Because the Cat Purrs: How We Relate to Other Species and Why it Matters

By Janet Lembke

"A new book by Janet Lembke is always a cause for celebration."Sue Hubbell We share our lives, for better or worse, with a multitude of animals, white-tailed deer and white-tailed eagles, hens and wrens, frogs and guppies, and, last but hardly least, bugs and bacteria. For the most part, we drift along separately, with neither man nor animal affecting the other's way of life. Sometimes, however, we fall in loveas in the case of the cat in the titleor otherwise encounter our animal neighbors in ways that change both of us. Lembke challenges her readers to consider the idea that all creatures are conscious, with the ability to make choices, exercise awareness, and seek pleasure while shunning pain. Rarely has a book of natural history covered such a broad range of subjects, from the everyday bargains we make with our pets and other domestic creatures to descriptions of bungee-cord snail sex and the purpose of a honeybee's sting. Lembke explores the evolution of her subjects, and draws on literature and myth to paint gorgeous, wide-ranging portraits of everyday (and more unusual) encounters, such as that of a gardener and a groundhog, or a chicken egg and Augustus Caesar's wife. This is a sensitive and timely appraisal of how we treat the creatures we share our planet withand how we ought to. It is a book that no lover of intelligent writing about the natural world will want to miss. 20 b/w illustrations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: May 17, 2008
• ISBN: 9781626369108

Janet Lembke

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Book preview

ONE

Sophie

{A Cautionary Tale}

Sophie looks like a cloud of sooty gray smoke. She’s longhaired and spooky, with ice-cold eyes. And she’s needy. A family living cater-cornered across the street adopted and named her several years ago, along with a skittish, coal-black cat that they dubbed Malcolm. My neighbors keep bowls of food and water on their front porch. They also went so far as to trap both cats and cart them to the vet for an examination and the appropriate shots. Malcolm was neutered, but, as it happened, Sophie had already been spayed. Once upon a time, she’d been somebody’s darling. Occasionally, she goes inside the neighbor’s house but soon thereafter returns to her chosen domain, the street, which she cases daily, strolling uphill and down again, sun, rain, or snow, until she feels a need to nap. Then, any porch will do, though she seems to prefer porches with cushioned chairs. One days, to my surprise, she introduced herself to me with a soft meow and a territorial rub against one of my porch pillars. I held out a hand, and—oh my!—claiming it, she allowed me to stroke her. Beneath the cloud of hair, she is little more than skin and bones. No meat on her, but from depp within, she produced a purr. Now, asking not for food but for attention, she makes occasional calls when I sit upon my porch. My own cats, indoor creatures both, stand at a window and watch with cocked heads, fully alert. I do not know what goes through their brains, but they make no moves, thank goodness, to dash outside and seem content to stay right where they are.

Sophie and Malcolm are not the only street cats that we see daily, though some are not strictly street cats. They might better be known as backyard cats. One large cream-colored tom often takes his repose beneath my Norway spruce. (How do I know that he’s a tom, and intact? Because he’se jowly and his cheeks bulge, as if he’s puffed them out.) The neighborhood also has at least one ex-street cat, Leroy, who prowled up and down in his kittenhood. As cats go, he was a sociable creature, readily allowing people to handle him. My young neighbors, whom you will meet at greater length in the red-maple story, took him in just at the point that his testicles had descended. Next stop: the vet. He’s now an indoor-outdoor cat. Although his people would like him to stay inside all the time, he gets peevish at being confined and strikes out at his housemate, Ivy, the dog. If Leroy is in my yard, he flees at the sight of me. Why? Not long ago, his female person had no luck when she tried to put him into a carrier for a trip to the cat-sitter. Frantic, she arrived on my doorstep to see if I’d care for Leroy while she and her husband vacationed far away. As she was showing me the location of his food and litter box, he came into range. I caught him and plopped him into the top-loading carrier. He’s not about to let me catch him again. But Leroy’s adoption is a success story for reasons that I’ll come to shortly.

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A clowder of unadoptable, irredeemably feral cats lives at my brother’s mill, where he formulates and grinds feed-mixes—corn for energy, soy for proteins—to nourish all manner of farm animals, from cattle to llamas. The cats arrived not long after the mill opened. There’s a rule at work here: where there is grain, there are rodents. To a cat, their presence means food and the thrill of the hunt. The current number of cats at the mill is anybody’s guess, but it’s safe to say at least a dozen. Nor need they depend solely on rodents for their suppers. My brother has set out bowls and keeps them filled with cat chow. Their relationship to my brother and the mill’s employees is commensal. While the people are neutral, the cats depend on human activity for their sustenance, be it chow or the mice attracted by the feed. Nonetheless, all of them, no matter what their markings—orange tabby, black, broken white—are small and skinny. Anyone so foolish as to catch one finds that he holds a squirming, protesting creature with its claws unsheathed. These cats most successfully fend off any attempts to docile and domesticate them. It is as if they exercise volition or as if they have taken a most solemn vow: they shall not be anyone’s pets.

