Cat History Pictures

Here are some cat history pictures. Please click on them to see large versions. Thanks.

A mixed bag of pictures showing the cat, wild or domestic, in a historical context. They were gathered together from various sources on the internet. They are either in the public domain, published under creative commons licenses or with express permission of the author.

You can read about these pictures or similar ones by clicking on the following links (you’ll just have to select the right one!):

• Cat history
• Siamese cat history
• History of the big cats
• Cartoon cats
• Cheshire cat art
• Early LOL cats
• Jaguar wildcat
• Egyptian cat art
• Cats in ancient Egypt
• The anthropomorphism of wild cat and domestic cats
• Cats in paintings (see link below)
• Ancient Egyptians abused cats.

The interesting thing about cat history pictures is that the camera was invented at about the same time as the cat breed – mid/late 1800s. Before that time you will see wild cat species or random bred cats in drawings or paintings. You’ll see quite a nice piece of cat history pre-camera at cats in paintings. Cats were not infrequently painted by the great artists.

Another interesting factor is that cats before the cat fancy was invented, which were purebred by chance, were almost certainly purer in terms of genotype than current (2012) purebred cats. This is because the cat fancy controls the breeding of cat breeds and they look for appearance not historical purity. Selective cat breeding has bred out genetic purity on occasion. The Persian comes to mind.

99.99% of cat history concerns wildcats. Yet most cat history pictures concern domestic cats. This shows our lack of interest in the wild cats which leads to their gradual extinction due to exploitation of their habitat e.g. Bengal tiger habitat. I won’t discuss that further here.

From cat history pictures to cat history.