at all times, prohibiting cat ownership in new suburbs, nighttime curfews, and impounding free-roaming cats in declared conservation areas – even though only the last of these would control the activities of the feral cats that are probably causing the most damage.

Researchers have yet to evaluate the effectiveness of such control measures comprehensively. However, a recent survey of four areas of the City of Armadale, Western Australia, suggests that cats may not be the primary culprits after all. One area in this study was a no-cat zone, where cat ownership was strictly prohibited; the second was a curfew zone, in which pet cats had to be belled during the day and kept indoors at night; and in the other two areas, cats went unrestricted. The main prey species in the area were brushtail possums, Southern brown bandicoots, and the mardo, a small prodatory marsupial a little bigger than a mouse, which was predicted to be the most vulnerable of the three to cat predation. In fact, researchers found more mardos in the unregulated areas than in the curfew or no-cat areas, and saw little difference in the numbers of the other two prey species across any of the sites. What variation there was could be best accounted for by the amount of vegetation available: in other words, habitat degradation, and not cats, may have been the major factor limiting the numbers of small marsupials. The draconian control measures against pet cats had, at least in this one location, produced no benefit to wildlife.”

“The gene that gives the Scottish Fold its characteristic lop-eared appearance also causes malformations of the cartilage elsewhere in the body, and as a result many of these cats develop severely painful joints at a relatively early age.”

“It is usually best to start by keeping the new cat in a part of the house that the resident cat rarely uses, allowing it to establish a small “territory” of its own and getting to know its new owners before facing the challenge of meeting the resident cat face to face. The two cats will undoubtedly be aware of each other’s presence, if only by smell, but this will be less stressful at this early stage than being able to see each other. Owners can build up some degree of familiarity between the two cats before a meeting takes place by periodically taking toys and bedding from each of the two cats and introducing them to the other while rewarding that cat with food treats or a game. This builds up a positive emotional link with the other cat’s odor. The actual introduction should wait until after both cats no longer show any adverse reaction to the other’s smell, and should be carried out in stages, starting with allowing the cats to be together for just a few minutes.”

“Owners can use clicker training to entice a cat to walk into its cat carrier, rather than forcing it in. Similar training could help cats overcome their initial fear of other potentially stressful situations — for example, encounters with new people. In general, cats need persuasion, not force, if they are to adopt a calm approach to new situations.”

“Cats instinctively scratch objects with their front claws. Perhaps they do this to leave behind an odor or a visible sign of their presence, to alert other cats. They may also scratch because their claws are itchy: periodically, the whole of the outside of the claw detaches, revealing a new, sharp claw within.”

“The Bengal is a hybrid between domestic cats and the Asian leopard cat Prionailurus bengalensis. The latter species is separated by more than 6 million years of evolution from the domestic cat, and has never been domesticated in its own right; therefore, it would seem an unlikely starting point for a new breed of cat, were it not for its attractive spotted coat (referred to as “rosettes”). Domestic cats and Asian leopard cats will mate with one another if given no other option, but the resulting offspring are essentially untamable. During the 1970s, repeated breeding between these hybrids and domestic cats produced some offspring that retained the leopard cat’s spots on the back and flanks, creating the current Bengal “breed.”

Unfortunately, many Bengals possess not only wild-type coats, but also wild-type behavior.”

“Because neutering inevitably targets those cats that are being best cared for, it must logically hand the reproductive advantage to those cats that are least attached to people, many of which are genetically predisposed to remain unsocialized. We must consider the long-term effects of neutering carefully: for example, it might be better for the cats of the future as a whole if neutering programs were targeted more at ferals, which are both the unfriendliest cats and also those most likely to damage wildlife populations.”