Cultural history: The wildcat in the pet

There are around 600 million domestic cats worldwide, and in Germany alone there are around seven million. However, your story of becoming a pet is not yet complete. They have largely retained important skills for independent survival, such as night vision with a special layer behind the retina of their glowing eyes, their fine hearing, their highly sensitive beard and whiskers, small measuring bodies for ground vibrations in the pads of their soles and, last but not least, their sense of balance , which always allows her to stand on all four paws.

The evolutionary biologist Jonathan B. Losos believes that the term “semi-domesticated” is appropriate for domestic cats. In his book “From the Savannah to the Sofa” he justifies this with the relatively small difference between the wild cats, which are now threatened with extinction, and the mostly friendly “house tigers”. Only 13 genes differ between the anatomically very similar animals. Domestic cats have a 40 percent longer intestine, which allows them to better digest plant foods such as bread, pasta or vegetables. Nevertheless, cats absolutely need meat or fish because this is the only way they can cover their high need for the amino acid taurine for their eyesight. The European wildcat has a 27 percent larger brain, in which the areas for aggression, fear and reactivity are particularly pronounced.

Ancestors in North Africa

The common ancestors of large cats such as lions and small cats such as rusty cats, sand cats and wild cats separated around eleven million years ago. Genetic studies of archaeological cat DNA show that all domestic cats today are descended from the North African wildcat. When and where taming and domestication began has not yet been conclusively proven. Bones of a domestic cat were found in a 9,500-year-old grave in Cyprus. Further evidence such as mummified cats, sculptures and images come from the Egyptian empire of the pharaohs 4000 years ago.

Cats were worshiped there as messengers of the cat-headed goddess Bastet, the goddess of love and health. The North African cats probably approached the large granaries where countless mice were hiding. 2,500 years ago, cats spread by sea to Greece, Rome, Jordan, Bulgaria and Turkey. A cat on the ship kept the mice away from the provisions and was valued as a good luck charm.

In Norse myths, cats were admired for their courage and fierceness. The Druids placed the wildcat at the side of the goddess Brigid. Old Germanic images show the goddess Freya with four wild cats in their typical beige-black striped fur pattern.

Different colors of domestic cats only emerged within the last 2000 years. Gene mutations for black, white or orange fur would have had disadvantages in the wild. Boldly colored cats would be seen and caught more quickly by their natural enemies such as large birds of prey. It was only humans who began to select special colors created through mutation that shaped this variety of colors. White cats were considered a symbol of fertility and tricolor cats in white, gray tabby and orange were called lucky cats.

frowned upon by the Christian church

In the course of Christianization, the view of animals changed. Some representatives of the Christian church were suspicious of cats living out their passionate heat. After all, an outdoor female can mate loudly with one or different tomcats around 15 times a day during the seven days that she ovulates. (These tones were brought back to their natural state in the 1986 GDR song “Cats at Night” by Petra Zieger and recreated with distorted electric guitar.)

In the late Middle Ages, black cats were demonized and persecuted as symbols of the devil. The word heretic was directly related to cats that were supposedly kept by evil witches.

Nowadays, conservationists in particular criticize the hunting instinct of free-roaming domestic cats, which not only kill mice but also songbirds. The biologist Jonathan Losos advocates breeding more peaceful purebred cats with a less developed hunting instinct, i.e. a cat for the 21st century that could, for example, help only children to have more empathy and older, lonely people to lower their blood pressure.