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Created specifically for its appearance,  the Bombay is a cross between a sable American Burmese (see p. 88) and a black American Shorthair (see p. 113). Sleek and glossy, this breed comes only in black, with large, gold or copper-colored eyes. The Bombay may look like a panther, but it is a true homebody and few cats are more loving and
sociable. Bombays are intelligent and easygoing; they want to be with their owners all the time and are likely to mope if left alone too long. Having inherited the inquisitive and playful nature of the Burmese, these cats are no couch potatoes. Bombays enjoy games and are ready to be entertained—or to entertain their owners. They get along well with children and other pets.
Achieving perfection took Nikki Horner, original American breeder of the Bombay, through many attempts and failures. The deep copper eye color that she sought to set off the gleaming black fur proved particularly elusive. Even when Horner’s dream cat had finally been created, it was many years before the Bombay was given official recognition and the breed was permitted to compete in official show classes.

This pint-sized “black panther” has glossy fur and striking copper eyes; it is not as vocal as other Asian cats.

WITCH’S FAMILIAR Prowlers of the night— appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye—cats were long believed to be supernatural creatures that walked with ghosts and evil spirits. The association of cats, particularly black  ones, with the  forces of darkness was widespread throughout medieval times and lasted into the 18th century. Many a harmless old woman who kept a cat for



company was suspected of being a witch; it was believed that every witch had a “familiar”—a demon servant in the form of a small animal, perhaps a toad or a hare, or an owl, but often a cat. Even more alarming, an animal could be a shape-shifting witch in disguise, so it was prudent to guard your tongue in the presence of a strange cat. In Europe, millions of cats suffered the same hideous fate as anyone accused of witchcraft, being subjected to trial by torture and burned alive if found guilty.
LUCKY FOR SOME Superstitions about black—or in some cultures, white—cats as omens of either good or  ill fortune are surprisingly persistent throughout much of the world. The beliefs are often contradictory, varying
from one country or region to another, and can involve complicated conventions. For example, just the way a person encounters a black  cat can matter: whether it crosses someone’s path from right to left, or vice versa, may make all the difference between  a good day and a bad one. And while being approached by the cat brings luck, fortune takes a turn for the worse if the cat stalks off in the opposite direction. For the superstitious, in some parts of Europe and in the United States black cats  are unlucky. Many US rescue centers find it difficult to find them homes. In Britain, black cats are considered lucky, much in favor as a subject for wedding-day keepsakes such as beribboned charms or whimsical ornaments.
Japan is another country where black  cats signify good luck, although here they take second place to the much-loved, multicoloured icon Maneki Neko—the “beckoning” cat. Ceramic figurines of this cat, with its doll-like face and raised paw, fill souvenir shops and are commonly placed in doorways to welcome visitors. According to legend, the original Maneki Neko was a temple cat that invited a passing feudal lord to come in and take shelter, thereby saving him from being caught in a violent storm.
REMARKABLE MAGIC POWERS There are numerous myths linking cats  with the weather. It is said that a cat will raise a storm by clawing at the furniture,  and can predict rain by sneezing or washing behind his ears. Some of these tales may have originated with sailors, who not only need to keep a constant eye on the weather but also have a long-held reputation for being highly superstitious. Traditionally, seafarers kept  a cat on board the ship for protection against the elements. Japanese mariners thought tortoiseshell cats worked best for giving advance warning of storms. A cat shipmate could also turn into a liability unless treated with care. It was the custom never to speak the animal’s name, otherwise trouble was guaranteed. If the worst happened and the cat fell overboard, nothing short of gales  and sinking could be expected to follow. The popular saying that cats have nine lives has endured since at least the 16th century. In 1595, William Shakespeare certainly thought it familiar enough to use as one of Mercutio’s quips in Romeo and Juliet, and at that time the notion was given some credence. Because of their quick reflexes and agility, twisting  in midair to right themselves after a fall,  cats do seem to have a remarkable ability 
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Cats are enigmatic animals and there is a touch of magic about them. For people in the past, the magic was

Walking with lions In this late-Victorian painting by Sir William Blake Richmond, Venus, the Roman goddess of love, walks with a lion and lioness and turns winter into spring as she passes.
CATS IN RELIGION



