Win-win interactions can be found across nature. These relationships, known as mutualisms, involve members of different species working together for mutual benefit.
But relationships between two species can change over time, with those that start out as mutualists potentially evolving into parasite-host relationships, Rob Dunnprofessor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, previously told LiveScience.com.
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When we think about the ways in which we measure our reciprocity, it is worth considering cats. House cats, house cats, under the table and on the table, cats are everywhere and we take them for granted, but what do we get out of our cooperation with them?
As far as I know, cats are no longer worshiped as gods. Yet they are not our mutualists either. Superficially, they appear to be parasites of human societies, at least from a Darwinian perspective. They take advantage of us at the expense of the food we give them. The combined weight of domestic cats exceeds that of African savannah elephants. And Americans alone feed 15 billion calories worth of food to domestic cats every day — much of it meat — about as many calories as humans would consume in New York City in a day.
We feed them tuna; as royalty, they feast on the sea’s best predators. In exchange, what do we get in return?
I admit up front that I try to answer this question with trepidation. The conclusion I come to may require us to broaden our perception of what the terms of reciprocity might be; they definitely require us to rethink what a cat is.
Today, hundreds of millions of domestic cats live with humans around the world. More than 70 million domestic cats can be found in the United States alone – 70 million meowing, purring, clawing creatures – one cat for every four adult humans.
There have never before been so many felines (members of the cat family) on earth. Globally, there are probably about half a billion cats, although none have large numbers. We have replaced almost all the wild carnivorous cats in the world – tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards – with domestic cats. Where we once feared jaguars, we are now confronted with creatures worth naming like Edgar Allen Paw, Co.spinnicus, and all too often Mr. Whiskers.
These domestic cats are all descendants of the African or Libyan wild cat, Felis silvestris lybica. African wild cats are, and have long been, native to both North Africa and the Levant. Their distribution clashes with that of European wild cats, Felis silvestris silvestrisin Turkey. As humans began to cultivate and store grain, African wild cats began to move into small agricultural settlements. Once there they ate mice and rats. They may also have eaten the snakes that ate these rodents (as highlighted in Egyptian art and later writing).
Studies led by the Italian cat geneticist Claudio Ottoni from DNA present in the bones of cats found at archaeological sites have so far been unable to discover any evidence that the earliest African wildcats living with humans were genetically distinct from their wild ancestors and relatives. Their genes seem to have been almost the same, or perhaps simply the same.
At least early in the cat-human relationship, their bones were the same. The early village and city cats seem to have been the same African wild cat, simply living in closer proximity to humans. Species with this habit are sometimes called “synanthropes”, meaning nothing more than co-occurrence, living with (syn) humans (anthrop). These cats that lived with humans had learned to behave tamely around humans, just as humans had learned to behave tamely around them, most of the time.
“Tameness” 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 old Indo-European word meaning “to oppress”. However, this root is misleading. Most domesticated species either have traits that lead them to behave domestically, as is the case with many island species that have long been naive to large predators, or they choose to be domesticated, in order to enter our worlds without threats. To be tamed is to come to peace.
After entering human cities, the partially or fully domesticated human-associated feral cats spread with agricultural societies. 9,500 years ago, wild cats had reached places they could not reach without the help of humans. Feral cats are not native to Cyprus. Still they came. A 9,500-year-old burial on the island of Cyprus includes a eight-month-old cat carefully prepared for life after death with a human. How? Old cats are unlikely to have engaged in long swims on their own (if you doubt this claim, try bathing a feral cat). Wild but domesticated cats were ushered/ferried/carried here and there by humans. It is likely that their human drivers were scratched in the process.
In early settlements, cats and humans were friends with mutual benefits, regardless of whether one exercised any control over the other and whether one partner changed, evolutionarily, relative to the other. There was a reciprocity on the length of the paw. The cats benefited from the messiness of humans and the effects of the messiness on rodents. Humans benefited from the control cats could exercise over rodent populations.
Today, most domesticated 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 bones from six rats in its stomach. In good years, cats’ consumption of small and large rodents may have been a kind of pleasantry for humans (“Ah, fewer mice”). This year when food was short, it probably saved lives. It may also have saved lives when diseases carried by rodents, or the fleas on them, killed people – diseases like the plague. Later, cats also played an increased role on ships, where mice and rats were abundant and grain was a precious and relatively scarce commodity.
Where scholars of cat domestication—yes, there are a few, though they would fit at a long dinner table—begin to differ is whether cat predation on mice, rats, and snakes continued to matter as human settlements grew ever larger. This is a subject that can partly be treated through mathematical models.
I suppose that in small settlements in the ancient Levant, or later, in Mesopotamia, cats were probably successful in reducing the amount of mice, and perhaps rats, and so also their negative effects. But in large urban centers, such as those that emerged with the New Kingdom of Egypt (1600 BCE), grain was stored in enormous quantities. Where there were entire buildings full of grain, in cities practically overflowing with grain, it seems unlikely that you could have enough cats around the grain for the cats to matter.
It would have required hundreds or even thousands of cats to roam the granary, meowing and acting pissed off. It is therefore entirely possible that as early grain-based settlements grew, the cat’s functional role in rodent and snake control diminished.
It is during this period that cats began to appear in new forms in Egyptian art. 3,500 years ago, cats were no longer shown hunting. Instead, they lurked under tables or chairs, often with powerful Egyptian women. As Claudio Ottoni pointed out to me, these “under chair” cats were usually on leashes, perhaps an indication that they may have been domesticated but not yet so docile as to pose unrestrainedly for an artist. The cats under the chair seem to indicate that as the human-cat relationship persisted, new types of bonds were formed, bonds that were no longer solely related to the cats’ role in controlling vermin. But why?
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