A Michael Broad Blog
There is an interesting article in The Times today, Friday, September 1, 2023 which I would like to discuss briefly. The title is “Early humans were on brink of extinction”. Remarkably the research that Kaya Burgess reports on found that the population of Homo sapiens’ ancestors dwindled to less than 1300 adults about 900,000 …
My understanding of this study (see base of page) is that there are four reasons why Australian cat owners keep their cats inside their home. And there are five different ways of owning a cat in terms of containing them inside the home or allowing them outside. Australians have the highest domestic cat containment …
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, …
The question is asking for information about the world’s very first domestic cat. We don’t have that information. We have a rough idea when the North African wildcat was first domesticated but that is about it. The domestic cat’s skeleton is very, very similar to their wildcat ancestor. This makes it difficult to identify …
On my reckoning, there are only 10 countries where the domestic cat is a native species or a non-invasive species. In all the other countries of the world the domestic cat could be described as an invasive species. So, what is an invasive species and where are these countries? Well, an invasive species is …
Domestic cats are not an invasive species in every country. Domestic cats are native to certain countries and in those countries they are not an invasive species. A species of animal is only “invasive” if they are not native or indigenous to a certain place. For cats this means that they were brought to …
At what date can we say that the domestic cat existed in North America? I think it’s an important subject because the United States is the greatest country in the world for the domestic cat in 2020. Historically, we are told, that there were no domestic cats in North America before European settlers emigrated …
