The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World by Abigail Tucker
My rating: 4/5 cats
A house cat is not really a fur baby, but it is something rather more remarkable: a tiny conquistador with the whole planet at its feet. House cats could not exist without humans, but we didn’t really create them, nor do we control them now. Our relationship is less about ownership than aiding and abetting.
here’s the one-sentence summary of this book:
cats own us.
that’s basically what you will take away from this book, but you should read it anyway, because it is a highly entertaining study that combines science, history, and cultural analysis to examine how cats managed to insinuate themselves into our homes (and our HEARTS!) and why we let them stay there, in what is pretty much a one-sided relationship in which they tolerate us (on a good day), while contributing nothing but their cuteness.
“if i dig my claws into you, you will never leave…”
despite being a cat-lover herself, abigail tucker is a curious lady seeking the answer to the great mystery no one else seems to be investigating, namely – why cats?
People are accustomed to driving a very hard bargain with domesticated animals. We expect our dependents to come to heel, schlep our stuff, or even obediently proceed to the slaughterhouse. Yet cats don’t fetch the newspaper or lay eggs or let us ride them. It’s not often that human beings are left scratching our heads about why in the world we keep a creature around, let alone hundreds of millions of them. The obvious answer is that we like cats – love them, even. But why do we? What is their secret?
in this book, she explores our relationship with this enigmatic and beloved beastie through the entirety of our overlapping existences, and reminds us of what we all already know, but do not speak about: that cats are highly adaptive opportunistic hypercarnivores who have done little for us in practical terms since introducing our species to meat in the wayback,when carnivorous kangaroos and “jumbo otters” roamed the earth, when our scavenging ancestors came upon the picked-over remains of the kills of giant cats and said – “hmmm – this looks tasty!” of course, these same giant cats were also using us as a source of delicious meat, dragging us into caves, devouring us in trees, caching our eviscerated corpses in their lairs, so it’s a fairly tainted legacy. eventually, cats saw we had homes and hearths that they deemed comfy, and they used their big eyes to ingratiate themselves and somehow, in times of scarce resources, when animals were beginning to be domesticated for their use as food or to help with farming or hunting and nothing was fed and sheltered that didn’t contribute in some way, somehow cats wormed their way in and domesticated themselves.
she traces the history of the domesticated cat back to the lybica, a middle eastern wild cat which all the world’s 600 million housecats call great-grandaddy:
she talks about the cat’s dispersement throughout the world, as people brought them to continents without indigenous cat species – on ships, for their reputation as rat-catchers, by christian missionaries hoping to charm the natives with these little wide-eyed cuties, pampered and toted around in bags by victorian fancy-people, and the effect this cat-diaspora had on environments unprepared for a creature requiring massive quantities of meat relative to their size to live; three times as much protein as dogs. when they went free into these new territories, many native species were suddenly at risk as prey items, but just as many cats became pets, with only their personalities to contribute to the arrangement: Cats, it seems, transcend the practical. Domesticating them made so little sense that we likely never tried; once cats domesticated themselves, they provided few tangible services. but we let them stay. and why? she claims that their …raw cuteness combined with innate boldness, helps explain how the cat got a paw in the door when so many other species stayed out in the cold, as she discusses their similarity in appearance to human babies, unlike most other domesticated animals, which is what got them into our homes, and the additional element of manipulation cats employed:
…through a combination of evolved behavior and natural good looks, house cats exerted a kind of subtle control over us. We became their creatures as much as they became ours. They ate our food without much to offer in return.
and these evolved behaviors??
Many cats somehow figure out…that humans respond well to sound. Take the pleasing trill of a purr. Among cats, this tonal buzzing in the vocal folds has no fixed significance – it can mean anything from “I am happy” to “I am about to die.” But to humans the sound is welcome and even flattering. house cats have learned this about us, and have adapted accordingly:
…not only do pet cats meow more often – and more sweetly – than feral and wild cats, but within a given household, a cat devises a unique language of meows to instruct its owner.
and – damn – we are so easily manipulated: With our hypercommunicative hardwiring, humans are prime targets for such exploitation., so …within our earshot, many cats apparently rejigger their purposeless purr to include a barely audible, very annoying, and insistent signal, a cry – usually for food – that resembles a baby’s wail, and studies show that cats may have modulated their vocalizations over time to mimic the cry more precisely.
clever beasties…. but there’s a dangerous flip side to this:
…small Amazonian cats called margays have been observed mimicking primate baby calls while hunting.
i’m in the treeees, sounding like your babies! all the better to eat you, suckas!
so it would seem we are in an abusive relationship with cats. they have learned how to make sounds like our helpless babies sparking our parental drives and they manipulate us into feeding them while they do nothing but sleep all day. and we are lapping it up.
because make no mistake, cats don’t need us. they do just fine in the wild with their excellent hunting skills and masterful abilities in the making of baby cats. dogs have been well-domesticated, and without us, they flounder.
