Contemporary Authors

1. The lion in the living room : how house cats tamed us and took over the world LCCN 2016000722 Type of material Book Personal name Tucker, Abigail. Main title The lion in the living room : how house cats tamed us and took over the world / Abigail Tucker. Published/Produced New York : Simon & Schuster, 2016. Description 241 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9781476738239 (hardcover : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER SF442.6 .T83 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Author Homepage - http://abigailtucker.com/#/about

  Abigail Tucker is a correspondent for Smithsonian magazine, where she covers a wide variety of subjects, from vampire anthropology to bioluminescent marine life to the archeology of ancient beer. Her work has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series and recognized by the National Academies of Sciences. Previously she was a reporter at The Baltimore Sun, where she won Columbia University’s Mike Berger Award for feature writing and a National Headliner award. The Lion in the Living Room is her first book.

  THE LION IN THE LIVING ROOM
  Introduction

  In the summer of 2012, Denise Martin and her husband, Bob, were camping in the Essex countryside, about fifty miles east of London and not far from the quaint vacation town of Clacton-on-Sea. Evening was just settling on the campground when Denise glimpsed something unexpected through their bonfire smoke. The 52-year-old factory worker fished out her binoculars for a better look.
  “What do you make of that?” she asked her husband. He, too, peered at the tawny creature lolling in a field a few hundred yards away.
  “That’s a lion,” Bob said.
  For a time they watched the beast and it seemed to watch them back. Its ears twitched, and it started cleaning itself. Later it ambled down a hedgerow. The couple’s reaction was serene, even philosophical. (“You don’t often see something like that in the wild,” Denise later told the Daily Mail.)
  Others at the campsite took a less tranquil view.
  “Christ, that’s a lion,” a neighbor said to himself as he peered through Denise’s binoculars.
  “It’s a fucking lion!” another man reportedly screamed, and took off running for his camper.
  The cat—rumored to be “as big as two sheep”—soon disappeared into the night, and panic spread. Police sharpshooters converged on the country field. Zookeepers came armed with tranquilizer guns. Helicopters hovered ahead, deploying heat-seeking technology. The campground was evacuated and the press arrived to chronicle the big game hunt. British Twitter exploded with news of “the Lion of Essex.”
  But nobody could find any trace of it.
  The Essex Lion is what is known as a Phantom Cat or, to the cryptozoologically correct, an ABC (Alien Big Cat). Like its many elusive brethren— the Beast of Trowbridge, the Hallingbury Panther—it’s a kind of feline UFO, a strange visitation that’s particularly common in parts of the former British Empire—England, Australia, New Zealand—where big cats no longer exist in nature, or never did.
  A few of the phantoms have been revealed as calculated frauds, or legitimate escapees from exotic menageries. But often these patrolling panthers and leopards on the loose turn out to be something much more familiar: the common house cat, mistaken for the awesome relatives whom he resembles in all but scale.
  So it was with the Lion of Essex, who was almost certainly just a burly orange pet named Teddy Bear. Teddy’s owners—who were on vacation at the time of the lion hunt—suspected him as soon as they saw the evening news.
  “He’s the only big gingery thing around there,” they told the newspapers.
  And so the farcical safari was over.
  Yet perhaps the campers were not fools but visionaries. Actual lions, after all, are no longer anything to fear, and many of us have come practically to pity the poor things. (Remember the international outcry for Cecil, the Zimbabwean lion dispatched by a safari-happy Minnesota dentist.) Former lords of the jungle, lions are now relics, ruling nothing: 20,000 holdouts barely hanging on in a few African preserves and a single Indian forest, dependent on our conservation money and our mercy. Their habitat shrinks each year and biologists fear they may vanish by the end of the century.
  Meanwhile, the lion’s little jester of a cousin, once an evolutionary footnote, has become a force of nature. The global house cat population is 600 million and counting, and more of them are born in the United States every single day than there are lions in the wilderness. New York City’s annual spring kitten crop rivals the wild tiger count. Worldwide, house cats already outnumber dogs, their great rival for our affections, by as many as three to one, and their advantage is probably increasing. The tally of pet cats in America rose by 50 percent between 1986 and 2006, and today approaches 100 million.
  Similar population jumps are happening across the planet: the pet cat population of Brazil alone is climbing at the rate of a million cats per year. But in many countries the quantities of owned cats are negligible compared to the burgeoning colonies of strays: Australia’s 18 million feral cats outnumber the pets by six to one.
  Wild and tame, homebound and footloose, these cats increasingly preside over nature and culture, the concrete jungles and the real ones beyond. They have seized control of cities, continents, even cyberspace. In many ways, they rule us.
  Through the billowing bonfire smoke, Denise Martin may have glimpsed the truth: the house cat is the new king of beasts.
  By now it’s obvious that our culture—both online and off —is in the grip of a cat craze. Celebrity house cats ink movie deals, make charitable donations, and count Hollywood starlets among their Twitter followers. Their plush likenesses fill the shelves at Nordstrom; they promote their own fashion lines and iced coffee blends; their images swarm the Internet. Indeed, house cats oversee entire cat cafés, bizarre establishments where people pay to sip tea among random felines, now opening their doors in New York and Los Angeles and in cities around the world.
  All this high silliness, however, distracts from something far more interesting. Despite our confessed cat obsession, we know very little about what these animals are, how they came to dwell among us, and why—both in and outside of our homes—they wield such immense power.
  The plot thickens when you consider how little we seem to get out of this fraught relationship. People are accustomed to driving a very hard bargain with domesticated animals. We expect our dependents to come to heel, schlep our stuff, or even obediently proceed to the slaughterhouse. Yet cats don’t fetch the newspaper or lay tasty eggs or let us ride them. It’s not often that human beings are left scratching our heads about why in the world we keep a creature around, let alone hundreds of millions of them. The obvious answer is that we like cats—love them, even. But why do we? What is their secret?
  It’s especially confusing because this same cherished creature is also classified as one of the world’s 100 worst invasive species, accused of damaging a range of ecosystems and even driving some endangered animals to extinction. Australian scientists recently described stray cats as a bigger menace to the continent’s mammals than global warming or habitat loss: in a landscape teeming with great white sharks and common death adders, it is the house cat that Australia’s Minister of the Environment has singled out as a “savage beast.” Bewildered animal lovers sometimes can’t decide if we should spoon-feed cats canned salmon with crème fraîche or harden our hearts against them forever.
  This same uncertainty permeates American laws: in some states, “pet trusts” enable house cats to legally inherit millions of dollars; in other places, cats who live outdoors are classified as vermin. New York City recently shut down a large swath of its mighty subway system in an effort to rescue two stray kittens, even as our country routinely euthanizes millions of healthy kittens and cats each year. When it comes to house cats, contradictions reign.
  The confounding nature of the human-feline affiliation helps explain house cats’ persistent associations with black magic. Indeed, the idea of a witch’s “familiar”—with its hints of both intimacy and uncanniness—is an excellent definition of the domestic feline. Maybe sorcery is as good an explanation as any for the cats’ mysterious and sometimes maddening power over us. Tellingly, an updated version of this medieval paranoia often surfaces in discussions of a common disease that cats spread, which infests human brain tissue and is said to compromise our thinking and behavior.
  In other words, we fear ourselves bewitched.
  I should confess that I myself have always been among the mesmerized. I haven’t just owned cats: for most of my life, I was the sort of person for whom you might purchase a whiskered Brie dish with matching potholders, and I’ve been known to decorate with cat blankets and coordinating pillows, and fill entire vacation albums with random Mediterranean cat photos. I have purchased pedigreed cats from Fabulous Felines (once rumored to be the world’s largest fancy cat emporium) and adopted stray kittens from shelters and the street. I have done these things at my personal and professional peril: I recently learned that a friend’s highly allergic mother crosses the road when she sees me coming, and once on a magazine assignment—while I toured a famous research colony of prairie voles—a scientist began wordlessly plucking cat hair off my sweater, lest the scent terrify the study rodents and threaten the integrity of various experiments. In the privacy of my own home, I continue to select carpeting based on a narrow spectrum of colors that best disguise cat barf.
  Few people can say they owe their very existence to felines, but I can: my parents vowed not to have children until they “trained” their first cat. (She eventually learned to chase a cork, and that was considered good enough.) Our family has never had anything but cats. My sister once traveled 400 miles to rescue a panicked Russian Blue from a dog lover’s bathroom. On long car trips, my mother has been known to wear her tabby draped around her shoulders like a fur stole as she whizzes past astonished toll keepers.
  Because cats were so much a part of my own background, I seldom considered the sheer oddness of harboring these tiny archcarnivores—until I had children, that is. Faced with my own offspring’s merciless demands, my devotion to another species’ appetites and potty habits began to seem silly and even a bit deranged. I studied my cats with fresh suspicion: How exactly had these crafty little creatures gotten their claws into me? Why had I treated them like my own babies for so many years?
  But even as these doubts flickered, I had the experience of seeing house cats through the eyes of little children. “Cat” was the first word both of my girls ever said. They begged for cat-themed outfits, toys, books, birthday parties. To toddlers, these pedestrian little house pets were very nearly lion-sized, and living with them seemed to ignite questions about a wilder world: “I want to be like Lucy with Aslan,” one sighed, soon after a foray into Narnia, while watching a neighbor’s cat from the window. “Does God love tigers?” they asked at bedtime, clutching plush house cats in their cribs.
  So I vowed to learn more about these creatures, and what makes our mystifying relationship tick. As it happens, I’ve spent much of my professional life writing about animals for newspapers and magazines, and I’ve gone almost to the ends of the earth in pursuit of the truth about various creatures, from red wolves to jellyfish, trying to understand them as independent organisms in a human-dominated world. But sometimes the best story of all lies directly underfoot.
  Which is where you can always find Cheetoh, this book’s bright-orange muse.
  Cheetoh is my present pet, adopted from an upstate New York trailer park where his father probably fought raccoons, and he weighs in at twenty pounds before breakfast. His unusual size has caused the plumber to pause in wonder upon entering our living room and the Comcast guy to snap cell phone pictures to show his friends. Cat sitters have occasionally refused to return, because Cheetoh—in furious pursuit of food—has chased them, belly waggling. His unusual proportions lend domestic existence an Alice in Wonderland–like quality: you constantly wonder if you’ve shrunk or he’s grown.
  It’s hard to believe that this oversize croissant curled up at the end of my bed belongs to a species that has the capacity to upend an ecosystem. But, biologically speaking, a cosseted indoor cat is no different from a hardscrabble Australian stray or an urban alley cat. Owned or not, purebred or mongrel, inhabiting a barn or a multifloor luxury condo, house cats are all the same animals. The domestication process has forever altered their genes and behavior, even if they’ve never seen a person. Kept and stray populations regularly interbreed, sustaining and propelling each other, and an individual house cat may begin life in one category and end up in another. The only differences are circumstances and semantics.
  And even if Cheetoh doesn’t seem like he would survive far from his food dish, his bludgeoning, feed-me-now persistence points toward an important truth: house cats are quite commanding animals. This is not because they are the smartest of creatures—nor the strongest, especially compared to near relations like jaguars and tigers. In addition to their small size, they are saddled with the same body plan and burdensome, protein-heavy dietary requirements that are driving other members of the cat family toward extinction.
  But house cats are supremely adaptable. They can live anywhere and, while they must have plenty of protein, they eat practically anything that moves, from pelicans to crickets, and many things that don’t, like hot dogs. (Some of their imperiled feline relatives, by contrast, are adapted to hunt only a rare species of chinchilla.) House cats can tweak their sleeping schedules and social lives. They can breed like crazy.
  As I dug into their natural history, it became hard not to admire these creatures in new and ever-wilder ways. And after interviewing dozens of biologists, ecologists, and other researchers, I have the sense that many of them—sometimes despite themselves—admire cats, too. This was a little unexpected, as the divide between cat lovers and the scientific profession has deepened in recent years, and not just because scientists are frequently in league with groups that regard cats as an ecological menace. The clinical side of science also seems to insult the heart of feline subtlety and mystery; for enchanted cat fans, it may be jarring (not to mention dull) to read of “the advantageous amino acid substitutions” that help explain their pets’ miraculous-seeming night vision.
  Yet some of the most eloquent and original descriptions of cats also come straight from journal papers: cats are “opportunistic, cryptic, solitary hunters,” “subsidized predators,” and “delightful and flourishing profiteers.” And many, if not most, of the scientists that I interviewed while researching this book—whether they study imperiled Hawaiian fauna, brain-dwelling cat parasites, or the gnawed-on bones of our ancient human ancestors— keep house cats of their own.
  Which, perhaps, should not be so surprising after all, as the most significant aspect of house cats’ adaptability, and the greatest source of their strength, is their ability to navigate a relationship with us. Sometimes this means riding the coattails of global trends, turning what we’ve done to the world to their absolute advantage. Urbanization, for instance, has been a boon to their prospects. More than half of the earth’s human population now lives in cities, and the compact and (allegedly) low-maintenance cat seems better suited than dogs to cramped city life, so we are buying more of them as pets. More pets also means more strays, who share the genes that allow cats to tolerate humans at close quarters, giving them a leg up over other animals lurking in our noisy, stressful metropolises.
  But when it comes to managing a relationship with humanity, cats aren’t just coasting: they also boldly take the initiative, and this has been true from the first. They’re a rare domestic specimen that’s said to have “chosen” domestication itself, and today, via a combination of lucky good looks and deliberate behaviors, they hold sway over our homes, our kingsize mattresses, our very imaginations. Their recent sweep of the Internet is just the latest victory in an ongoing global conquest, with no end in sight. Indeed, countless little takeovers happen in our own homes every day; while most people must go out looking for a new family dog, pet cats are statistically likely to just show up at the back door one evening, and invite themselves in.
  Though the house cats’ play for survival in a human-dominated world is striking and unique, their story has universal implications. It’s an example of how a single, small, and seemingly innocent human act—taking up with a petite species of wild cat, and giving it the run of our hearths and, ultimately, our hearts—can have cascading global consequences, stretching from the interior forests of Madagascar to schizophrenia wards to online message boards.
  In certain ways the house cat’s rise is tragic, for the same forces that favor them have destroyed many other creatures. House cats are carpetbaggers, arrivistes, and they’re among the most transformative invaders the world has ever seen—except for Homo sapiens, of course. It’s no coincidence that when they show up in ecosystems, lions and other megafauna are usually on their way out.
  But the house cat’s story is also about the wonder of life, and nature’s continuing capacity to surprise us. It offers a chance for us to set our self-centeredness aside and take a clearer look at a creature that we tend to baby and patronize, but whose horizons stretch far beyond our living rooms and litter boxes. A house cat is not really a fur baby, but it is something rather more remarkable: a tiny conquistador with the whole planet at its feet. House cats would not exist without humans, but we didn’t really create them, nor do we control them now. Our relationship is less about ownership than aiding and abetting.
  It may seem treasonous to consider our adorable consorts in this cold light. We are used to thinking of cats as companion animals and dependents, not evolutionary free agents. I began fielding reproachful comments from my mother and sister as soon as my reporting for this book began.
  Yet real love requires understanding. And despite our mounting feline fascination, we may actually be giving our cats less than their due.
  The correct response to a creature like Cheetoh might not be awwwww, but awe.

