Cats

What makes a cat? ‘Cat’ is one of the first one hundred words children learn. Cats are familiar as pets, numbering some 60 million in the US, and five times that many in the world. Cat domestication is young compared to dogs and barnyard animals, less than 6000 years old. Descended from the African wildcat Felis sylvestris, house cats are first a companion animal, but they were initially bred as an agricultural defense against rodents, and then worshipped as a deistic symbol in Egyptian religion, morphing to a dark omen of evil spirits and witchcraft by the middle ages. Domestic cats of today derive from generations of artificial selection for coat color appearance and behavior that has led to forty-odd cat breeds, revered and proudly displayed in fancy cat exhibitions across the globe. Feral cats, released to form semi-wild social communities in urban and rural settings, are at best nuisances and at worst vilified predatory pests to fragile birds and wildlife in conservation-minded Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Domestic cats carry in their genomes the majesty and resilience of their fantastically successful wild relatives, the 36 living species of the Felidae family. The cat family, one of eight within the order Carnivora, contains species with remarkable size variance (from the 3 lb South African black footed cat to the 700 lb Siberian tiger), exquisite predatory acumen and complex reproductive and social behavior. The great roaring cats of the Panthera genus sit atop the trophic chain in every ecosystem they occupy and have fascinated humankind since history began. The 36 Felidae species are arguably the most successful and charismatic of all carnivore species occupying parallel ecological niches on every continent except Australia and the poles. Wild cats dominate their habitat but require vast expanses to survive, which explains the tragic depredation such that every species of Felidae, except the domestic cat, is considered either endangered or threatened in the wild today by CITES, IUCN Red Book and other monitors of the world’s most endangered species.