Feral dogs, for one thing, are incompetent mothers. Puppies born on the street tend to die. Packs of street dogs are sustained through recruitment of new strays rather than through births.
dogs also depend almost entirely on garbage, which cats, while certainly enjoying a nice, easy meal of trash, can also do without, going off the grid and subsisting on their own kills.
cats adapt easily to the urban wild, and if we all up and died, they’d just shrug it off and delicately step over our remains on their way to a new adventure.
making armies of cats along the way.
because they are damn good at breeding:
By one calculation, a pair of cats could produce 354,294 descendants in five years, if all survived. In real life, five cats introduced to forbidding Marion Island (permanently snow-capped and actively volcanic, it’s hardly a feline paradise) bore more than 2,000 surviving descendants within 25 years.
this combination of breeding and hunting has become a real problem to conservationists in certain parts of the world, most notably australia, which is home to 3 million pet cats and 18 million feral cats. and those cats get hungry! how hungry, you ask?? thanks for playing – hungry enough that the Action Plan for Australian Mammals report determined cats to be a factor in the fate of 89 out of Australia’s 138 extinct, threatened, and near-threatened mammals, many of which are only found Down Under. The continent has far and away the highest rate of mammal extinctions in the world, and the scientists declared house cats to be the single biggest threat to mammalian survival there, far more dire than habitat loss and global warming.
australia is displeased, and their environmental minister promptly declared war on the world’s favorite pet, which he described as “a tsunami of violence and death.”
who, me??
but it’s not just australia where cats move in and wreck shop. in new zealand, cats are also hungry.
In the 1970’s, they cornered the last population of kakapo and today there are just over 100 of the huge flightless parrots left. Some of these birds might have otherwise enjoyed a life expectancy of ninety-five years.
i learned all about these kakapo from elizabeth knox’s book Wake. you really want these things living for 95 years, attacking heads all the while?
i didn’t think so.
my anti-bird stance is well-documented, so i’m applauding all the little kitties doing what nature enabled them to do:
In 2013, federal scientists released a report suggesting that America’s cats – both pets and strays – kill some 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds per year, making them the leading human-related cause of avian deaths.
that’s more like cat-related causes, if you ask me, but i suppose humans are culpable for enabling the little monsters. but how can you fault an animal for cleverness?
On the island of Kauai, the Newell’s shearwater has a mothlike relationship with city lights and. enthralled yet confused, then suddenly exhausted, they plummet from the sky. Good Samaritans are encouraged to collect birds and deliver them to aid stations, but cats have learned to wait beneath the lights.
sounds to me like those birdies need to adapt better. the cats certainly have.
it’s more than just birds who have to fear the cat’s voracious appetite. back to australia –
In Queensland a few years ago, the Save the Bilby Fund shielded a few acres of bilby habitat with a $500,000 predator-proof fence and herded dozens of precious survivors inside. To everyone’s delight, the rare marsupials began to breed and by 2012 had produced more than 100 newborns – a regular embarrassment of bilbies, at least compared to wild populations.
But, unbeknownst to the bilby boosters, heavy rains and flooding rusted a hole in the fancy fence. When scientists entered the breached sanctuary afterward, they found 20 cats and no baby bilbies.
can you blame them? so tasty looking!
also at risk is the key largo wood rat
which conservationists in florida tried to steer away from extinction, making cute cozy little sanctuaries for them where they could happily (and slowly) breed, and then releasing the fattened-up population back into the wild, straight into the jaws of cats.
hypercarnivores gonna hypercarnivate.
there’s so much ground covered in this book, and it’s all entertaining as hell, particularly the chapter on the history of cat shows and breeding, which began with the victorians and their pet pageants:
The nineteenth-century British sought to impose order on the whole world, and the new discipline of natural history embodied this ideal – men subduing the chaos of nature through science, even as they simultaneously hunted down the most disruptive beasts in the wild. The Victorians dearly loved to rank and classify domestic animals, from puppies to pigeons, just as they liked to rank and classify all living things.
but cats proved to be problematic creatures to classify, and the results of their “nocturnal and rambling habits” (i.e. – mad boning), baffled the victorians when it came to identifying breeds, as most cats were mixed-breed alley cats, indiscriminately mating as the mood struck, all looking the same – a melting pot of proximity-rutting. At best, they were alley cats from particularly far-off alleys.
