[PHOTO] Shakespeare, in the dark

Shakespeare was not cooperating today.

[CAT] "Did Ancient Native Americans Try to Domesticate Bobcats?"

George Dvorsky's io9 post amused me.

The 2,000-year-old remains of a carefully decorated and deliberately buried juvenile bobcat has scientists wondering if it’s the first example of feline domestication in the prehistoric Americas.

The remains of the bobcat were originally discovered in the 1980s at the Illinois Hopewell Burial Mounds just north of St. Louis. Archaeologists had mistakenly identified the bones as belonging to a young dog and placed it in the archives of the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. Now, a new analysis by Ph.D. student Angela Perri and her team from the University of Durham in the UK, has correctly identified the bones as belonging to a bobcat (Lynx rufus) that was likely between four and seven months old when it perished. The results of their work can now be found at Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology.

Incredibly, the bobcat kitten was buried by a group of Middle Woodland Native Americans in a very human-like way, among the remains of humans and dogs. The bobcat was adorned with a necklace made from seashells, along with a bone carved to look like bear teeth (seen above). What’s more, the complete skeleton showed no signs of trauma, which suggests it wasn’t sacrificed.

[CAT] "To save big cats from extinction, scientists say we need to redefine ‘tiger’"

Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen linked to Robert Gebelhoff's Washington Post article noting arguments in favour of a new taxonomy for tigers.

Fewer than 4,000 tigers roam across the Asian continent today, compared to about 100,000 a century ago. But researchers are proposing a new way to protect the big cats: redefine them.

The proposal, published this week in Science Advances, argues current taxonomy of the species is flawed, making global conservation efforts unnecessarily difficult.

There are up to nine commonly accepted subspecies of tigers in the world, three of which are extinct. But the scientists' analysis, conducted over a course of several years, claims there are really only two tiger subspecies: one found on continental Asia and another from the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Java and Bali.

"It's really hard to distinguish between tigers," said Andreas Wilting, the study's lead author from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research. "There has been no comprehensive approach. The taxonomies are based on data from almost a hundred years ago."

The study, described by its authors as "the most comprehensive analysis to date," looked at the mitochondrial DNA, skulls, skin markings, habitat and prey of all nine tiger subspecies. It found a high degree of overlap in these traits between the continental tigers — spanning from Russia to Southeast Asia — and between the island-dwelling "Sunda" tigers.

[URBAN NOTE] "Cats Are City Slickers"

Live Science's Tia Ghose reports on a study suggesting cats are less efficient predators than some have feared.

Cats have gotten a bad rap in recent years. The furry carnivores have been implicated in wildlife killings: Researchers reported in 2013 that American cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds, and more than 20 billion small mammals, each year. Most of those killings are tied to feral cats, which don't have human owners, though kitty cams have revealed outdoor domestic cats are also partaking in the carnage, that study found.

To better understand Felis catus, Hess and his colleagues, along with hundreds of citizens in six Eastern states from Maryland to Tennessee, deployed critter cams in yards, urban parks, protected wild spaces and green corridors.

After analyzing millions of hours of footage, the team found that cats tended to stick to urban and suburban settings: They were 300 times more likely to pop up in residential yards than in parks.

In addition, cats were scarce in areas where coyotes roamed. The more coyotes that prowled an area, the fewer kitties ventured there, according to the study, which was published today (June 30) in the Journal of Mammalogy. The one exception was that coyotes were occasionally found in urban corridors that were connected to larger green spaces, said study co-author William McShea, a wildlife ecologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Virginia.

[. . .]

The new findings, however, suggest coyotes play a positive role in keeping cats at bay in wilder spaces, McShea said. Coyotes are the "big kid on the block" and are aggressive toward cats, which may cause cats to stay off coyote turf, he added.

[CAT] "Are Cats Really Wild Animals?"

Slate's David Grimm reports on the debate on the extent to which cats are domesticated.

The other night, before my wife and I put our 2½-year-old twins to bed, she began reading them one of their favorite books, Where the Wild Things Are. Juliet, in Dalmatian pajamas, asked, “Mommy, where are the wild things?” My wife glanced over at our gray-and-white tabby curled up on a chair nearby. “Well,” she said, “Jasper’s a wild thing.” Juliet looked incredulous. “Jasper’s not a wild thing,” she said. “He’s a cat!”

The dispute is understandable. Though cats have lived with us for nearly 10,000 years and are the world’s most popular pet, experts disagree about whether they’re actually domestic animals. Our feline companions don’t really need us, after all: They can hunt for themselves, and they go feral without human contact. A scientific paper published last year uncovered some of the first genes responsible for domestication—all in the cat genome—yet still referred to cats as “semi-domesticated.” Other scientists vehemently disagree with that designation. “There’s no difference between a domesticated cat and a domesticated anything else,” says Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford who has studied the domestication of pigs, dogs, and a variety of other animals. “Good luck trying to get a goat or a sheep to spend the night in your house.”

