What affects us affects cats
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 …
The sand cat was discovered in 1856 by Captain Victor Loche at Ngouca in the sand dunes of eastern Algeria near the Libyan border. He was on an 1856-1857 French expedition to the Algerian section of the Sahara. He was listing and describing the mammals and birds of the area for the book Catalogue …
We don’t have an exact figure for the number of domestic cats that have lived at the White House with US presidents over the years so the question in the title cannot be answered with accuracy, sadly. However, there seems to have been around 20+ as a rough estimate. That’s the end of the …
The compact infographic below summarises how the humble and innocent cat became so unfairly associated with witchcraft. Once again, I rely on the best man or women on the matter of cat history and behavior: Dr Desmond Morris. Such clean writing and clarity of thought. He says that religious bigots, in this case Christians, …
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 best source for information of this kind is Sarah Hartwell’s messybeast.com. She is quite clear on this. While lions, jaguars and leopards can all mate with each other to ‘form viable hybrids’, the tiger can only successfully mate to produce viable offspring with the lion. When a tiger mates with the leopard the …
Quite a lot of people respond to enquiries on why the cat was left out of the Chinese zodiac of 12 animals. After all, they’ve got the dog in the zodiac and the cat is as popular today as the dog. It seems very unfair. There is a myth as to the reason but …
A bit of domestic cat history from England and Europe in general plus an image created with the help of an AI computer and some superb online software and some imagination. In Medieval England (500-1500 AD) domestic cats were in danger of being captured and skinned by professional skinners. Does this remind you of …
