There is a saying that “nobody owns a cat”, but archaeological remains suggest that wildcats have been slinking inside huts for treats and strokes for around 9,000 years. Scientists recently discovered that all of today’s domestic cats descend from one subspecies of African wildcat, and that our ancestors could be divided into cat or dog people as early as the stone age.
Perhaps the ultimate “cat people” were the Egyptians, who worshipped our feline friends to such an extent that they imposed the death penalty for killing one, shaved their eyebrows in grief when theirs died, and had them mummified and placed in purr-amids in readiness for the kitty afterlife. For ancient Romans, Felis silvestris catus was a symbol of liberty and an effective form of pest control. It was cats’ mice-bothering skills that allowed them to pad across Asia, where dedicated mousers protected silkworm cocoons and treasured manuscripts from rodents.
The middle ages were a bit of a low period in the history of catkind, as felines were cast as symbols of “sinful” female sexuality and witchcraft by the church. In Malleus Maleficarum, the medieval treatise on witchcraft usually translated as The Witch Hammer, a 13th-century folk story depicts three witches that turn themselves into cats and attack a man. From then on witches were believed to have cats as sidekicks, or to change into feline form in the night. But by the 15th century, cats were coming back into favour, helped in part by the legend of Dick Whittington, who made his fortune thanks to his rat-killing kitty. This kitty may or may not have worn boots in real life – and may or may not have sounded like Antonio Banderas.
It was around this time that cat-fans started breeding moggies for particular coat colours and textures. Kitty genetics is a fascinating field. Cats come in two dominant colours – black and red – that are “diluted” or “masked” to become “blue” (appearing grey) or “cream”. The red colour is only carried on the X chromosome, which is why tortoiseshell cats are nearly always female, and ginger cats are nearly always male. (This is all great trivia with which to impress your cat-loving and/or geneticist friends, by the way.)
There have been many “crazy cat ladies” – and gentlemen, for that matter – throughout history, notably Cardinal Richelieu (AKA the baddie in The Three Musketeers), who had 14 cats at the time of his death in 1642, including Ludovic le Cruel, so named because of his savage dedication to killing rats. Catherine the Great of Russia turned the Winter Palace into a cattery, with her favoured breed of Russian blues running wild upstairs and a basement full of “working cats” that she promoted to guard status, complete with salaries and extra food rations. Winston Churchill kept cats at Chartwell, while Abraham Lincoln was such a cat obsessive that he fed his kittens Tabby and Dixy at the table at a state dinner, and regularly took in strays to the White House.
As cats became a popular indoor pet – no doubt helped by the invention of cat litter in 1947 – they clawed their way into popular culture, too. Whole essays have been written on the cartoon cat, from Sylvester the Cat, who first appeared in 1939, right up to Pokémon’s Meowth, via Felix, Top Cat, Garfield, Bagpuss and the Aristocats. Not to forget Alice’s Cheshire Cat, which also appeared in cartoon form in the 1951 Disney film.
In a nod to the feline’s medieval association with evil, cats also became the purr-fect accomplice for witches, Bond villains and, in homage, Mike Myers’s Dr Evil. They were also the animal ally of choice for breakfasters at Tiffany’s, the alien-battling Ripley in the otherwise very non-furry Alien films, and leather-loving Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman herself in Batman Returns.
But it’s the internet that has taken cats from much-loved pet to feline overlord. From “I can has cheezburger” memes to Grumpy Cat, via the 52 million people who have watched a ginger cat called Fatso play a keyboard, Brits share 3.8m cat pictures and videos every day. Meanwhile, social media has made stars of some pampered pusses, such as Karl Lagerfeld’s fluffy white Birman, Choupette (112.4k followers), Kitty Purry (Katy Perry’s cat) and Taylor Swift’s two cats, who now have their own merchandise line, the Meredith and Olivia Swift collection.
But before memes there was poetry. In the ninth century, an Irish monk wrote a poem about his cat, Pangur Bán. For Baudelaire, the cat’s meow was the very source of his verse. When Romantic poet Robert Southey’s cat, Rumpelstiltskin, finally went for his great catnap in the sky, Southey wrote: “There should be a court mourning in Catland.” Meanwhile, Thomas Gray was composing an Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes. If only they’d been alive in 2002, when the first cloned kitten – the aptly named “CC” – was born.
And while Kristen Roupenian’s viral New Yorker short story Cat Person could stake a claim, the most famous feline work of literature has to be TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Fitting, then, that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s record-breaking 1981 musical version is about to get a big screen reboot, starring – who else? – contemporary cat woman Taylor Swift. Memories in the making, for sure.
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