  REVIEWS
  “Dig deep into the history, biology, and science of house cats in this charming, highly informative read that explains how cats came to rule.”
  B&N Reads
  “Fascinating feline history...”
  People
  “Eminently readable and gently funny, Tucker’s blend of pop science and social commentary will appeal to cat lovers as well as a broad general audience with an interest in natural history.”
  Library Journal
  “A thoughtful look at the illogical human love of felines.”
  Publishers Weekly
  “[An] intriguing history...Read this entertaining book and you will be convinced that house cats are ‘the most transformative invaders the world has ever seen.’”
  Kirkus Reviews
  “Fascinating...Cat lovers, keep watching those cute cat videos online, but back it up with this very serious look at what makes Tabby tick.”
  Booklist
  “Exquisite, delightful...unusually deft...the net result is a deep and illuminating perspective on our favorite household companion.”
  Huffington Post
  “Immensely informative and enjoyable...delight in the species is evident on every page.”
  New Statesman
  “Informative...Tucker reviews all aspects of our favorite pet as well as the spell it has cast on us.”
  The New York Times
  “Intriguing...”
  The Atlantic
  “Engaging...lighthearted...”
  The Seattle Times
  “An alluring, funny and informative romp...”
  Shelf Awareness
  “Fascinating...If you have relatives or friends who are mad about cats -- and the strong statistical probability is that you do -- consider putting this book under their Christmas tree.”
  National Review
  “A lively read that pounces back and forth between evolutionary science and popular culture...”
  The Baltimore Sun
  “If you own a cat (or a cat owns you) and you think you know it, take a read through Tucker’s book to find a host of surprising facts.”
  The Columbus Dispatch
  “Funny and fascinating...”
  The Sacramento Bee
  “Tucker has given us plenty to enjoy in this book and we should look forward to whatever topic she next takes up.”
  Spectrum Culture
  “An adventure through history, natural science, and pop culture...this is a fascinating story of how cats not only conquered the world but our hearts.”
  Catster
  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR LION
  “Remarkable and hilarious…a big-hearted book that’s also a deep science dive into our most inscrutable furry companions. You can't help but LOL.”
  David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene
  “A delightful and warmhearted romp…A must-read.”
  Virginia Morell, author of Animal Wise: How We Know Animals Think and Feel
  “For cat lovers, cat haters, and anyone curious to learn how these mysterious creatures…clawed their way into our hearts.”
  Mara Grunbaum, author of WTF, Evolution?!
  “A clear and detailed view…After reading this book, no one will ever look at a cat the same way.”
  Irene Pepperberg, author of Alex and Me
  “From mummification to catification, from cat cafes to feline etiquette manuals to the earliest cat shows at the Crystal Palace, Abigail Tucker's enlightening The Lion in the Living Room explores the deep history of the connection between cats of all sizes and colors and the humans who adore them.”
  Wendy Williams, author of The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion
  “This book confirmed something I always knew about cats: They're the ones in charge of our relationship. And that's not the toxoplasmosis talking.”
  Jim Tews, author of Felines of New York
  “You will never look at the beast in your living room the same way again.”
  Richard Conniff, author of House of Lost Worlds
  “By turns funny and disturbing…full of surprises. Like all the best non-fiction, it will make you think twice about the world around you.”
  Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
  “A humorous, intelligent, and insightful investigation…a truly wonderful book.”
  Dr. Brian Hare, author of The Genius of Dogs, and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University

