A Michael Broad Blog
Together with the cat’s athleticism, their claws and teeth define the cat because they are essential to their predatory nature. The cat is a top predator and they live with us when domesticated. It’s remarkable in many ways that humans should so successfully live with such a devastating predator. The relationship isn’t always successful …
There’s been quite a lot of discussion about the first domestic cats in America. We are sure that early Americans, around 10,000 years ago, did not domesticate a wild cat species and thereby create the first domestic cat. That happened in and around what is now Syria with the North African wildcat. So, the …
In the image below I have tried to present a feel for what the Fertile Crescent was like around 10,000 years ago when ‘at least five different females from the wildcat population’ befriended farmers and founded one of the greatest populations of domestic animal companions the world has seen: the domestic cat. Of course, …
It’s a point worth making. You hear a lot about the first domestic cats coming into being about 10,000 years ago. These are the first N. African wildcats who befriended humans and vice versa; both benefiting in an act of ‘commensalism’ as it is called. These early pet cats were tamed wildcats. Their behaviour …
It is sad and telling of modern life that the famous place where the first wildcats were domesticated by farmers, the Fertile Crescent, which encompasses Syria and the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, is now a place where there are no farmers tilling the fields because the river, which was once swollen with floodwaters, has …
Fiona Sunquist in her book Wild Cats of the World tells me that the first animal to be domesticated was the grey wolf now the domestic dog and that Felis sylvestris a.k.a. the wildcat was “almost the last species to be tamed”. I think, to be fair, she’s not quite correct on that statement. …
Putting aside selectively bred pedigree breeds, which are a tiny minority, most cats choose their own mates and go where they please unless they are neutered and confined to the home. However, although in the West domestic cats are spayed and neutered and often confined to the home, in the majority of the world …
Generally, domestic cats have better immune systems than domestic dogs. I emphasise ‘generally’ because you have to drill down to individual animals (are they purebred or random bred, for instance?). I am referring to purebred dogs and cats and their proportion of the overal population. The proportion of purebred dogs in relation to the …
