‘Parasites of human societies’: How did we end up so close to cats?
Win-win interactions can be found in nature. These relationships, known as mutualisms, involve members of different species working together for mutual benefit.
But the relationships between two species can change over time, with those that started out as mutualists potentially evolving into parasite-host relationships, Rob Dunnprofessor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, previously told Live Science.
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As we think about how we measure our mutualisms, it’s worth thinking about cats. Pet cats, house cats, under the table and on the table, cats are everywhere and we take them for granted, but what exactly do we get out of our partnership with them?
As far as I know, cats are no longer worshiped as gods. However, they are not our mutualists either. At first glance, they appear to be parasites of human societies, at least from a Darwinian perspective. They take advantage of us at the cost of the food we provide them. The collective weight of domestic cats exceeds that of African savannah elephants. And Americans alone feed 15 billion calories of food to domestic cats every day – much of it meat – about as many calories as humans in New York would consume in a day.
We give them tuna; like royalty, they prey on the ocean’s top predators. In exchange, what do we get in return?
I admit in advance that I try to answer this question with apprehension. The conclusion I arrive at may require us to broaden our conception of what the terms of mutualism can be; they definitely force us to rethink what a cat is.
Today, hundreds of millions of domestic cats live with humans around the world. In the United States alone, there are more than 70 million domestic cats – 70 million meowing, purring and scratching creatures – one cat for every four adult humans.
There have never been so many felines [members of the cat family] on Earth. Worldwide, there are probably about half a billion cats, although no one has a significant number of them. We have replaced almost all of the world’s wild carnivorous felines – tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards – with domestic cats. Where once we feared jaguars, we now face beings we deign to give names like Edgar Allen Paw, Co.purrNicus and, too often, Mr. Whiskers.
These domestic cats are all descendants of the African or Libyan wild cat, Felis silvestris lybica. African wildcats are, and have long been, native to North Africa and the Levant. Their range clashes with that of European wild cats, Felis silvestris silvestrisin Türkiye. As humans began to cultivate and store grain, African wildcats began to move into small agricultural human settlements. Once there, they ate mice and rats. They may also have eaten the snakes that ate these rodents (as emphasized in Egyptian art and later writings).
Studies carried out by Italian feline geneticist Claudio Ottoni of DNA present in cat bones found in archaeological sites have so far been unable to uncover any evidence that early African wildcats living with humans were genetically different from their wild ancestors and relatives. Their genes appear to have been roughly the same, or perhaps just the same.
At least in the early days of cat-human relationships, their bones were the same. The first village and city cats appear to have been the same African wildcat, simply living closer to humans. Species with this habit are sometimes called “synanthropes”, which means nothing other than coexistence, living with humans (synanthropes) (anthrope). These cats living with humans had learned to be docile with humans, just as humans had learned to behave with them, most of the time.
“Tame” is a vague word. Biologists use it to express a kind of mutual tolerance between a non-human animal species and humans. It comes from an ancient Indo-European word meaning “to subdue.” But this root is misleading. Most tame species either have traits that cause them to behave docilely, as is the case with many island species long naive to large predators, or they choose to be tamed, to enter our worlds without threat. To be tamed is to come in peace.
After entering human cities, partially or fully tamed wild cats associated with humans spread into agricultural societies. By 9,500 years ago, wild cats had arrived in places they could not reach without the help of humans. Wild cats are not native to Cyprus. However, they arrived. A 9,500-year-old burial on the island of Cyprus includes a an eight-month-old cat carefully prepared for the afterlife alongside a human. How? It’s unlikely that ancient cats engaged in long swims on their own (if you doubt this statement, try bathing a wild cat). Wild but tame cats were brought/carried/transported here and there by humans. It’s likely their human drivers were scratched in the process.
In early colonies, cats and humans were friends with mutual benefits, whether one or the other had control over the other and whether one partner or the other changed, through evolution, relative to the other. It was a mutualism on its last legs. Cats have benefited from the mess of humans and the effects of that mess on rodents. Humans benefited from the control cats could exert over rodent populations.
Today, most domestic cats do not prey on rats. But reports of early Egyptian cats suggest they may have been larger than modern domestic cats. At least one Roman archaeological site in Egypt records a glutton cat with the bones of six rats in its stomach. In good years, cats’ consumption of rodents, large and small, might have been a kind of pleasure for humans (“Ah, fewer mice”). In years when food was scarce, this probably saved lives. It could also have saved lives when diseases carried by rodents or their fleas killed humans – diseases such as the plague. Later, cats also played an increased role on ships, where mice and rats were gloriously abundant and grain was a valuable and relatively rare commodity.
Where cat domestication specialists—yes, there are a few, although they could fit at a long table—begin to diverge is whether cat predation on mice, rats, and snakes continued to matter as human settlements grew more and more. This is a subject that could be partially addressed through mathematical models.
I suppose that in small settlements in the ancient Levant or, later, in Mesopotamia, cats probably managed to reduce the abundance of mice, and perhaps rats, and therefore also their negative effects. But in large urban centers, such as those that emerged with the New Kingdom period in Egypt (1,600 BCE), grain was stored in immense quantities. Where there were entire buildings filled with grain, in towns that were practically overflowing with grain, it seems unlikely that one could keep enough cats around the grain to make the cats count.
It would have taken hundreds, if not thousands, of cats moving around the attic, meowing and acting angry. It is therefore entirely possible that as early grain-based settlements developed, the functional role of cats in controlling rodents and snakes diminished.
It was around this time that cats began to appear in new forms in Egyptian art. 3,500 years ago, cats were no longer shown hunting. Instead, they hid under tables or chairs, often alongside powerful Egyptian women. As Claudio Ottoni pointed out to me, these “under chair” cats were usually leashed, perhaps indicating that they were perhaps tame but not yet docile enough to pose unrestrainedly for an artist. Cats under chairs seem to indicate that as the human-cat relationship persisted, new kinds of bonds were formed, bonds that were no longer simply about cats’ role in pest control. But why?
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