• Simon and Schuster - http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Abigail-Tucker/411578495

  Abigail Tucker
  Abigail Tucker was the first ever staff writer for Smithsonian magazine, where she remains a contributor. She previously wrote for The Baltimore Sun. Her work has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. The first word of both of her daughters was “cat.” She is the author of The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World.

4/13/17, 2)15 AM
Print Marked Items
Can cats teach us how to live? we should celebrate the solitary hunters among us
John Gray
New Statesman.
146.5352 (Feb. 3, 2017): p40. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd. http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
A philosopher once assured me, many years ago, that he had converted his cat to veganism. Believing he was joking, I asked how he had achieved this feat. Had he supplied the cat with mouse-flavoured vegan food? Had he presented his cat with other cats, already practising veganism, as feline role models? Or had he argued with the cat and convinced it that eating meat is wrong? My interlocutor wasn't amused, and I realised that he really believed the cat had opted for a meat-free diet. So I ended our exchange with a simple question: did the cat go out? It did, he told me. That solved the mystery. Plainly, the cat was supplementing its diet by covert hunting. If it ever brought home any of the carcasses--a practice to which ethically undeveloped cats are sadly prone--the virtuous philosopher had managed not to notice them.
It is not hard to imagine how the cat on the receiving end of this experiment in moral education must have viewed its human teacher. Perplexity at the absurdity of his behaviour would soon have been followed by contemptuous indifference. Seldom doing anything unless it serves a definite purpose or gives immediate satisfaction, cats are arch- realists. Faced with human folly, they simply go their own way.
The independence of cats is one of the features most admired by those of us who love them. Given their evolutionary history as solitary hunters, it is easily explained. Seeking their prey alone, cats--with the exception of lions and sometimes cheetahs--have not developed patterns of collective action and hierarchy of the kind found in dogs and other pack animals. "Herding cats" is a metaphor based on fact: cats don't live in herds. As they are highly territorial and notoriously picky in their eating habits, they make an unlikely candidate for domestication. And yet, more than almost any other species, cats have learned to live on intimate terms with human beings. How has this come about?
As Abigail Tucker explains in her immensely informative and enjoyable book, wild cats need space: large tracts of land that can sustain the sources of meat that are their sole food supply. Human settlements posed a big challenge to these "hyper-carnivores". When forests are cleared for farming, native prey species disappear, or shrink in numbers. Lacking the prey they relied on in the past, wild cats can only turn to animals that human beings have domesticated-- cattle, sheep and the like. Inevitably, this makes cats enemies of human beings. It is not recreational hunting or the use of body parts as aphrodisiacs that is condemning so many wild cats to extinction, though these disgusting practices are hastening the end of wild tigers. It is habitat destruction, an inevitable concomitant of human expansion.
So, it is all the more extraordinary that one particular type of cat--Felis silvestris, a small and sturdy tabby--should have been able to spread worldwide as a result of learning to live with human beings. By invading the villages that were established 12,000 years ago in parts of what is now Turkey, these cats were able to turn the human shift to a
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more sedentary life to their advantage. Preying on other animals attracted by stored seeds and grains and harvesting waste meat left behind after slaughtered animals had been eaten, they made human settlements into reliable sources of food. Recent evidence points to a comparable process taking place independently in China roughly five millennia ago, when a central Asian variety of Felis silvestris pursued a similar strategy.
Having entered into close proximity with human beings, cats were quickly recognised as being useful to them. Employing cats for pest control on farms and ships became common. They spread to parts of the world where they were not previously known. In many countries, they outnumber any other species as co-inhabitants.
Cats initiated this process of domestication themselves, and on their own terms. Unlike other species that foraged in early human settlements, they have continued to live in close quarters with human beings ever since. For a minor predator, it is an extraordinary triumph. As Tucker writes:
A house cat is not really a fur baby, but it
is something altogether more remarkable:
a tiny conquistador with the whole planet
at its feet. House cats would not exist
without humans, but we didn't really
create them, nor do we control them now.
Our relationship is less about ownership
than aiding and abetting.
Predictably, there has also been a counter-reaction against cats. Tucker highlights the aims and methods of this movement:
... the worldwide ecological community
is, in some areas, attempting full-on
felinicide. People bomb cats' lairs with
targeted viruses and deadly poisons.
They rain hell on cats with shotguns and
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hounds. Australia is leading the fight ...
the government has bankrolled pioneering
research in cat poisons, including the
development of a toxic kangaroo sausage
called Eridicat. The Australians have also
tested the Cat Assassin, a metal tunnel
into which cats are lured and then misted
with poison. Scientists have considered
despatching Tasmanian devils (carnivorous
marsupials that live wild only on the island
of Tasmania) to dismember cats.
Among these advocates of felinicide are the authors of Cat Wars. For Peter P Marra and Chris Santella, cats are "environmental contaminants like DDT" which spread diseases and disrupt ecological balance. A chapter luridly entitled "Zombie Makers" describes how cats spread rabies, parasitic Toxoplasma gondii and the pathogen responsible for the Black Death. According to the authors, schizophrenia, which they describe in simplistic terms as "a severe brain disorder", can be caused by infections emanating from cats. These fearful zombie-makers are also responsible for the deaths of countless birds (Marra is the director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Centre). The only solution is to reduce cat numbers and eliminate stray cats completely. Making sure the reader is clear about what they are recommending, the authors write: "Euthanasia must be part of a successful solution."
Marra and Santella make some attempt to appeal to cat lovers by suggesting that cats be kept indoors and allowed to work off their excess energy on feline versions of hamster wheels. If "cat owners" insist on giving their animal companions experience of the outdoors, "they can get a leash and walk their cats as tens of millions walk their dogs".
It is obvious from these examples that the authors--unlike Tucker, whose delight in the species is evident on every page--have little knowledge of and even less affection for cats. Do they imagine that cats will accept life on a leash as dogs have done? Are they so ignorant of the differences between the two species? Maybe not. They seem bent on feline mass extermination. At the end of their book they write:
With cats wandering the landscape it
is not difficult to imagine a time in the
not-so-distant future when your son or
daughter enters a natural history museum
and comes upon a small exhibit for a piping
plover, a roseate tern, a Hawaiian Crow,
a Florida scrub-jay, a Key Largo cotton
mouse, a Choctawhatchee beach mouse, a
Catalina Island shrew, a Lower Keys rabbit,
or any number of other species from
islands and continents around the world with
the label "Now Extinct".
As can be seen from this passage, the principal rationale for a mass cull of the cat population is environmental conservation. But the risk that cats pose to the environment is not enough alone to explain the authors' intense hostility to Felis silvestris. The danger of disease can be countered by programmes such as Trap-Neuter-Return, widely implemented in the US, in which cats living outdoors are taken to clinics for vaccination and spaying and then released. The risk to birds can be diminished by bells and other devices. (Birds also spread diseases, some of them potentially fatal, but this is rarely mentioned by cat haters.) More fundamentally, it is distinctly odd to single out one branch of a non-human species as a destroyer of ecological diversity when the main culprit in this regard is by any reasonable measure the human animal. With their superlative proficiency as hunters, cats may have altered the ecosystem in parts of the world. But it is human beings that are driving the planetary mass extinction that is under way.
Another striking feature of the campaign against cats is how little attention is given to the benefits they confer on
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human beings. For most of the time in which they have cohabited with people, cats lived outdoors.
It is only relatively recently that they began to live in human households in large numbers. What is it that has allowed them to make this evolutionary step? Ailurophobes will say it is the anthropomorphism of cat lovers, who treat their feline housemates as surrogate human beings. But for many cat lovers, I suspect the opposite is true. What they cherish is not how cats resemble us, but their differences from us. Living with cats opens a window into a world beyond our own and teaches us something important about what it means to be human.
One of the most attractive features of cats is that contentment is their default state. Unlike human beings--particularly of the modern variety--they do not spend their days in laborious pursuit of a fantasy of happiness. They are comfortable with themselves and their lives, and remain in that condition for as long as they are not threatened. When they are not eating or sleeping, they pass the time exploring and playing, never asking for reasons to live. Life itself is enough for them.
If there are people who can't stand cats--and it seems there are many--one reason may be envy. As Jeffrey Masson, whose The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats is the best book on cats ever published, has written:
In English, if not in "cat", the word
contentment conveys something of a
feeling of being at peace with the world
or with yourself. It is more of a state than
a fleeting emotion. A person can be happy
(momentarily) without being content.
Contentment cannot he purchased;
happiness, on the other hand, has a price.
For us, happiness is a serious business.
Whereas human beings search for happiness in an ever-increasing plethora of religions and therapies, cats enjoy contentment as their birthright. Why this is so is worth exploring. Cats show no sign of regretting the past or fretting about the future. They live, absorbed in the present moment. It will be said that this is because they cannot envision the past or future. Perhaps so, though their habit of demanding their breakfast at the accustomed hour shows they do have a sense of the passage of time. But cats, unlike people, are not haunted by an anxious sense that time is slipping away. Not thinking of their lives as stories in which they are moving towards some better state, they meet each day as it comes. They do not waste their lives dreading the time when their lives must end. Not fearing death, they enjoy a kind of immortality. All animals have these qualities but they seem particularly pronounced in cats. Of all the animals that have lived closely with human beings, cats must surely be the least influenced by them.
