What Happens to the Natural World when People Disappear?

 

 

 Across the globe, vast swathes of land are being left to be reclaimed by nature. To see what could be coming, look to Bulgaria.

Abandonment, when it came, crept in from the outskirts. Homes at the edge of town were first to go, then the peripheral grocery stores. It moved inward, slow but inexorable. The petrol station closed, and creeper vines climbed the pumps, amassing on the roof until it buckled under the strain. It swallowed the outer bus shelters, the pharmacies, the cinema, the cafe. The school shut down.

Today, one of the last institutions sustaining human occupation in Tyurkmen, a village in central Bulgaria, is the post office. Dimitrinka Dimcheva, a 56-year-old post officer, still keeps it open two days a week, bringing in packages of goods that local shops no longer exist to sell. Once a thriving town of more than 1,200, Tyurkmen is now home to fewer than 200 people.

On a warm spring afternoon, Dimcheva stood in the town square. “The weddings took place here, all of the folk dances, the volleyball. There were lots of young people. A pool,” she said. She gazed around, pointing to ruins or now-empty spaces where buildings once stood, remembering. There, the building that housed a small cinema. Behind it, the space for a school that burned down, was rebuilt, then closed. “Life was bubbling.” Now, she said, “life in the villages is dying”.

Thousands of similar villages are scattered across Bulgaria. After the fall of communism, people flocked to the cities in search of work, and over the next 30 years many villages emptied to the point of obliteration. As of the 2021 census, almost 300 villages were completely abandoned, and more than 1,000 had populations below 30 – most of them very elderly. With its low birthrates and high rates of emigration, Bulgaria has been emptying out for decades. Its population has dropped from close to 9 million in 1989, to fewer than 6.5 million  – one of the worst peacetime population declines  in modern history.

Bulgaria lies at the extreme end of this kind of demographic change, but the forces reshaping it are acting everywhere. Over the past half century, the global portion of people living in rural areas has decreased by almost a third. Farming is becoming increasingly industrial and concentrated. More than half of all people now live in and around cities, and that figure is expected to rise to 70% by 2050. In many countries, birthrates are dropping steadily, and while the global population is projected to keep  growing until 2080, around half of that growth is being driven by fewer than 10 countries.

As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place, ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.

Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world. A team of scientists recently calculated that roughly 30m hectares of farmland had been abandoned across the mainland US since the 1980s. As the climate crisis renders more places unliveable – too threatened by flooding, water shortages and wildfires to build houses, soil too degraded and drought-stripped to farm – we can expect further displacements.

This world-altering shift has drawn remarkably little attention. “It has been there all the time – but we did not really describe it,” says Prof He Yin of Kent State University, one of the scientists now using remote sensing to create global maps of abandoned land. “We talk about expansion,” he said, referring to development of land. “Yes, absolutely that’s important. But there’s this other side – abandonment – that people don’t really talk about.”

Alongside this story of depopulation is another story – of what happens to the land left behind. To preserve a livable planet, it is crucial to preserve and expand forests, grasslands, healthy ecosystems and wild places. Huge expanses of abandoned land represent an opportunity but also a question, an ongoing experiment without clearly predictable outcomes. For thousands of years, humans have dramatically shaped the places where they live, transforming the Earth’s face. So what happens to the natural world when people disappear?

It was this puzzle that drew ecologist Gergana Daskalova to Tyurkmen. On a hot, quiet morning in May she walked down the main street. It was empty of people, but lined by papers that fluttered in the early summer heat, tugging at their staples on the fences, gates and power poles. When a member of the household dies in Bulgaria, it is traditional to mark their passing with a notice. The A4 printouts featured a name, photograph, date of death and a brief tribute. Each noted how long ago the loved one had died: six months, a year, a decade, 22 years. In villages across the country, these posters often also mark the end of human habitation. “If you walk around, you’ll see it’s like this clock that’s ticking, measuring the time since those people have left us,” Daskalova said. “On a human level, that’s very sad. But that clock, it’s also measuring the end of human impact, and the onset of environmental change afterwards.”

