What affects us affects cats
Why was the cat domesticated? The advent of farming was the reason why the wild cat came to be domesticated. As Dr Morris says ‘there would have been no taming of the cat before the Agricultural Revolution’. This happened during the New Stone Age or Neolithic period – 10,200 BC to no later than …
What does raised underfoot mean? It means to raise kittens in your home, literally under your feet, as a process of socialization to prepare them for their new home and owner.
It is not often that you can describe a wild cat, albeit a small one, as “quite friendly” as Mel and Fiona Sunquist did in their excellent book1. And yet a well-known British biologist, R.I. Pocock described captive Pallas’s cats (alternative names ‘manul’ or ‘Pallas cat’) as follows: The manul is markedly different in …
The Egyptians kept their cats to themselves and under close guard. They made their export illegal. This restricted the spread of the newly domesticated wildcat to other parts of the world. In 500 BC cats were almost unheard of in Greece and Rome. At that time ferrets were the animals chosen for rodent control. …