"When I play with my cat," Montaigne wrote, "how do I know she is not playing with me?" With creatures that can be understood only partly by us, one can only speculate about their inner life. Yet it is tempting to suppose that the secret of feline contentment is that cats have no need to defer to a picture of themselves as they imagine they should be. Certainly they have a sense of dignity: they avoid people who treat them disrespectfully, for instance. Yet cats do not struggle to remake themselves according to any ideal self-image. Not inwardly divided, they are happy to be themselves.
Again, it will be said that this is because they have no moral sense. There are many cases of heroic devotion in which cats have risked pain and death to protect their kittens. But it is true that they cannot be taught moral emotions in the way dogs have been taught to feel shame. Cats are certainly not virtue signallers. Nor--except when it concerns their offspring--are they at all inclined to self-sacrifice. But given that cats, consequently, do not kill other cats or anything else in order to become martyrs to some absurd belief system, that may be no bad thing. There are no feline suicide- warriors.
The moralising philosopher who believed he had persuaded his cat to adopt a meat-free diet only showed how silly philosophers can be. Rather than seek to teach his cat, he would have been wiser to learn from it, as Montaigne did. Living in accord with their nature, cats do not need moral instruction. Dissatisfaction with our natural condition, on the
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other hand, seems to be natural for human beings. The human animal never ceases to strive for some higher form of life. Cats make no such effort. Without any process of laborious cogitation, these lucid, playful and supremely adaptable creatures already know how to live.
John Gray is the NS lead book reviewer and the author of "Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals" (Granta)
Caption: Domestic gods: Felis silvestris has survived and flourished by turning human settlements into reliable sources of food
The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World Abigail Tucker
Simon & Schuster, 256pp. 12.99 [pounds sterling]
Cat Wars: the Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer
Peter P Marra and Chris Santella
Princeton University Press, 216pp. 19.95 [pounds sterling]
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gray, John. "Can cats teach us how to live? we should celebrate the solitary hunters among us." New Statesman, 3 Feb.
2017, p. 40+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484156000&it=r&asid=05f9ac67544df9005f28c0618a66c7c9. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A484156000
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The case against cats: the animal so many dote on
ranks among the world's most destructive
predators
Britt Peterson
The Atlantic.
318.5 (Dec. 2016): p40. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Atlantic Media, Inc. http://www.theatlantic.com
Full Text:
CAT WARS: THE DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES OF A CUDDLY KILLER
PETER P. MARRA, AND CHRIS SANTELLA
Princeton University Press
THE LION IN THE LIVING ROOM: HOW HOUSE CATS TAMED US AND TOOK OVER THE WORLD ABIGAIL TUCKER
Simon & Schuster [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
NEW ZEALAND'S RECENT ANNOUNCEMENT of a plan to eradicate all invasive predators, including feral cats, sparked an immediate response--and not in defense of the stoat, up there with cats among the top too on the Global Invasive Species list. "Cat murdering New Zealand[ers] are for the birds," one commenter vented on The Washington Post's website. "Removing cats from an area is a futile effort--one that cannot succeed," another warned. When Australia announced a plan in 2015 to cull 2 million feral cats, the singer Morrissey declared them "2 million smaller versions of Cecil the lion." The actress Brigitte Bardot called the cull "animal genocide." Needless to say, no celebrity outrage or online indignation has greeted New Zealand's or Australia's expensive and long-standing rat-eradication programs.
What makes an animal a pet--a creature to which our emotions attach, sometimes in logic-warping ways--is surprisingly difficult to pin down. Cats are a particularly puzzling case. Domesticated some 9,500 years ago, they still don't strike humans as completely tame. They live with us, but even indoor cats aren't entirely dependent on us, certainly not in the emotional way dogs are. They do many things that seem to defy rational explanation, which is no small source of their allure: the blanket-attack ritual, the full-body keyboard plop, the blank-wall stare, and perhaps most dramatic, the post-poop freak-out. One of my cats performs a ninja leap about three feet up one side of the door frame, then slides down, firefighter-style, to the floor.
Even the discoveries, in the past several decades, that cats carry a parasite that could contribute to schizophrenia, and that outdoor cats wreak ecological disaster, haven't budged a curiously imbalanced relationship with this furry companion--or maybe cohabitant is more accurate. More than a third of all households in the United States now have a pet cat (the total count is estimated to be close to 100 million animals), which marks a 50 percent rise since the 1980s. Their owners feed them, stroke them, shovel their litter, spend ages trying to photograph their yawns from the cutest angle for Instagram. They ignore their owners, mostly sleep, intermittently deign to serve as purring lap warmers, and occasionally drop a half-dead mouse on the rug. Mysterious as cats are, however, the greatest mystery about cats centers on humans. Why do so many of us love them so much when they are so bad for us, and for our planet? And if we could resolve this first mystery, would we be any closer to solving the world's cat problem?
IN CAT WARS: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, Peter P. Marra, the head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, and Chris Santella, a widely published travel writer, take the easy way out. They're so clearly not cat lovers that they can't really begin to comprehend those of us who are. The best they can do in their otherwise informative anti-cat polemic is to tell us that cats have long been "tolerated by their human neighbors because of their supreme pet-like characteristics."
Merely tolerated? Rat-catchers aboard colonizing ships in the 18th and 19th centuries, cats immediately inspired a craze when they were introduced to islands in the Pacific, the reporter Abigail Tucker writes in The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World. "A passion arose for cats," according to the log of a ship that landed in Samoa, "and they were obtained by all possible means." Tucker takes an intriguing stab at accounting for that still-thriving passion. "Cats look uncannily like us," she proposes, and locates their appeal not in their alien aura but in the spell their familiarity exerts and the protective fascination it elicits. "Even better, they look like our infants." Given their baby-size bodies; large, front-facing eyes; and yet oddly predatory mien, it's no wonder we find them "mesmerizing."
Tucker is certainly right to suggest that the current cat predicament is rooted in peculiarly fraught power relations between these cuddly yet opaque creatures and Homo sapiens. History reveals felines as the ultimate opportunists,
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biologically primed to exploit their human enablers--among many other creatures. As both books reveal, cats travel well, reproduce quickly, and are savage and omnivorous predators. When Mark Twain arrived in Hawaii in 1866, some 90 years after cats had strolled down the gangplanks of Captain Cook's fleet and conquered the hearts of the natives, he observed "platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats."
The bloody takeover was well under way, and has continued. Those felines, who have since multiplied in feral-cat colonies throughout the archipelago, prey on endangered birds such as the petrel, the nene, and the Laysan albatross, and have helped decimate the Hawaiian crow. In Australia, with its 3 million pet cats and 20 million feral cats (and about 23 million people), cats have contributed to wiping out several mouse, rat, and bandicoot species. They currently threaten the much-beloved greater bilby. Cats are implicated, according to one study, in 14 percent of all reptile, mammal, and bird extinctions on islands--33 animal species in all.
And the feline menace isn't limited to islands. Cats imperil species around the world, including our own, with which their relations have become--at least on the surface--more symbiotic. A century ago, when they were still viewed as a quasi-domesticated form of vermin control, cats were also regularly deemed vermin themselves--a germ-carrying danger to be treated as such. The New York SPCA, for instance, gassed 300,000 strays during a 1911 polio scare. The invention of kitty litter in 1947 heralded the thoroughly housebound cat, and a new identity, or rather, disguise: The pampered pet had arrived, but the semi-pest still lurked.
Toxoplasma gondii, mostly found in outdoor cats, is one of the most common parasites in humans. It is present in nearly half of the world's population, according to estimates. Often acquired by eating undercooked meat from animals who ingested tainted cat poop, it can cause a disease called toxoplasmosis, which is especially dangerous for infants and the immunosuppressed, but may pose risks for others as well. Carriers of the parasite seem to suffer at higher rates from Alzheimer's disease, anxiety, migraines, bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. There's evidence for a schizophrenia link, too. And in a twist worthy of a Cheshire Cat smile, Toxoplasma gondii may change our behavior in some bizarre ways, actually encouraging an attraction, in men, to cat pee. (In "How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy," which appeared in these pages four years ago, Kathleen McAuliffe reported on pioneering research into the parasite's effects.)
Stop and think about the adaptive brilliance: More humans seduced by house cats means more besotted allies willing to take to the barricades in defense of all cats, ignoring the broader free-ranging-cat menace. And it is broad. Toxoplasmosis also afflicts nonhuman animals, from beluga whales to kangaroos. Because of runoff in the ocean from sewage containing cat feces, the disease has seriously affected marine mammals like seals (including the endangered Hawaiian-monk variety), sea otters, and manatees over the past several decades.
A 2013 study co-authored by Marra estimated that outdoor cats in the U.S. kill--not by disease--somewhere between 1.3 billion and 4 billion birds and between 6.3 billion and 22.3 billion mammals each year. It's fair to say, as Tucker does, that cats maybe considered "nightmarish invaders, capable of ransacking whole ecosystems and annihilating feebler life-forms in their path."
IF THAT CHARACTERIZATION Calls to mind another species (our own), perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that solutions for the cat problem have proved hard to come by. Both of these books emphasize that altruistic impulses and calmly rational responses have been in notably short supply. As birders have become poignantly aware of cats' impact on biodiversity, two camps have dug in: cat people and bird people. Extremism reigns in a war of Tom and Jerry-esque brutality over how to handle the free-ranging-cat problem. Bird people want all outdoor cats to go. Some have gone vigilante and poisoned or shot strays. Cat people have fought back, occasionally with death threats of their own--
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against people.
Even if compromise did seem more feasible, both books suggest that a moderate and affordable solution doesn't really exist. The primary answer, at least in the United States (host to roughly too million outdoor cats), is trap-neuter-return. The approach, popular in many counties, involves just what the name suggests, with cats ideally returned to the cat communities they were part of, now spayed and under the official or semi-official auspices of "managers." Proponents argue that TNR prevents rampant breeding, and is more humane than euthanasia. But TNR, according to Tucker as well as Marra and Santella, is not especially effective at accomplishing its primary stated goal of keeping cat populations in check. To do that, you'd need to spay or neuter nearly all the animals in a colony, whereas most TNR programs target a small fraction. So the cats continue to breed--and hunt. They routinely get fed, too, by the colony supervisors. As one article in a scientific journal put it, the practice is "cat hoarding without walls."
