The Amazing Life of Cats

Candida Baker is an author and the Director of the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival. She has been a writer, a journalist and an animal lover for many years. She owns horses, dogs, and one long-suffering cat, somewhat inappropriately named Tiny.

The amazing life of

CATS

CANDIDA BAKER

First published in 2011

Copyright © Candida Baker 2011

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Boots, who taught me that walls don’t matter

Contents

Introduction

H
istorians have told us often over the years that domestic cats sprang from Ancient Egypt, where temple cats were worshipped, and indeed, paintings of house cats go back as far as 3600 years. Bast, the Egyptian goddess, was often shown in cat form, and was occasionally depicted as a lioness. But in 2004 a Neolithic grave containing two skeletons was excavated in Cyprus; one skeleton was human, the other a large cat. They were buried beside each other. The grave is almost 10,000 years old, and the cat closely resembled the African wildcat. For a writer the detail is tantalising—why were they buried together? Who died first? Were cats already companion animals by then?

We may never know the social or emotional history behind the gravesite, but science can give us some facts. Genetic studies show that cats were probably first domesticated in Mesopotamia and were later brought to Cyprus and Egypt. There’s also evidence to suggest that they were already present in Britain in the late Iron Age. But whenever and wherever the relationship began, like our relationships with horses and dogs—the other four-legged species that have chosen to link their destinies with humans—it’s certainly been going on for thousands and thousands of years.

It was during the so-called Age of Discovery, when man set off in sailing ships to explore the world, that cats really came into their own. They were carried on board to control rodents and as good luck charms, and thus made their way to all corners of the globe. I like the idea of a cat comforting a cabin boy a long way from home, or cuddling up with a grumpy sailor in his hammock.

So despite cats’ obvious independence and occasional apparent disdain for their humans, it would seem that in the same way that dogs made a decision to join us beside our fires, cats too thought their lives might be improved by a connection with people. However, while dogs have generally modified their wild behaviour in order to coexist with us, cats have not altered much since the first wildcat—most likely a jungle cat from southeast Asia, an African wildcat, a Chinese mountain or an Arabian sand cat—threw their natural caution to the winds, no doubt for the same reason a stray can be tamed now: easily accessible food.

What was it that early man saw in cats that meant cats were elevated to a more exalted status than dogs? Many ancient religions believed that cats are higher souls, designed as companions or spiritual guides for humans. The prophet Muhammad himself had a favourite cat, Muezza, and apparently loved cats so much that ‘he would do without his cloak rather than disturb one that was sleeping on it’.

If a theme has emerged from the compiling of this anthology it is the healing power of cats. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that cats are psychic—I’ve owned a psychic cat myself, as you can see from my story about my black and white cat Boots. Perhaps it was their healing and psychic powers that caused them to be associated with witches during medieval times—or perhaps witches, themselves healers and psychics, recognised these powers in the small felines and adopted them as friends. Unfortunately, the relationship got both sides of the equation into trouble. Searching for reasons as to why the Black Death or Bubonic Plague occurred in the fourteenth century, which was spread by fleas from infected rats, historians have found that when witch hysteria was at its height, hundreds of thousands of cats were killed as well, causing an explosion in rat numbers.

Before the mass hysteria of the middle ages, cats enjoyed a more peaceful symbolic connection with Freyja, the Norse goddess of love, beauty and fertility, who is shown riding a chariot drawn by cats. Indeed, despite what I am sure would be growls of disapproval from tomcats around the world, cats are traditionally associated with the feminine, as dogs are with the masculine. Cats’ extraordinary sensory perception—their eyesight, hearing, smell and touch—places them symbolically as ‘guides’, who can know the way when we don’t, when we have to follow our blind instinct.