Daskalova specialises in global change ecology: how large-scale human activity is reshaping the natural world. She is in the middle of an ambitious research project, studying 30 villages across the Bulgarian countryside in different stages of abandonment. Along with collaborators and students, she is gathering a huge range of data: using aerial drones to map the return of forests, block-by-block botany surveys to see what plants are growing, audio recorders on trees to capture shifts in the density and volume of birdsong. Over time, she hopes to compare the ecology of derelict villages with those where some people remain, providing a comprehensive picture of how nature responds when humans leave.

Daskalova, is in her early 30s, with a chatty warmth and patient knack for breaking down scientific theory, possibly honed by a year of explaining to curious shepherds why she’s out strapping microphones to trees in remote fields. She recently gave birth to her son, and on some days he watched from her hip, swaying and serious-eyed, as she strode around research plots.

Tyurkmen was not a randomly selected research site – it is the place she grew up. Like many of her generation, as a young child Daskalova was largely raised by grandparents while her parents went to work in the nearest city. Eventually, she left for university. “For a decade, I was one of the people who left the village and only returned occasionally, and every time I came back, there were less and less people living on my street,” she said. When she was younger, Daskalova would track the creep of abandonment in the wintertime, watching to see whether smoke emerged from a chimney down the street, or light shone from one of the windows. “Instead, one by one, the lights get turned off,” she said.

For the first few years of her career, Daskalova worked in far-flung places, including the arctic tundra. But she remembered the great depopulation she had lived through, and recognised that it was part of something wider, with scope to reshape the future of thousands of species.

Today, she lives and works in the home in Tyurkmen that once belonged to her grandparents. All around her, homes stand empty. Across the street, one house has crumpled inward, like a cardboard box left in the rain. Inside, that morning, nesting barn swallows orbited a bedroom. The front door had been knocked off its hinges, still carrying an enamel plaque: an award dispensed by communist-era local authorities, reading “exemplary home”.

Abandoned places are not the most alluring research sites: “They’re not the rainforests, not the gorillas,” said Daskalova. Individually, each research site is just a village, like thousands of others. “But in a way that’s what makes it special,” she continued, “because depopulation is happening at a really big scale.” And what comes after abandonment is often not what we expect.

  News that great swathes of our planet are being abandoned can excite visions of a rewilded Eden in the ruins of humanity. In the absence of humans, nature will come roaring back. Deer will roam the streets of crumbling cities, vines will crack the concrete, football fields will give way to forests. The skies will clear and species will flourish. In 2020, lockdowns gave many people a taste of what semi-abandonment might look like. As humans were forced indoors, wild creatures returned to some urban streets and suburban gardens. “Humans are the virus,” observers declared, in a mixture of earnest commentary and internet punchlines. In their absence, “nature is healing”.

Visions of humans as a pox upon the natural world – and of paradise sprouting in our absence – are intertwined with some of ecology’s oldest ideas. In the late 19th century, botanist Frederick Clements helped popularise succession theory, the idea that left to its own devices, any disturbed landscape will follow a step-by-step progression. A ploughed field, for instance, will be overtaken first by fast-growing grasses and weeds, then shrubs, which finally thicken into trees and forest. Clements argued that any place would move through succession to a “climax” state of stable equilibrium. The final result could differ according to climate and geography, an alpine forest being different from a swamp or desert. But the essential trajectory was always the same: a “universal law”, Clements wrote, of ecosystems climbing toward climax like an animal progressing through infancy toward adulthood.

The idea gained traction through the early 20th century, coinciding with a period of explosive growth in human cities, populations and industry. It had a kind of simple, elegant beauty. As people watched human activity transform the earth around them, it also offered a certain comfort. No matter how dramatic the disturbance – whether the retreat of a glacier or the razing of a forest for farmland – nature’s capacity to return remained. That ideal climax state would rest like a substrate beneath the soil, lying dormant even as the land above was tilled or excavated or burned or paved. To return, all it needed was time and benign neglect.

Over time, Clements’ more sweeping theories were picked apart by fellow botanists. The stable, permanent climax communities he had theorised proved elusive: field studies continued to find ecosystems passing through unpredictable cycles of collapse, regeneration, divergence and stasis. Today, this deterministic version of succession theory is seen as widely debunked. But Clements’ vision endured in the popular imagination – sometimes to the frustration of ecologists. “Many popular ideas about the environment are premised on the conviction that nature is … capable of preserving its natural balance more or less indefinitely if only humans can avoid disturbing it,” ecological historian William Cronon wrote in 1995. “These stories are ours, not nature’s. The natural world does not organise itself into parables.”