Eradication, which has been tried on about too islands (from the Galapagos to California's San Nicolas) over the past 30 years, is usually successful--but can be hard-won and very expensive, even in a self-contained space. To dig out every last kitten from an island's rocky crevices costs up to $100,000 per square mile. Herding cats isn't easy. Most programs use traps and toxic bait; some rely on "specialist cat-hunting dogs." And then there are the daunting public- relations challenges.
With their eye on non-island countries, namely America, the authors of Cat Wars argue for a combination of spay/neuter programs, enclosed sanctuaries, and euthanasia. But they're well aware of the obstacles. "We would find it preferential-if not quite realistic--to see all free-ranging cats removed from the environment," Marra and Santella write. The not quite realistic is as much a nod to the power of pro-cat sentiment in the United States as it is to the practical impossibility of somehow stashing all the stray and feral cats in giant, smelly cat houses. They may well be right that the political difficulties are more daunting than the logistical ones. (Good luck even getting cat owners to keep their pets inside; according to studies the authors cite, 40 to 70 percent of house cats are allowed to roam, and the majority of them spend their time doing what outdoor cats do--hunting.) When a Kiwi philanthropist and activist named Gareth Morgan launched a website supporting an outdoor-cat-free New Zealand back in 2013, he said much of his hate mail came from America. "It really feels like I've taken on the gun lobby," he told Tucker.
Guns don't purr, of course, or lie across your belly at the end of a long day like a small, furry pillow. Then again, cats-- however cute--are lethal and heartless. That's essential to their charm, I would argue: We care about cats so much because (unlike babies) they really don't care about us. Even their purring seems to be all about them. They are egotistical and self-sufficient, and not really house pets, and we like the sense that we're more dependent on them than they are on us. Otherwise we would get dogs. To make the rest of nature pay the price for that preference, though, is an act of supreme selfishness. You might think we were spending a little too much time with our cats.
Illustration by ERIC HYQUISI
Britt Peterson is a contributing editor at Washingtonian magazine and a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Peterson, Britt. "The case against cats: the animal so many dote on ranks among the world's most destructive
predators." The Atlantic, Dec. 2016, p. 40+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472473994&it=r&asid=a436356cdb935bb1b64c5235289e7ba8. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472473994
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Dog Days, Cat Photos
Frans De Waal
The New York Times Book Review.
(Nov. 13, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: p10(L). From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
De Waal, Frans. "Dog Days, Cat Photos." The New York Times Book Review, 13 Nov. 2016, p. 10(L). PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469881481&it=r&asid=bc8b28783ced6aa88ba85a900f53cbd9. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469881481
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The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World
Michael Potemra
National Review.
68.20 (Nov. 7, 2016): p45. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 National Review, Inc. http://www.nationalreview.com/
Full Text:
Surreptitiously--one might even say, with Sandburg, "on little cat feet"--a social revolution has overtaken America. It has been joked that the Internet was invented for national-security and industrial purposes but is now dominated by, about evenly, porn and cat videos; and it took the Internet to make people realize just how dominant the feline presence in our national life has become. The number of house cats in the U.S. is approaching 100 million, reports journalist Abigail Tucker in The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World (Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $26)--and she tries to explain how this happened.
Unlike other domesticated animals, cats serve no obvious utilitarian purpose: They do not (outside of certain highly questionable restaurants) provide human beings with food, nor do they protect our homes or carry our burdens. So how did they become a household fixture? Tucker explains that the house cat is the rare animal that took the lead in its own domestication: As wild cats, such as lions, started heading toward extinction, the smaller animals that eventually became house cats scrounged for food in the garbage surrounding human settlements. That's how they got involved with human beings. They were subsequently accepted into the households because of their cuteness--which, Tucker points out, "is not an arbitrary ... quality":
House cats are blessed with a killer set of what Austrian
ethologist Konrad Lorenz calls "baby releasers": physical traits
that remind us of human young, and set off a hormonal cascade....
[They] cue a pleasurable, drug-like "oxytocin glow" in human adults
and trigger a set of nurturing behaviors, including enhanced
fine-motor coordination that prepares us to cradle a baby.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
This fascinating book goes on to explore many other aspects of the housecat phenomenon, including the much- discussed question of whether the pussycats literally cause mental illness in their owners. (The evidence is suggestive
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but still inconclusive.) If you have relatives or friends who are mad about cats--and the strong statistical probability is that you do--consider putting this book under their Christmas tree.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Potemra, Michael. "The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World." National
Review, 7 Nov. 2016, p. 45. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467259312&it=r&asid=404665e78301b6e4685af77e87660c3c Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A467259312
.
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The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World
Brad Hooper
Booklist.
113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p18. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World. By Abigail Tucker. Oct. 2016. 256p. Simon & Schuster, $26 (9781476738239). 636.8.
What? The adorable kitty nestled in your lap as you read this review is actually a barely domesticated killer, or, as the author of this eye-opening account says, a "force of nature." More popular now in our households than dogs, house cats are, with their amazing adaptability and reproductive ability, "classified as one of the world's 100 most invasive species." This is a confusing picture needing clarification, which Tucker does in fascinating prose as she details the house cat's rise by way of the species' strong and unique survival ability. The reader faces an incontrovertible and stunning fact: cats do control us. The house cat self-domesticated itself, and by their habits and example, humans were introduced to meat eating. Thanks to their cuddly companionship, cats were invited to stay inside with us, but, as Tucker suggests, the process of domestication is not complete, for there have been lots of bumps in working out the cat-human relationship. Cat lovers, keep watching those cute cat videos online, but back it up with this very serious look at what makes Tabby tick.--Brad Hooper
Hooper, Brad
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hooper, Brad. "The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World." Booklist, 1 Sept.
2016, p. 18. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463754979&it=r&asid=7196a8fca1d84e38f1cec20ba2f537d5. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463754979
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Tucker, Abigail. The Lion in the Living Room:
How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the
World
Lindsay Morton
Library Journal.
141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p119. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Tucker, Abigail. The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World. S. & S. Oct. 2016. 256p. notes. ISBN 9781476738239. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781476738253. NAT HIST
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Enormously successful from an evolutionary perspective, cats occupy a unique niche in human society and in the popular imagination. Six hundred million cats thrive in our homes, on city streets, and even in the wild. Cats have served as cultural icons and objects of fascination and adoration. Tucker, a contributor to Smithsonian magazine, explores humans' relationship to cats with humor. Effortlessly interweaving research, anecdote, and analysis, she delves into the evolution and domestication of the house cat, the ecological consequences of the worldwide spread of the species, the mysterious and terrifying toxoplasma gondii parasite, and the complexities of the current landscape, including animal rights politics, cat fancier culture, the changing nature of pet ownership, and, of course, Internet popularity. VERDICT Eminently readable and gently funny, Tucker's blend of pop science and social commentary will appeal to cat lovers as well as a broad general audience with an interest in natural history.--Lindsay Morton, P. L. of Science, San Francisco
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Morton, Lindsay. "Tucker, Abigail. The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the
World." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 119+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459805140&it=r&asid=fcdd015535cd524ec1d77ec5bcda3c6b. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459805140
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The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World
Publishers Weekly.
263.30 (July 25, 2016): p59. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World Abigail Tucker. Simon & Schuster, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-4767-3823-9
Debut author Tucker, a writer for Smithsonian and a cat lover, avoids cute cat tales while using the science and history of Felis catus to explore cats' relationship to people. Beginning with a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits, Tucker gives a clear and comprehensible tour of the evolution of the cat. The earliest tamed cats, less domestic recruits than opportunistic invaders, may have just been the boldest of their breed, taking advantage of the food around human encampments. They were not friendly as much as fearless in approaching humans, a trait passed down to their descendants. Tucker neatly moves to the next question: Why did people keep cats around? Environmentally, cats are a disaster. A multitude of places around the world struggle with the chaos cats have caused by overbreeding and killing native creatures. Yet cats remain beloved, possibly because of how much they resemble human young--"fictive kin" in the terms of evolutionary psychologists. How do people react to their fictive kin? Tucker's informative interviews with werewolf cat breeders, cat lobbyists, and Internet star Little Bub's owner round out a thoughtful look at the illogical human love of felines. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World." Publishers Weekly, 25 July
2016, p. 59+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285523&it=r&asid=bc00a4d283c69a175ebbe7ed22b460fb. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285523
about:blank Page 15 of 15