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Not all domestic cats were meant to be pets. At least one, Bast by name, was—and maybe still is—a goddess. She entered the world during Egypt’s second dynasty, some five millennia ago, appearing first as a woman with the head of a lioness. But she was gradually tamed and came to wear the head of a cat. Eventually, she was represented wholly as a domestic shorthair, from her large, perked ears to the tip of her tail. In any form, she was worshipped, sometimes extravagantly. The Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century B.C.) has described in detail how devotees came annually in spring to Bast’s sacred city, Per-Bast, in the Nile delta. Men and women by the tens of thousands boarded barges, the women clattering castanets and some of the men playing flutes, and when they arrived, Herodotus says, They celebrate the festival with elaborate sacrifices, and more wine is consumed than during all the rest of the year. And just what did Bast, sometimes called Bastet or Ubasti, signify to those who adored her? Her name means devourer, and as such, she had responsibility for defending the pharaoh from enemies, for slaying them as a cat would slay and consume a mouse. She also showed her tender side as the protectress of pregnant women, caring for them as a queen would for her kittens. Herodotus also has much to say about house cats. When queens bear kittens, they avoid the toms, but the toms, deprived of their satisfaction, have most ingeniously figured out how to regain what they have been denied—they steal the kittens, sometimes killing but not eating them, and the queens, deprived of their kittens, will again seek mates. As for their human commensals, Herodotus writes:

What happens when a house catches fire is most extraordinary: nobody takes the least trouble to put it out, for it is only the cats that matter: everyone stands in a row, a little distance from his neighbors, trying to protect the cats, who nevertheless slip through the line, or jump over it, and hurl themselves into the flames.

He attests to the esteem in which cats are held by noting that the tenants of a house in which a cat has died a natural death express their grief by shaving off their eyebrows. (At a dog’s death, the tenants shave their entire bodies, including the head.) And he tells us that dead cats were taken to Per-Bast (which the Greeks called Bubastis), where they were mummified and buried in sacred receptacles. Likely, some of them were sacrificial victims. Archaeologists have since uncovered just such a cat cemetery in the ruins of Per-Bast, a site now called Tell-Basta. Nor was that the only Egyptian graveyard reserved for cats; many others have been found.

Once upon a time, some twelve millennia ago, all cats were wild. The evolution of the domestic cat has been demystified from studies made of the mummies that these graveyards have yielded. Noted science writer Sue Hubbell says, in her 2001 book Shrinking the Cat, So many cats were mummified that toward the end of the nineteenth century boatloads of excavated mummies were exported from Egypt to England as ballast on the home voyage of commercial ships. (In the nineteenth century, human mummies were used as fuel for locomotives in the Middle East and were exported to England, where they served the same purpose in factories.) Ms. Hubbell points out that the Egyptians had engaged in genetic engineering thousands of years before anyone had conceived of genes. They’d tinkered with the North African version of the ancestral wildcat, a large, rangy, striped, shorthaired beast with gray or brown tabby markings, until it became a smaller and more docile animal for which the Egyptian name, then and now, is the onomatopoeic mau. Natural selection had nothing to do with the pussification of the wildcat. Rather, human beings bred the wild stock selectively for traits, from size and coat color to temperament, which would make them gentle, companionable, pleasing to our senses, and willing to live inside. The mummies show that as the size of the animal’s body was reduced, its brain also became smaller. Imagination posits that its brain must have lost a bump of suspicion, along with a node directing it how to fend for itself. In actuality, the domesticated cat had lost some thirty percent of the neurons associated with vision, and its adrenal glands had also become smaller. In other words, puss, no longer a dedicated hunter, did not need acuity of vision to find food nor quickness of response to prey or danger. (It’s noteworthy that a cat does not need a fully functioning brain in the first place; a cat with a brain injury that would turn a person into a vegetable continues to behave as usual—meowing, begging for food, using a litter box, and purring—because its autonomic nervous system kicks in and dictates normal

Reviews for Because the Cat Purrs

[glade1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a pretty good book but not about cats! Cats are in the first essay, then each other essay takes an animal or plant from the author's yard and examines its history and impact on the world. (I feel a bit silly saying that but it really seems designed to make you think it's about cats.) It's a lot of information presented very clearly. Janet Lembke is a bit different from other authors, in that she doesn't seem too worked up about using chemicals in her yard or doing away with animals - very old school. So this is a good book but not really what the title and the cover imply!