The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World

Why do we show such affection and care for some animals but disregard the welfare of others?

... the hybrid breeders dream big. "The end game is to create the most beautiful example of something that looks wild but is domestic," says Anthony Hutcherson, who breeds Bengals, a mix of house cat and Asian leopard cat lineage whose name nods to a type of endangered tiger. "It's great to win a cat show, but it is more rewarding to make something that looks like a little leopard or jaguar or ocelot that eats cat food and purrs on sight.

The house cat has gained ground from the Arctic Circle to the Hawaiian archipelago, taken over Tokyo and New York, and stormed the entire continent of Australia. And somewhere along the way, it seized the most precious and closely guarded piece of territory on the planet: the stronghold of the human heart.

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 kin to the cat show’s human judges than to its meowing contestants.

Petkeeping has thus been called a ‘misfiring of our parental instincts’.

Unlike truly wild animals, for instance, they weren’t shy of Dollar’s traps—especially once they realized that they would always be released. He snared a few cats so often that he named them. “We caught Sylvester every day for three weeks in a row,” Dollar marvels. “He wasn’t going to purr or rub up against our legs or anything, but he figured, ‘I go in this box, I eat the bait, and these guys come get me out the next day.’

real love requires understanding.

That’s how our eyes face, too. Primates are not ambush predators but largely vegetarian browsers, and we’ve used our centrally located eyes for very different purposes: scanning bushes for ripe fruit at close range, and much more recently, for reading the facial expressions of others. Cats’ eye placement is a major part of what makes their faces appear so person-like to us. (Owls, another visual nocturnal predator, have similar facial composition, which perhaps explains why we prefer them to, say, vultures.)

House cats are blessed with a killer set of what Austrian ethnologist Konrad Lorenz calls “baby releasers”: physical traits that remind us of human young and set off a hormonal cascade. These features include a round face, chubby cheeks, big forehead, big eyes, and a little nose.

(At first this struck me as an unusual alliance, but if you think about it, the Disney franchise is staunchly pro-rodent, and its best-known pet pussies, from Cinderella’s Lucifer to Alice’s Cheshire Cat, are all at least mildly villainous.)

At the Alley Cat Allies conference, I sit through a very technical presentation on Tomahawk trap trip plates, postoperative temperature control, and other TNR mechanics. As the sober PowerPoint concludes, the presenter suddenly flashes a slide of an adorable feline neonate: "And this is my kitten Rex!" she says. The room explodes in squeals. It was a bit like ending a lecture on the war on drugs with a picture of a lit crack pipe—especially since there is actually some evidence that cats, like street drugs, have clinically compromised our minds.

Bastet, whose cult was based in the Nile city of Bubastis, had especially raucous festivals, where revelers from across the country floated into town on party barges. At their peak, these celebrations—more or less cat raves, in which worshippers danced and tore off their clothes—were attended by an estimated 700,000 people, a huge chunk of Egypt’s population

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 would 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.

Petkeeping has this been called a ‘misfiring of our parental instincts

In a storage room, Harris shows off the milk teeth of a Smilodon kitten. They are almost four inches long. “How did they nurse?” I ask. “Very carefully,” he answers.

Cats are biologically at odds with the broadest patterns of human civilization. This was true from the first: Egypt, the first great agrarian culture, gradually lost much of its lion population. The Romans—who bagged big cats for processions and Colosseum spectacles—documented regional shortages as early as 325 BC. By the twelfth century lions were gone from Palestine, where they were once common. Before Europeans arrived in India, Mughal emperors fragmented the tiger population by razing forests. And so it went with all kinds of wild cats.