A Michael Broad Blog
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 …
Mars Petcare have created a useful and interesting index which pulls together information about homeless cats and dogs in 9 countries. They used more than 200 global and local sources. They researched attitudes towards cat and dog ownership. Germany comes out on top while India is bottom. The index provides a score as to …
Introduction: this test requires that the cat’s owner has never used their hand as a toy for their cat. If that has happened, their cat will instinctively want to attack it. I am referring to a test to assess cat domestication in interactions with their owner. I accept that all domestic cats have a …
Big Red is a special ginger tabby feral cat, found in St George, Utah, USA, and rescued; and once rescued he decided to be domesticated and feel the warmth, both physical and emotional, of having a human caregiver look after him. I guess he had had enough of being a feral cat, struggling to …
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. …
I am picking up on a study that I have written about before which genetically analysed the Chinese mountain cat to confirm (1) that it is a subspecies of wildcat and not species in its own right and (2) that it was not domesticated at the time the African wildcat was domesticated about 10,000 …
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 …