Peruvian puma This gold artifact depicting a puma had religious significance for the Moche people of Peru, whose society flourished between about 100 and 800CE. Puma gods were common  to many early American cultures.
and was marked with an “M” on its forehead—the classic coat pattern seen in tabby cats—when the Madonna stroked it. The Christian Church’s centuries-long, well documented prejudice against cats was probably at least partly driven  by a determination  to stamp out the remnants of earlier pagan beliefs. Church authorities viewed cats  as agents of the Devil, especially when they were kept by people believed  to be witches (see pp.26–27), and dealt with them mercilessly—maiming, torturing, hanging, and burning were among  the cruelties sanctioned. Persecution of cats reached its height in the Middle Ages and continued, astonishingly, into early modern times.
ISLAMIC BLESSING Historically, out of all their connections with religions, cats have had the greatest acceptance in Muslim cultures, where treating animals with kindness is an
a cat lover and drove a chariot pulled by  two enormous gray cats that had been given to her as a gift by Thor, the god of thunder. The ancient Romans were said to be great respecters of cats, the only animals allowed to enter their temples, and sometimes gave them preferential treatment as household  gods, symbols of home and safety. In the Americas, pre-Columbian civilizations knew nothing of domestic cats, which had yet to cross the Atlantic, but some of their deities were associated with big cats. Both the Mayans and the Incas worshiped gods who took the form of jaguars. In today’s major religions, cats as sacred icons remain few and far between. One exception is the Hindu goddess Shashthi, worshiped as a protector of children, who is often depicted riding a cat. In some branches  of Buddhism, the soul  of someone who has attained great spirituality is said on death to enter  the body of a cat. There  is also an old tradition of cats, especially white ones, being kept by Buddhist monks as temple guardians.
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION Unlike many other animals,  cats are not mentioned anywhere in the Bible,  either for good or evil.  In a rare positive association between cats and Christianity, the 7th-century St. Gertrude, abbess of a Benedictine order near Brussels, is regarded as the patron saint of cats; she is sometimes portrayed holding  a cat—or surrounded by mice. There is some evidence that Gertrude, presumably thanks to her cats, had a reputation for keeping her abbey miraculously free of mice in an age plagued with vermin. Another happy association is the charming legend that a cat with its litter of kittens was present in the stable at the birth of Jesus,
Temple resident Many Buddhist temples swarm with street cats like this one, which has found a home at Wat Phra Yai, near Pattaya in Thailand. Such animals are highly respected by the monks, who provide them with food and shelter.
important part of Islamic teaching. The Prophet Muhammad, whose revelations  in the 7th century form the text of the Holy Koran, set an example—there are many reports of the care and respect he gave to his own pets. In an Islamic version of the origins of the tabby forehead marking, the “M” is said to have been left by the Prophet’s touch.

Walking with lions In this late-Victorian painting by Sir William the Moche people of Peru

Farmyard haven Although they will never be family pets, feral barn cats  depend on shelter and human concern for their welfare. The provision of basic care encourages them to stay  and help control rodents.
Neutering program While a sedated feral cat is prepared for surgery, a vet shaves an ear ready to cut a small notch that identifies  the animal as neutered. On recovery, the cat will be taken back to its home colony.


FERAL CATS
to fight off marauding toms, which are a constant peril with their desire to kill off kittens and so bring the females back into season for further matings. As a feral colony expands, the dynamic within it changes, with stronger toms ousting weaker rivals that then either hang around the periphery of the group or strike out on their own to find more congenial territory. Occasionally, males born within  a colony do become accepted by the senior members simply because of their familiarity, but a strange tom attempting to infiltrate the group is usually rejected vigorously.
CONTROL OF COLONIES Life in a feral cat colony is hard and tends  to be short. While well-cared-for pet cats often live into their teens, a feral cat is lucky to survive beyond about three or four years. Diseases are common and spread rapidly. Nutrition is often inadequate, and as the colony grows there is less food for everyone.
Females weakened by continual breeding  are particularly vulnerable and may die, leaving sick and abandoned kittens. Traffic accidents and fighting among rival toms lead to injuries and infections (see pp. 304–05) that never receive treatment. Most countries now have a policy of managing feral cat colonies, both for humane reasons and to prevent them from becoming an environmental problem. As  a more acceptable alternative to wholesale eradication, many cat rescue organizations or animal welfare societies have put a three-part program into practice. This involves trapping the cats without causing injury, neutering them (and ear-tagging them for future identification), and returning them to the colony. Unfortunately, this often proves to be a temporary solution. The numbers of feral cats may fall for a time, but eventually unneutered cats will join the community and even a single breeding pair can restock the colony within a year.
BARN CATS In rural areas, feral cats are sometimes welcomed by farmers and other landowners as low-maintenance providers of rodent control in stables, barns, and feed stores. Some cat adoption centers have exploited this by offering farmers feral cats that  they have collected and taken into care.
Properly managed, such programs can be  a satisfactory solution to the problem of feral colonies that have become too large  or need to be relocated because of health issues. Although the animals concerned  are not regarded as pets, the people who “adopt” them must agree to provide minimum shelter, a small daily amount of cat food to augment whatever prey is taken by hunting, and veterinary care if necessary.

