Whether you love cats or hate ‘em, we can all agree, no other cats have a rap quite like black cats. While black cats are tied to Halloween, black magic and misfortune, there’s significantly more to them than unpleasant stuff. Learn more about them, how they became Halloween symbols, the places where they bring luck, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Cats of domestic descent that have known little or no human contact, or former pets that have become homeless for various reasons, are termed “feral.” Although feral cats live in a wild state, they have no relationship to the true wildcat species found throughout the world. Being resourceful animals, cats that have strayed or been …
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 …
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. …
Cats are world citizens and have come a long way from their roots in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. While cats do not respect boundaries, and some early house cats probably moved independently, they have mostly traveled where humans have taken them. Even in areas where their wild counterparts have never occurred— such as …
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 …
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 …