In practice, scientists have found that humanity’s relationship to the natural world is far more complex than we often assume. This is one of Daskalova’s more counterintuitive findings: rather than always being antithetical to nature, human presence can help make life possible for a vast array of species. Even more surprisingly, total abandonment can sometimes have worse consequences for biodiversity than landscapes where some people remain.

To show how this could be possible, Daskalova drove me to a village buried in vines. Kreslyuvtsi lies in semi-mountainous regions of central Bulgaria. For years now, most of the village has been completely abandoned. In the spectrum of villages that Daskalova is studying, it offers a case study of what something approaching absolute human absence brings.

Standing at the edge of a hillside, Daskalova gingerly took a step off the path and out into space. When her foot landed, she bounced ever so slightly, held up by the latticing of thousands of bramble vines, woven tightly enough to create their own buoyant elasticity. Somewhere beneath was a steeply sloped bank of land, and out a few metres in front was one of the long-abandoned homes of Kreslyuvtsi village. Its form was slowly collapsing as the stone walls crumbled. Brambles had surged up over the house until only an upper corner of the tiled roof was fully visible, jutting above the vines like the prow of a boat in its final stages of sinking. “They will swallow this place whole,” Daskalova said.

The brambles illustrate the first force that abandoned land faces: when humans leave en masse, new dominant species can make a clean sweep. The worst offenders are not brambles, but imported, invasive species. In Poland, where about 12% of farmland was abandoned after the fall of communism, the fields have turned thick mustard yellow, blanketed by the bright pollen cascades of Canadian goldenrod. This species has colonised about 75% of the country’s abandoned fields, and where goldenrod grows, little else thrives. Scientists studying this abandoned land found that wild pollinators  decreased by 60% - 70%, and the number of birds halved. In Bulgaria, an emerging threat is the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), a hardy, fast-growing, disease-resistant tree from northern China, with bitter-smelling sap that repels other plant, animal and microbial life.

These monocultures can create “biological deserts”, where just one species grows. The need to diversify them is not only an aesthetic, human preference. Monocultures are associated with soil degradation and nutrient depletion, extinctions of other species, difficulty purifying water, catastrophic wildfires, vulnerability to drought and the rapid spread of disease.

In some cases, a monoculture’s dominance is temporary. Even virulent invasive species can sometimes act as “nursery” environments for a variety of plants and creatures that might eventually outgrow them. Other times, an ecosystem may stall, failing to recover or diversify. “It is widely believed that once destroyed, forests can recover naturally from grassland or shrubland within a few decades in a process known as forest succession, and that tree planting can help,” scientists discussing the process on Hong Kong plantations wrote in 2023. “Our study shows that forests do not recover as much, or as rapidly, as people think they do.”

 

 

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Humans are often responsible for creating monocultures. But there is also a surprising, unacknowledged role that people can play in holding them back.

Out among the brambles in Kreslyuvtsi, Daskalova turned, carefully dragging her gumboots back toward the path winding up the hillside. Reaching the path, she crouched in the grass and began to name species around her feet: grasses, ivy, but also buttercups, purple flowering vines, a tiny yellow orchid. “I can’t imagine many people walk up this road, but every once in a while some do,” she says. In the process, they have held back the rising tide of brambles, and opened up space for this small flurry of species, a scatter of colour against the flat green opacity of vines.

From where Daskalova stood, the path led up to an opening in the trees, where long grass and wildflowers grew in a clearcut meadow. Here, again, a small island of fragile blooms revealed the history of this land. Buttercups and agricultural weeds signalled that humans were here in the not-too-distant past, as did the clearing itself. Daskalova pointed to the thick-woven darkness of trees around the space, arranged like an audience in an amphitheatre, their network of branches already forking into the precious light of the clearing. “They’re right at the edge, ready to move in when that opportunity arises,” she said. “If there’s no grazing or mowing, it could only be something like five years until it’s all in the shadows of a denser canopy.”