Farmyard haven Although they will never be family pets


often manage to survive on their own once they have reverted to the wild. Most have highly developed hunting instincts that allow them to subsist on small prey such as birds and rodents, and many supplement their diets by scavenging or accepting food handouts from sympathetic cat lovers.  Such cats usually learn to become wary  of humans, but because they still have a background of domesticity it is sometimes possible to rehabilitate them. Truly feral cats, which are born wild  and never handled, are difficult if not impossible to domesticate as adults. Feral kittens, if rescued at a very early age, can sometimes be socialized with time and patience; but even at a few weeks old 
they have a natural distrust of humans and may already be beyond the stage where this  can be overcome.
STICKING TOGETHER The majority of domestic cats lead solitary lives and resent or fear competition for food, territory, and shelter. However, two or more cats that share a home can become friends, especially if they are littermates. Others,  at best, cease hostilities and settle down together with indifference. Among feral cats there is a much greater degree of sociability. Because food supplies can be scarce and unreliable, any feral cats within one area tend to be drawn to a common food source, such as a garbage dump, a feeding station organized by cat welfare organizations,  or an empty building overrun by rats and
mice. Out of necessity, these cats tolerate each other and will share resources with minimal aggression. Where a few feral cats have found shelter, a colony can build up, which over the years can amount to dozens of animals of several interrelated generations. Any unneutered females attract toms—entire males—and frequent matings produce two or more litters of kittens a year for each female. Established colonies are very much matriarchal societies, with a core population of females that often form close bonds. Female cats have been observed sharing birth dens and cooperatively nursing and raising litters of kittens, taking turns guarding the family when one of the mothers goes out hunting. Feral females have even been known to present a combined front 
A feral cat crouches against the backdrop of the ancient Ionian city of Ephesus, in what is now western Turkey.  As a source of titbits, tourist hot spots such as this tend  to attract feral cat colonies.
Respite from hunger These cats lining the waterfront of a Greek harbor may thrive in the summer months, when there are fish scraps  to be had from fishing boats, and tourists provide handouts or leave edible garbage. Their lives will be m

Being resourceful animals, cats that have strayed or been abandoned by their owners


perhaps presented some of their cats as prestigious gifts to Chinese emperors or  to the Romans, who were becoming increasingly powerful in northern Africa.  After domestic cats reached Rome, the advance of the Roman Empire carried them even farther throughout Western Europe.  By the end of the Roman Empire, cats were probably widespread in Britain, where they were to enjoy hundreds of years of peaceful coexistence with people until they fell out of favor in the Middle Ages (see pp. 24–27).
ON TO THE NEW WORLD With the beginning of the great voyages of discovery and colonization that set out from Europe from the 15th century onward, domestic cats crossed the Atlantic for the first time. Taken on board sailing ships to control infestations of rodents, they had ample time on the long sea passages to the Americas to produce kittens. When they arrived at ports of call, many of these burgeoning cat families simply jumped ship,
or were perhaps traded with local communities, while others accompanied pioneering settlers into the interior of the  New World. In the opposite direction, cats headed for Australia on convict ships and alongside colonists. There is  a possibly apocryphal story that the first cats to reach Australia were in fact survivors of a Dutch shipwreck in the mid-17th century.
RISE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CAT By the middle of the 19th century, domestic cats could be found on almost every sizeable landmass in the world and had diversified into distinct types. In Europe and the United States, the import of exotic-looking cats such as the Siamese and Turkish Angora stimulated much interest, and people began to see the taken-for-granted farmyard mouser or house pet in a new light. For almost the first time since the days of the ancient Egyptians, the cat was about to be once again a prized possession and a status symbol. Like-minded owners began to form cat clubs, where they could enthuse about their particular favorites and argue the merits of one type over another. These cat fanciers— or the “cat fancy” as they came to be known—organized shows that engendered much rivalry and endless competition to produce better-quality cats that conformed to ever-more precise specifications. The serious breeding of pedigree cats and the perfection of breed standards triggered a new phase of international travel for cats. As getting around the world became easier from the mid-20th century onward, cat enthusiasts, and even ordinary tourists, discovered “new” breeds—for example, the Turkish Van or the bobtailed cats from Japan—that had in fact been developing over many centuries in rarely visited areas. Brought back to the United States and the UK, such cats were used to start enthusiastic breeding programs and transatlantic exchanges. Cats have even been highly
Cats got where they are today largely by sea travel. From ancient times, when they first left Egypt, they crossed vast distances on ships taking merchants, colonists, and adventurers around the world. Cats were sometimes carried as trade items, but more often as vermin controllers. Wherever people disembarked in new lands, so did the cats. The tradition of a ship’s cat continues today only among private sailors. Modern commercial and naval vessels  no longer permit cats like “Stripey,” seen below on board the British Royal Navy warship HMS Warspite in the 1940s. SHIPS’ CATS
mobile within their native countries, moving from relative obscurity in  a particular area  to nationwide popularity and then—for example, the Devon Rex or the Maine Coon— achieving international recognition. In the 21st century, cats are still passing back and forth across the Atlantic as  one exotic breed after another becomes fashionable. Crosses between such novelties have produced yet further variations. As some of these become recognized outside their country of origin—and not all are—the global migration of cats continues.  One of the most recent developments has been a return to the original wildcat template, with breeders creating spotted  cats not unlike those that 4,000 years ago became the first pet felines. The domestic cat’s extensive travels could be said to have brought it back to its starting point.

