[CAT] "Are Cats Really Wild Animals?"

[rfmcdonald]

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.