TIME Cats

MOHAMMAD CUT THE SLEEVE FROM his robe rather than disturb his friend, asleep on the Prophet’s gown. Samuel Johnson pampered his spoiled companion Hodge daily with meals of fresh oysters. Victor Hugo cherished Gavroche. Cardinal Richelieu left a generous legacy for the 14 he owned. Napoleon is said to have broken into a cold sweat at the sight of one. In his childhood, Smerdyakov, in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, was fond of hanging them. Thomas Hardy and Thomas Gray wrote poems to them; Hemingway shared dinner with his. Physician and scholar Albert Schweitzer favored two ways to take refuge from human misery: playing the organ and delighting in the play of his cats. From deification to demonization and every stage in between, attitudes toward cats have been confused, variable, peculiar,…

MOST PEOPLE LOVE CATS. ME? I envy them. Sure, they’re sweet and snuggly, cute and cuddly. But don’t be fooled—cats are total badasses. While they are technically domesticated animals, they’re not that domesticated. If the grid goes down and society collapses, we humans and our obedient tail-wagging poodleoodle-doodles won’t last a month. But cats? They’ll be running this joint, fat and happy. I envy how cats take charge in any given situation. To paraphrase Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, cats know what they want and they know how to get it. For example, many years ago, just after college graduation, a bunch of my buddies moved into an apartment in some dark, disgusting corner of New York City. It was the kind of place that only a bunch of…

They’re not all that tame If your cat seems to have a wild side, there’s a reason: A study on house cats found that our feline companions are only semi-domesticated. People began domesticating cats around 9,000 years ago, but DNA researchers from Washington University in St. Louis found in 2014 that house cats still have many of the same traits as their wild cousins. The fact that cats have retained the ability to hunt and survive effortlessly in the wild underscores how little impact we humans have had on them. Wes Warren, an associate professor of genomics at the university, told the Los Angeles Times, “We believe we have created the first preliminary evidence that depicts domestic cats as not that far removed from wildcat populations.” That’s not to say…

BRITISH SHORTHAIR This ancient breed came to England by way of Egypt and Rome and enjoys a reputation as one of the gentlest cats around. A 2019 study in the journal Nature deemed British Shorthairs the least likely breed to act aggressively toward family members or toward strangers. The most famous British Shorthair is the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ABYSSINIAN If you’re undecided about whether to get a cat or a dog, you could split the difference and go with an Abyssinian. These energetic and affectionate felines are regarded as the dogs of the cat world. It is the breed that looks like the cats most commonly seen in artifacts of ancient Egypt, and their reach expanded when they were brought home by British soldiers…

WHEN WE LISTEN TO CATS, CAN we tell what they want from those meows they so skillfully direct at us? Many people feel they understand what cats are saying when hearing them meow. However, under the scrutiny of scientific tests, it seems we may rely on more than just their meows to get the full picture. In a pioneering experiment, Nicholas Nicastro recorded the meows of cats in five different situations: requesting food, annoyed at being brushed, requesting attention, requesting to be let out, and distressed when traveling in a car. He played them back to people and discovered that, although they performed better than chance at identifying the meow contexts, without the added visual cues gained when seeing the vocalizing cat, people found this quite difficult. This conclusion was…

IN 2014, DOZENS OF OAKLAND RESIDENTS QUEUED UP TO partake of a new phenomenon that brought together cats and drip coffee. The founders of Cat Town café, a hybrid drinkery and “cat zone,” held a grand opening for the nation’s first permanent cat café—a furry fantasy others had tried to realize only to be derailed by funding problems and pesky health codes. “The cat café, to us, is fun schtick on top of a serious rescue operation,” said Adam “Catman” Myatt, a photographer who cofounded Cat Town with Ann Dunn, on the occasion of its precedent-setting opening. Disheartened by the cramped, scarring conditions at local animal services, Dunn started a nonprofit foster program in 2010 to help whiskery creatures find homes. That operation, Cat Town, became the springboard for the…