but the victorians were nothing if not dogged, and when it came to their cat-pageants, …Victorian cat fanciers simply invented categories…There were divisions for “fat” and “foreign” cats, “tortoiseshell” and “spotted.” “Black and white cats” and “white and black cats” were considered to be entirely distinct creatures. The first American cat show, at the Boston Music Hall in 1878, paraded “Short-Haired Cats of Any or No Sex and Any Color,” “long-haired cats,” and “curiosities of any variety.”
gotta love it. even better:
Amid so many desperate attempts to draw distinctions among ordinary house cats, perhaps it’s no surprise that one early cat show was won by a ring-tailed lemur, a small primate that was much closer in kin to a cat show’s human judge than to its meowing contestants.
and why did no one tell me that people were now breeding werewolf cats??
i will need one of those, pronto.
and what book about cats would be complete without a chapter devoted to internet cats, entitled Nine Likes, in which one encounters this regrettable pun:
Instead of mice, they survive on mouse clicks.
because the internet is nothing but porn and cats at this point.
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, often called “the father of the Internet,” was asked recently what aspect of modern web usage most surprised him, he replied: “Kittens.”
and no one appreciates this feline takeover more than me! tucker name-drops a ton of cat-meme sensations, some of which were completely new to me, so that fact alone is enough to make me love this book. it’s a parade of kitties (with no pictures, but that’s what i’m here for)
l’il bub
maru
colonel meow
princess monster truck
grumpy cat
sir stuffington
hamilton the hipster cat
happy cat
keyboard cat
hitler cats
the infinite cat project
bonsai kittens
sushi cats
bread cats
and they’re not going anywhere – cats have dug in hard, with a little help from us.
Over a span of two years, the top five BuzzFeed cat posts received about four times as many viral views as the top dogs.
take that, doggies!
here are two of the most useful things the internet has supplied, both of which are new to me:
–written? kitten! – a motivational tool for writers, where a user is sent a cat picture every hundred words.
and
-unbaby.me – a service which replaces all those pesky pictures of your friends’ kids with pictures of cats instead (and which has changed since this arc was printed to and is now http://getrather.com/)
i like to close reviews on dark notes, because i am a ruiner of days! she doesn’t come right out and say it, not exactly, but she suggests that a possible explanation for our servitude to cats, besides them just being widdle cutiepootiepies, is perhaps down to them controlling all of us through toxoplasmosis. which i do not have the space to discuss here, but is a phenomenon i find endlessly fascinating, and have read many books in which it comes into play in various horrifying ways. basically, toxoplasma is a parasite which can ONLY reproduce itself inside a cat’s body, and causes a zombielike effect in those infected, but what i didn’t know were the stats; that it is believed to inhabit the brains of one in three people worldwide, including some 60 million Americans.
THAT IS A LOT OF PEOPLE, YO! and it may explain why cats are the stars of the internet and run our lives. we are being mind-controlled to feed and care for a species that will occasionally let us snuggle them.
i’ve also never read anything that explains the science of it in such a playful way:
Though Toxoplasma can infect any kind of warm-blooded animal, it reproduces itself in cat guts and cat guts alone. All of the parasite’s “secondary hosts,” from camels to skunks to humpback whales to human beings, are just pit stops in between cats. Only the intestines of infected felines are the site of epic parasitic orgies, reproductive frenzies that produce a billion new copies of Toxoplasma, which are then spewed out into ecosystems via cat poop.
and this is where i leave you. be afraid. be very afraid.
i’ve quoted a lot from this book, because i am so enthralled by it, but there’s also a lot i haven’t quoted, and there’s so much more for you to discover. stuff like fossils and tar pits, cat raves and conventions, the role cats played in plague-times, cat rescue organizations, this website: http://www.hauspanther.com/, cat psychologists, where we learn that there’s a chance …stressed cats end up conceiving of us as outlandish predators, presumably toying with them extensively before we settle down to eat.
turnabout’s fair play, kitty! that’s what you get for luring us onto your dinner plate pretending to be our babies!
i worry that i’ve implied that there’s a negative stance towards cats pervading this book, but except for cranky bird-loving conservationists and some folks that believe owning any pet is a bad thing as it diverts resources and attention from human babies and discourages people from breeding, since they already have their ‘fictive kin,’ this is more about the awe we should feel towards cats, who saw an opportunity and took it. it’s about how badass they are, how clever and enigmatic and yeah – adorbs.
it’s not a perfect book – that “mouse” pun wasn’t the only one in the book, there are a fair amount of redundancies, and there’s my own pet peeve – by page 5, she’d already used the word “random” twice, but overall it’s a wonderful read, and i encourage you to read it if you are a cat person. and since you are on the internet, i have to assume you are. that, or a porn fan. choose your own reputation.