Cats got where they are today largely by sea travel. From ancient times, when they first left


status symbols or pets, takes a major leap backward to 7500 BCE. The Cyprus cat is similar to the domestic cat’s ancestor, the African wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica (see  p. 9 and pp. 12–13). If it did belong to this species, it was not native to the island and  so must have been taken there. Archeologists have also recently disinterred the bones of small felines at  the site of a 5,000-year-old arable farming settlement in central China. Detailed analysis of the bones suggested that the  cats had preyed on grain-eating rodents,  so they clearly had some association with the human community, although whether  by chance or because they had been tamed  is impossible to establish.  Fascinating though they are, these newest finds are a long way from representing conclusive proof that the domestication  of the cat is an older story than originally believed. However, it is likely that the domestication of the cat progressed through a number of unsuccessful starts.
MOVING INDOORS Cats probably first put a paw into domestic life when humans made the switch from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers. Growing crops meant storing grain, and granaries attracted swarms of rodents 
ready to feast on this new bonanza of food. In turn, this provided an inexhaustible supply of easily caught prey for local populations of wildcats. The modern house cat has its origins in the very birthplace of agriculture, a swathe of richly productive farmlands known as the Fertile Crescent that extends from the Nile Valley up to the eastern Mediterranean  and then southward to the Persian Gulf  (see map, opposite). When, more than  2000 years BCE, the ancient Egyptians established the earliest-known organized agricultural societies along the banks of  the Nile, the African wildcats of the region were ready to fill a new niche.  Most of the cats that began to visit the Fertile Crescent farming communities would have been small spotted tabbies, very much like many of today’s household pets. Although initially these cats arrived
uninvited, eventually farmers began to realize the benefits of having on-site rodent control. The popular theory is that people actively encouraged cats to take up residence in their grain stores by tempting them with food scraps. From there, it is easy to imagine how the increasingly socialized cats would have moved into the house. Sheltered from the hazards of the wild, including larger predators, cats could now breed prolifically and their offspring had  a better chance of surviving to maturity. A litter of kittens born in a domestic environment, and most likely petted from  a very young age, could with little difficulty be absorbed into a family as pets. As Egyptian civilization rose, so did the status of Egyptian cats, whose eventual progression from household mouser to sacred icon is well recorded in paintings, statues, and mummified remains (see  pp. 24–25). However, until cats started  to spread out of the Fertile Crescent from about 500 BCE (see pp. 18–19), the concept  of the cat as a truly domesticated
Out of all the big cat species, only  the cheetah has proved possible to domesticate to any extent. Both the ancient Egyptians and the Assyrians kept tame cheetahs and used them for hunting, as centuries later did  the Mogul emperors in India. These beautiful animals can be remarkably tractable when habituated to people—the huntsmen of old trained them to accept a collar and leash, and to return to the huntsmen when the chase was over. However, even among those with the means to keep them, cheetahs never became widespread as pets. This is most probably because until recently people did not understand their breeding behavior well enough for them to reproduce successfully in captivity. Replacement animals were always sourced from the wild and therefore never developed the temperament of domestic pets that are born and raised by people over many generations.

special significance. If this is the case, the evidence that people kept cats

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