What affects us affects cats
We can thank a teaching and research assistant at the University of Sarajevo, Emir O. Filipović, for this photo of what must be domestic cat paw prints made in ink across a 15th century manuscript from Croatia. They are around 600 years old. Well at that time domestic cats were pretty much the way …
As a slightly controversial conclusion (perhaps) I’d say that we have altered what we consider to be the norm with respect to size. We accept larger as normal. Portion sizes at McDonald’s are much larger than they were 70 years ago. Cars are much larger than they used to be. We are larger than …
A 2,000-year-old roof tile which was dug up in Gloucester, UK, 45 years ago contains cat paw prints. They weren’t noticed at the time but an archaeologist going through Roman fragments of roof tiles at the city’s museum spotted them. They look small so perhaps they are a kitten’s prints. During Roman times in …
This is a comment from the Flickr website by the photographer who took the photograph above of the gravestone of “The Church Cat” at St Mary Redcliffe Church, Bristol, UK: “I’d looked for it a few times and then given up – I happened to be sat on a bench by the church, soaking …
The skeleton of a young bobcat was found buried with humans in 2,000-year-old burial mounds in Western Illinois. The discovery hints at the possibility that Native Americans, on occasions, had cats as pets. The most common wild cat in North America was and still is the bobcat. It would appear that this small-medium sized …
I focus on the distinct cat populations and the breeds emanating from them. The domestic cats closest wild relatives based on examining wildcat DNA are 15 wildcats from the deserts of Israel, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. About nine thousand years ago, Near Eastern wildcats, which were domesticated to a certain …
At one time during the Black Death, an epidemic that lasted from 1347 to 1353 and which returned several times including the great plague of London of 1665, it was thought that cats caused it. During the winter of 1348 and the following summer the Black Death killed a quarter of England’s population and …
The California Spangled is extinct but, that said, cat breeds can’t become extinct. Sarah Hartwell says, “The breed was considered extinct in the 1990s”. You won’t get a better authority. This is about 20 years ago. If there were some individual cats with some breeders perhaps they have died. There may be some individual …