At the heart of the debate is the heart of our relationship with cats. Sure, they were gods in ancient Egypt, but ever since a paranoid pope linked them to witchcraft in the 13th century, felines have been vilified as evil, unpredictable, and untrustworthy—stereotypes that persist even in this age of the adorable Internet cat video. So the question must be asked: Are cats just like dogs but in slinkier form, eager and able to be part of the human family? Or is there something truly feral about them—something wild and unknowable that will forever keep them from blending into our tribe? Put another way, are cats with us or against us?

Even early legal scholars debated the question, as I discovered while writing Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship With Cats and Dogs, which traces the journey of pets from wild animals to members of the family. In 1894, a Baltimore man was arrested for stealing his neighbor’s cat. But as the judge prepared to sentence him, Maryland’s attorney general stepped in. “A cat,” he declared, “is not legal property. … It is as much a wild animal, in a legal sense, as are its relatives—the tiger and the wild-cat.” The judge was forced to let the thief go. In the eyes of the law, a man who had stolen a cat had stolen nothing at all.

In the early 1900s, however, as cats became more popular household companions, the law changed its tune. At issue in a 1914 Maine state Supreme Court case was whether a man was legally justified in shooting his neighbor’s dog because it was chasing his cat. Under state law, the shooter pointed out, a person could kill a dog that was “worrying, wounding, or killing any domestic animal.” But did a cat fit that definition? After much deliberation, the court ruled that it did. “In no other animal has affection for the home been more strongly developed,” it decreed.

[URBAN NOTE] On the first cat café in Vancouver and the continuing lack in Toronto

CTV reported earlier this week that Vancouver is getting its first cat café.

Vancouver cat lovers take note: The city’s very first cat café is coming to town.

The ‘breaking mews’ came July 10, when cat lover and blogger Michelle Furbacher posted the announcement on her blog.

“It’s official — the City of Vancouver has approved our permit application, and we will be starting construction and renovations in the next couple of weeks!” Furbacher wrote. “Thanks everyone for your ongoing support!”

The Catfé will open sometime in October at International Village Mall, 88 West Pender St.

[. . .]

“Catfé will be part cafe, part foster home for cats, and altogether a community gathering space for cat lovers of Vancouver in need of some quality kitty time,” Furbacher writes.

Torontoist's Sheena Goodyear, meanwhile, looked at Toronto's continuing lack of said, noting the issues of the two leading candidates.

Since [Jennifer Morozowich] launched her Indiegogo campaign in June 2014 [for her Kitty Cat Café], Morozowich has come across a series of obstacles, the biggest being financial.

“One thing I’ve learned through this process is the amount of money required is not enough. You need to look at your budget and then get a shit-ton more on top of that,” Morozowich tells Torontoist.

It’s a lesson Jeff Ro and Ashkan Rahimi have learned all too well. The duo raised $12,921 of their $70,000 goal on Indiegogo last year for the cat café Pet Me Meow. But between lawyers, crowdfunding perks, marketing, and a pop-up cafe in June 2014, those funds have been depleted.

“All of the money that was fundraised was just re-invested back into all the costs that were associated with getting the campaign off the ground,” Rahimi says. “At this time, we’ve been really trying to explore investment opportunities.”

Rahimi and Ro are working with Startup Toronto to find compatible investors to get Pet Me Meow off the ground. Getting a bank loan for a café in the city is almost impossible in today’s business landscape, Rahimi says.

[FORUM] What do you think about ridiculously misused language?

Back in October of 2005, Livejournaler Heather Cooze posted in the Toronto Livejournal community a complaint about the steeped tea sold by Canada-founded chain Tim Horton's. This post has since been revised, apparently in response to criticism the author received, but in the original version she said that the decision of Tim Horton's to sell tea without including teabags--an option added, it should be noted, alongside their--was like rape. Also, it was something that the Nazis would have done.

The post got quite a lot of criticism. A petition that Cooze had started was taken down, as she complained people were taking her choice of language too seriously. A common opinion in the Toronto community, and in my Livejournal as well, was that the language she used was irresponsible. How, exactly, is selling steeped tea like rape? Why would it be something that the Nazis would do? The language used, evoking violence and even genocide, was ridiculously at odds with the actual subject matter. The people who said that a person who had only this to complain about was lucky were right.

I've been thinking of this misguided post more and more recently, as I've seen language get misused in similar ways in online forums and mainstream journalism and public life generally. Too often, words are used without regard to their actual meaning. "Colonialism" describes a specific set of circumstances, say, as does "fascism", as does "racism". Using terms like these as catch-all phrases to describe situations that a speaker does not like, without providing actual evidence for these terms' real-world relevance, conveys only that the speaker does not like a situation. That's it.

What do we lose through the misuse of the language? We lose an ability to actually understand what is going on. (Greece in 2015, for all of its travails, is going through nothing like Haiti's experience of slavery-driven colonialism.) We certainly demonstrate our profound lack of understanding of the situation that has been mistaken to provide the incendiary analogy. (The sale of steeped tea is nothing like sexual assault.) Ultimately, we lose an ability to actually talk about things. How can we, if words with established meanings are taken to mean anything at all?

What do you think about this? Is there any way we can fight against this misuse? (Fighting against specific examples of misuse, perhaps?)

Thoughts?