The Unadulterated Cat

The Cat in History

The books will tell you that cats evolved from civet ancestors about 45 million years ago, which was definitely a good start. Get as much distance between yourself and the civets as possible, that was the motto of the early cats. The civet cat has been a very nervous animal ever since it discovered that you can, er, derive civetone11 from it and use it in scent. Exactly how this is done I don't know and do not wish to research. It's probably dreadful. Oh, all right, I'll have a look.

It is.12

So, the story goes, the cat family pushed on with the evolving as fast as possible, going in for size, speed and ferocity. There's nothing like the fear that you might be mistaken for a civet for giving jets to your genes, especially when you know it's only a matter of millennia before your actual proto-hominids start wandering around the Holocenic landscape with a bottle, a knife and a speculative look in their eyes. They also spread out a bit but missed Australia, which had just gone past on the Continental Drift; this explains why the rats grew so big. Some got stripes, some tried spots. One well known early variety developed its very own do-it-yourself can opener a hundred thousand years before cat food came in tins, and died of being too early to take advantage of this.

And then, suddenly, small versions started toturn up and go mee-owp, mee-owp at people.

Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new “fire” stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst ofthem wanders into the cave and starts to purr.

More amazing yet, it didn't get et.

Dogs you can understand. They're pack creatures, humans are just another, brighter, pack leader. Dogs are handy for helping you run down things that are faster than you are. But cats—well, from Early Man's point of view, cats are good for nothing.

The first cat to approach the cave survived, in fact, on sheer surprise value. It was the first animal the man had ever seen that wasn't either running away or bounding towards him and dribbling. It liked him.

And the reason it felt this way was that the cat already knew that humans liked cats.

Here was a household in the country.

Households in the country attract cats. It's one of the fundamental wossnames of Nature. See the point? We know that Real cats can wander at will through time and space, and this cat was probably en route between feeding bowls before it took a wrong turning.

After all, what's the alternative? That Early Man had nothing better to do with his spare time than look at a wild cat and spot that this horizontal-headed, yellow-eyed, spitting menace was just the thing the cave needed? No, our theories demand that it went the other way, that wild cats are domestic cats that went feral thousands of years ago, probably because they were upset about something, possibly the continued non-invention of the fridge.

Cats make ideal time travellers because they can't handle guns. This makes the major drawback of time travel—that you might accidentally shoot your own grandfather—very unlikely. Of course, you might try to become your own grandfather, but having watched a family of farm cats, we can tell you that this is perfectly normal behaviour for a cat.