Gray, John. "Can cats teach us how to live? we should celebrate the solitary hunters among us." New Statesman, 3 Feb. 2017, p. 40+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484156000&it=r. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017. Peterson, Britt. "The case against cats: the animal so many dote on ranks among the world's most destructive predators." The Atlantic, Dec. 2016, p. 40+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472473994&it=r. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017. De Waal, Frans. "Dog Days, Cat Photos." The New York Times Book Review, 13 Nov. 2016, p. 10(L). PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469881481&it=r. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017. Potemra, Michael. "The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World." National Review, 7 Nov. 2016, p. 45. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467259312&it=r. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017. Hooper, Brad. "The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 18. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463754979&it=r. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017. Morton, Lindsay. "Tucker, Abigail. The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 119+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459805140&it=r. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017. "The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World." Publishers Weekly, 25 July 2016, p. 59+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285523&it=r. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.

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  Abigail Tucker: The Lion in the Living Room
  December 4, 2016 by David
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  the-lion-in-the-living-room-9781476738239_hrThe Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World – Simon & Schuster – 256 pages – ISBN 9781476738239 – October 2016 – $26.00 (ebook versions available at lower prices)
  Let me start off by stating forthrightly that I am not a cat person. I much prefer dogs. But I am intrigued by the fact that so many otherwise rational people are completely irrational about cats. And while I don’t love them, I certainly do not hate cats, and am interested in understanding their role in human culture. It’s always seemed that the cat’s relationship to humans is more complicated than that of the dog, and this thoroughly compelling – and entertaining – book by science writer, Abigail Tucker, certainly makes that clear.
  Tucker covers alot of ground with this book, and it will be a fun read not just for those who are besmirched with cat fancy. As the fine science writer she is, Abigail Tucker has taken years of research into animal biology, as well as human and animal behavior, and made a great story out of it all.
  If you love cats, this book will help you understand why, and may even teach you how to be a better (and more effective) cat owner. If you are more of a cat tourist, or even if you don’t like them at all, you still will want to know more about what makes them tick. After all, these are semi-untamed apex predators living in our homes. That’s a pretty interesting notion to consider just by itself.
  Tucker shows great humor and personality throughout this book, as she demonstrates that these animals, whose powers we have probably underestimated, have managed (us) to become one of the most dominant species on our planet. That may help all of us understand who these beasts are that live among us.
  As Tucker says about the book herself:
  It wasn’t until recently that I felt ready to cover an animal whose habitat is also my own house. But as soft and fuzzy as domestic cats may initially seem, The Lion in the Living Room presented a major journalistic challenge, since I hoped to simultaneously draw from the two schools of animal-writing: using the strange story of house cats’ rise to global dominance as a means to understand humanity’s vast environmental influence and — more importantly — as a narrative end unto itself. Rather than snuggling my subjects close, I tried to keep house cats at arm’s length, like termites or red-painted rattlers, to be handled with snake hooks and trembling hands — the better to see them for the exquisite conquerors they really are.
  Abigail Tucker is a correspondent for Smithsonian magazine, where she has covered a wide range of topics from vampire anthropology to bioluminescent marine life to the archaeology of ancient beer. The Lion in the Living Room is her first book. She now lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where she grew up (as I did as well).
  Abigail and I had a wide-ranging chat about this book that I hope you will enjoy as much as I did. You can read or listen to an excerpt of the book here at the (very good) Simon & Simon site.

• Huffington Post
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-edmund-moody/high-praise-for-the-lion-_b_12365596.html
  Word count: 678

  High Praise for “The Lion in the Living Room”
  By David Edmund Moody
  In The Lion in the Living Room, three things come together with exquisite, delightful effect: a natural history of cats, replete with ecological issues as well as contemporary cultural memes; evolutionary science as it pertains to the origins and consequences of our fascination with felines; and an unusually deft way with words by author Abigail Tucker. The net result is a deep and illuminating perspective on our favorite household companion.

  The United States alone is home to a hundred million cats, whose voracious, carnivorous consumption includes some three million chickens each and every day of the year. The paradox of our adoration of these furry friends with their devastating impact upon other species all over the world is the central issue with which this book is concerned. Tucker herself is imbued with a love of cats, so her admonitory tale of the havoc they wreak reinforces and authenticates her indictment of their behavior.

  What Tucker exposes - patiently, gently, and with wry good humor - is our utter collective ignorance of the global consequences of the environmental ascendancy of the seemingly innocuous housecat. Their numerical prevalence and predatory effects on a global scale are staggering. Tucker takes us on a tour of isolated islands as well as whole continents, and she documents species after species whose imminent or actual extinction is the result of the introduction of housecats.

  She also explores the cultural, psychological side of our feline infatuation, including their prevalence all over the Internet. She describes in meticulous detail how the shape and features of the face of a cat trigger deep maternal responses by virtue of cats’ uncanny resemblance, in certain respects, to the faces of human babies. The large, forward-facing eyes, the tiny nose, the rounded shape of the face as a whole, all combine to engender in humans the rather mindless adoration with which we are all too familiar.

  Notwithstanding her normally light-hearted and witty style, Tucker’s concluding remarks take on, as they must, a much more somber tone. “Human reverence and disregard have a dangerous way of coexisting, especially where animals are concerned. No matter how much we “love” something, it’s never beyond us to destroy it.” Not that we would destroy cats, but that we tolerate their effect on other species. Tucker’s final observation about cats and the terrible consequences of our obsession with them is so wise, so true: “Unlike us, though, they are always innocent.”

  In spite of her formidable skills as a science writer, a researcher, and an animal lover, Tucker struggles slightly in one key respect. Many of us are enamored of cats beyond all reason, and the explanation remains somewhat elusive. Perhaps Tucker somewhat overlooks that cats are not merely inexplicably cute and adorable; they are something much more. A cat in motion is an exceptionally graceful and beautiful creature to behold. Far more than a dog or a parrot or the fish in an aquarium, a cat shows us nature at her finest, albeit on a level reduced to human scale. We love cats in part because we have lost our love of nature, and within our artificial, domestic abodes, the cat is a living reminder and remnant of the fearsome wonder of the jungle.

  One hesitates to use the word genius, but Tucker’s book borders on that quality. The photo of her on the inside jacket cover is difficult to square with the outstanding quality of her prose: she looks like a lovely twenty-something-year old, fresh out of college, perhaps, with an air of innocence. In fact, her photo bears a remarkable resemblance to the photo of the kitten on the front cover: large eyes looking right at us, in a sweetly rounded countenance. One wonders if she did that on purpose?

  David Edmund Moody
  Author, ‘The Unconditioned Mind: J. Krishnamurti and the Oak Grove School’
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• PRI
  https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-11-13/do-you-really-understand-lion-your-living-room
  Word count: 828

  Do you really understand the 'lion in your living room'?
  Living on Earth
  November 13, 2016 · 10:15 AM EST
  Writer Adam Wernick
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  LION-Catstalkprey.jpg
  Even as they’ve comfortably moved into domestic life, cats haven’t compromised too much of their self-sufficiency. They still have the ability to hunt in the wild as feral cats. Credit: Jennifer Barnard/Wikimedia Commons

  America is a nation of cat lovers. In the US, house cats outnumber dogs three to one. But the reality is that cats don’t always bother to love us back — nor do they need to, since we provide for them anyway. How did cats get such a sweet deal?

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  Abigail Tucker tries to answer that question in her new book, "The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World."

  “It’s really kind of a staggering success story, because there are at least 600 million — some people think closer to a billion — house cats on the planet today, which is a shocking number for an animal of any kind,” Tucker says.

  This is especially stunning, she says, given that house cats are felines. "In nature, felines are relatively rare, because they tend to sit atop whatever ecosystem they're in, and they have these huge protein requirements that they have to satisfy. So they're [typically] rarer than other kinds of carnivores."

  House cats have managed to carve out a place for themselves, globally, while so many of their wild relatives, from tigers to sand cats, have had a hard time in recent years, as a result of their long-standing animosity with people, Tucker says.

  So, what’s their secret?

  “Basically, house cats have been able to succeed by sidling up to humanity and harvesting our resources without giving us too much in return and without compromising their feline forms in a way that would prevent them from surviving without us,” Tucker concludes.

  Cats have undergone an interesting and complicated process of domestication, Tucker says. “They have changed the structure of their brain to get along with us better, but they haven't really changed their bodies that much, and they remain hunters as magnificent as tigers or lions or any other member of the wild feline clan.”

  Instead of fighting with us, cats — lured largely by our trash — ventured closer and closer into our settlements and started changing themselves, to get along with the times.

  What’s more, she says, cats are so adaptable that they can make a go of it in a studio apartment or in the middle of the woods.

  Tucker, like so many cat lovers, finds reasons to “excuse” their behavior and ignore the fact that cats, on balance, have a negative impact on the planet: They kill songbirds by the billions, wreak havoc on small mammal populations and their huge dietary need for protein puts a strain on the global environment.

  “Whether they're going out to your garden and hunting a chipmunk or eating something that they get in a can, which could be a wild sardine caught in a far-off ocean or a chicken raised on a farm somewhere, all these things are meat, and all these things have an environmental impact,” Tucker says.

  “It's a little limited to think, ‘My cat is inside, so it doesn't eat any wild animals,’” she continues. “That’s important, and that's good, but it's not that your cat is existing on air and water. These animals eat things — and the fact that they do take a toll on the environment and on human resources only makes it more interesting that we tolerate them and even encourage having huge numbers of them around.”

  Before researching and writing her book, Tucker says, she didn’t give cats credit for “what amazing and formidable animals that they are."

  Even though she writes about animals professionally, "I was just as guilty as the next person, when it came to looking at my cats as cute little fur babies and infantilizing them and pretending that they needed help from me,” she admits.

  "Now I understand that, even though I had been accustomed to traveling across the world looking for interesting animals," she says, "this is an interesting animal that has come to meet me in my living room. This cat is a creature of conquest and a creature that is a global survivor, and is an example of how amazing nature is.”

  This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.

• Kirkus Reviews
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/abigail-tucker/the-lion-in-the-living-room/
  Word count: 376

  THE LION IN THE LIVING ROOM
  How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World
  by Abigail Tucker
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  KIRKUS REVIEW

  The intriguing history of how house cats found their way onto our hearths and into our hearts.

  In her debut, Smithsonian correspondent Tucker takes readers back into prehistory to examine the qualities of such killer cats as saber-tooth tigers and their ilk. Today, big cats are rapidly vanishing, but domesticated cats are thriving. By some estimates, in the United States alone, the tally of pet cats is approaching 100 million. Tucker, a devoted cat lover and owner, brings dozens of points of view about cats through her interviews with archaeologists, veterinarians, biologists, animal ecologists, and research scientists; her time spent observing cat fanciers at pet shows; and her encounters with wildlife refuge managers, animal rights activists, and cat breeders. Cat lovers may be dismayed to learn some of the negatives the author reveals—e.g., the link between cats and serious mental and physical conditions, the threat they pose to birds and other endangered animal populations—and cat owners may be alarmed to read of the vicious behavior of some ordinary house cats. Tucker relates one incident in which cat owners barricaded themselves inside their bedroom and called 911 to be rescued from their fierce little pet. The author also reports the work of hybrid breeders, who are producing some very strange-looking animals. Illustrations would have enhanced this lively and informative book, but readers curious to know what the rare Lykoi, also known as the werewolf cat, looks like can find ample photographs online. As many readers already know, cat videos have taken over the internet, and Tucker explores this phenomenon, visiting such current stars as Lil Bub.

  Read this entertaining book and you will be convinced that house cats are “the most transformative invaders the world has ever seen”—except for humans, of course.

  Pub Date: Oct. 18th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-1-4767-3823-9
  Page count: 256pp
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster
  Review Posted Online: Aug. 21st, 2016

• South China Morning Post
  http://www.scmp.com/culture/books/article/2048160/book-review-why-we-love-cats-lion-living-room-explains
  Word count: 429

  Book review: why we love cats -The Lion in the Living Room explains
  This enchanting journey helps to explain why we love cats despite their indifference to us
  PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 22 November, 2016, 1:30pm
  UPDATED : Tuesday, 22 November, 2016, 1:30pm

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  The Lion in the Living Room’s cover.
  The Lion in the Living Room
  by Abigail Tucker
  Simon & Schuster
  3.5 stars
  I read much of Abigail Tucker’s The Lion in the Living Room, appropriately, with a cat on my lap. And though I sat quietly, she did not: sometimes perching on the arm of my chair, staring vaguely but fixedly into space while her tail blocked the pages; sometimes jumping out of my lap and noisily racing around the room for no apparent reason.
  In other words, my beloved orange tabby seemed hellbent on proving Tucker’s thesis: while house cats are the world’s most popular pet – both in the flesh and online – they offer us curiously little in return.
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  Outdoors, they spread disease, annihilate bird species and aren’t as good at controlling rodent populations as they’re said to be. Indoors, cats are self-contained – “They don’t need people to complete them,” writes Tucker – and mostly sedentary. Unlike dogs, they have few innate duties and don’t seem to care whether they please us.
  But The Lion in the Living Room is no anti-cat screed. Tucker is an engaging writer and a sucker for the felines. (She had me when she referred to her own sleeping ginger cat as an “oversized croissant”.) And her brief, lighthearted book takes us on a fascinating journey: the evolution of the house cat, their similarities to their “big-cat” relations, cat husbandry, the indoor-cat phenomenon, the truth behind toxoplasmosis, the question of whether cats are at all useful (short answer: not really), the LOLCat internet craze and the central question of why so many of us are crazy about cats. (Apparently, it has to do with what an ethnologist calls “baby releasers”: cats, with their round faces and big eyes, remind us of our own young.)
  Social media goes to the dogs (and cats) as pets post online

  Will this book change your opinion on cats? Probably not. Will you enjoy reading it? Absolutely, particularly with your own tiny lion close by.

• NY Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/books/review/being-a-dog-alexandra-horowitz-lion-in-the-living-room-abigail-tucker.html
  Word count: 1415

  How Do Dogs Recognize Us? And Why Do We Love Cats Anyway?
  By FRANS de WAALNOV. 8, 2016
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  BEING A DOG
  Following the Dog Into a World of Smell
  By Alexandra Horowitz
  323 pp. Scribner. $27.

  THE LION IN THE LIVING ROOM
  How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World
  By Abigail Tucker
  241 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.

  As a college student, I had a black-and-white kitty named Plexie. About once a month, I would take Plexie on my bicycle (I lived in the Netherlands) in a bag with her little head sticking out, to go on a play date with her best friend, a short-legged puppy. The two of them had played together since they were little, and kept doing so now that they were adult. They would race up and down the stairs of a large student house, surprising each other at every turn; their obvious joy was highly contagious. They could go at it for hours until they’d plop down, exhausted.

  Dogs and cats have more in common than people assume. They are both predators eager to chase and grab moving objects, which is why they potentially get along so well. They are also both mammals, which helps them relate to us. Mammals recognize our emotions, and we recognize theirs. It is this empathic connection that attracts humans to domestic cats (600 million worldwide) and dogs (500 million) rather than iguanas or fish.

  But we also know the differences, which range from sociality — descended from pack hunters, dogs are far more gregarious and cooperative than cats — to the senses, with canines relying more on olfaction and felines more on vision. A dog is basically a nose with a body attached to it as Alexandra Horowitz explains in “Being a Dog.” Her fascinating book will open many eyes to the often forgotten world of airborne chemicals. We humans have an impoverished vocabulary to describe smells, and tend to overlook how much they affect our behavior. Given how well we remember the olfactory landscape of our youth, and how easily we tell the smells of human genders apart as well as recognize our siblings, this is rather surprising. We look down on this sense, considering it so animalistic that Sigmund Freud rated the loss of smell as a sign of civilization!

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  Horowitz combines the expertise of a scientist with an easy, lively writing style. She describes her own cognitive testing of dogs, such as verification of the claim that they know the time their owners will come home. The author doesn’t think there is any magic to this ability, and proposes that it has to do with the amount of time their owners’ smell lingers. When fresh owner smell was introduced in the house, the tested dogs reset their “clocks” and failed to wait at the appropriate time by the door.

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  The author writes mostly about the wonders of the nose, giving as much attention to the human one as that of the dog. Our noses have millions fewer olfactory receptors, and many fewer kinds of receptors, while we are unable to detect pheromones because of the lack of a vomeronasal organ. This is why dogs are called macrosmatic, whereas we are only microsmatic, or “feeble scented.” But perhaps this is not fair to our species. The author goes out of her way to show that given training, a different attitude and closeness to the source (bending down to the ground or a fence pole), humans can sniff out lots of interesting things. We have no trouble picking out someone who had a garlic-heavy meal the day before, and nonsmokers surely don’t need to see someone with a cigarette to know if he or she is a smoker. Despite all this olfactory acuity, however, we remain intensely visual creatures. White wine colored red fools even the connoisseur, who tastes it as red because vision almost always wins the battle of human perception.

  Dogs are obedient, eager to please and highly trainable, which is why they do all kinds of jobs for us. In comparison, the cat presents an enigma worthy of the wonder and awe that is the theme of Abigail Tucker’s “The Lion in the Living Room.” What do cats do for us? They sit pretty, purr when petted and seem to use us instead of us using them. How come we like them so much? One possible answer is Konrad Lorenz’s so-called Kindchenschema (infant-appeal) according to which we fall for signals of vulnerability in the young of our own and other species. With its relatively large frontal eyes and rounded features, the house cat sends many of these signals. They arouse human care and protectiveness even for a species that massacres songbirds and poses other environmental threats.

  Another possible explanation is that we began to love cats for precisely these predatory capacities, tolerating them in order to keep mice and other rodents away from our homes and food storage. This may be the main reason the Near Eastern type of Felis sylvestris (cat of the woods) was turned into Felis domesticus about 12,000 years ago. Although the cat’s body changed remarkably little, its character became quite a bit more tolerable than the way Frances Pitt, a wildlife photographer, once described a wildcat she owned, which “spat and scratched in fiercest resentment. Her pale green eyes glared savage hatred at human beings, and all attempts to establish friendly relations with her failed.”

  Tucker describes the history of the cat’s domestication, its relatively small breed differentiation (compared with dogs), while reviewing feline traits that we like, or think we like. Cats are depicted as protein-oriented hypercarnivores, which know how to manipulate us with well-timed meows and purrs while loathing members of their own kind. But although the latter view is popular, is it really correct? Having had multiple cats in my home all my life, I’d say it is true for only half of them. These cats would indeed have been perfectly happy without feline company. But the other half actively sought out the company and affection of humans and that of other cats, snuggling with their friends every day. Cats may search for a companion when he or she is gone, or cease eating upon the death of another. They can be quite a bit more social than they’re given credit for.

  Nevertheless, we like the image of cats as independent and territorial, as masters over us slaves, which view is enshrined in our internet heroes, from Henri, the blasé French-speaking aristocat, to Grumpy Cat. They all exude nonchalant perfection. With informative first-person excursions to different places and topics, Tucker reviews all aspects of our favorite pet as well as the spell it has cast on us.

  The only problem I have with both books is the mismatch between titles and content. Horowitz’s title suggests it is about being a dog, but the subtitle better covers her theme. Her book is about the olfactory sense, its huge importance for the dog but also its overlooked role for ourselves. Tucker’s title suggests we will hear about the sweet-looking carnivore in our living room, but instead of telling us how cats behave and why — which has been done many times before — she relates where cats come from, why they may have been domesticated and why we hold them so dear. We are a pet-loving species, even more so in our modern urban lives than before, which is why we like to read up on our furry companions while they purr in our laps or snore at our feet.

  Frans de Waal is a primatologist, a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?”

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