When people imagine ecosystems recovering, this return to forest is often what springs to mind. But forests only represent a small sliver of possible habitats. For other species, the currency of life is light, and a dense, closed canopy of forest is impossible to survive. A swallow is perfectly adapted to vast, open fields: the curve of its wings and distinctive forking tail designed for fast pursuit of insects hovering above meadows. A starling murmuration, moving across the sky like spilled pepper over a tablecloth, is an adaptation to open fields: repelling predators, protecting the roost. Vast numbers of species adapted and co-evolved with these open places – plants, mammals, insects, grazers, species like wildflowers, that relish disturbance and light. The rich biodiversity of open grasslands can be even greater than that of temperate forests.

Once, many of these kinds of environments were created by megafauna. Mammoths, giant water buffalo, bison and cave bears were large enough to reshape forests, toppling trees to create steppes and prairie. Scientists have estimated that megafauna were responsible for keeping about 30%   of South America’s forests at bay. Almost all of them are now extinct, the timing of their demise usually linked  to the arrival of humans. In many places, humans are the only remaining creatures that can consistently reshape landscapes in these radical ways, pushing back the shade of the trees for other creatures to take root.

For millennia, all across the planet, humans have been using fire and tools to open up land for agriculture, gardens, grazing and hunting. In the process, we created ecological “mosaics”, or “patchworks”: landscapes that hold a mixture of habitats, like meadows, gardens and forests. These places were not designed as nature reserves, but they often catered to hugely diverse animal life. In her book Nature’s Ghosts, Sophie Yeo details research  indicating that European hay meadows cultivated for animal feed were actually more successful at preserving a vast array of species than meadows explicitly cultivated for biodiversity. Looking back over the early Holocene – beginning 11,700 years ago – researchers have found that human presence was about as likely to increase biodiversity as reduce it.

Not all human-created landscapes have the same value. A paved subdivision with astroturfed lawns is very different to a village with diverse vegetable and flower gardens. A traditional hay meadow is radically different from a pesticide-drenched plantation of soya beans. But scientists continue to find evidence that the old idea of humans as antithetical to nature is also wrong-headed, and that rosy visions of thriving, human-free environments are more imaginary than real. “People are still imagining [nature as] this kind of pristine place that’s going to be saved from people,” says US environmental scientist Erle Ellis. “That is definitely a misunderstanding.”

In 2021, Ellis published new research that looked back 12,000 years. He and his colleagues found that nearly three-quarters of Earth’s land was occupied and shaped by human societies. Other researchers have pushed even further back. Examining human-biodiversity interactions in the Late Pleistocene – back as far as 120,000 years – scientists concluded that across most of the planet, “‘Pristine’ landscapes simply do not exist and, in most cases, have not existed for millennia”.

Many of the landscapes people now tend to think of as untouched, from the savanna lands of equatorial Africa to the deep Amazon rainforest, have already been deeply transformed by human presence. “The essential role that people play in ecology is the critical thing, and it’s been ignored,” Ellis says. “The most biodiverse places left on Earth – this is almost universally true – have Indigenous people in them. Why? Well, they conserve a lot of that biodiversity and actually produce it. They maintain that heterogeneous landscape.”

There is no question that recent human activity – particularly the massive clearing of ecosystems and industrial consumption of fossil fuels – has been an ecological catastrophe. But for nature to be restored to a past version of itself, the question might be less one of human absence, than what form human presence can take.

In the small communities riding out abandonment in Bulgaria, you sometimes see patches of gentle human presence that might offer paths for the future, as well as glimpses of the past. Off Tyurkmen’s main street, a dirt road leads to a stretch of scrubby meadowland. On the day I visited, Slavcho Petkov Stoyanov, who is 56 years old, stood watching as his sheep grazed among the shrubs. “Years ago, nobody would have let me graze here,” he said. “All this was used for growing vegetables.” His is the last flock in the village and he usually employs shepherds to watch them – but recently those young men left town and he was back out in the fields himself, sitting in a patch of shade to dodge the midday sun.

Stoyanov is one of the few remaining people here who help to maintain a diverse, “mosaic” landscape: in some empty blocks, the canopy of trees is expanding, but others are cleared by grazing and littered with wildflowers. He offers an example of how some forms of human occupation can be a protection against environmental damage rather than a source. As rural places like Tyurkmen depopulate, they become vulnerable to new forms of exploitation: land prices drop, and there are fewer people around to oppose projects like mines and quarries. “What you can get is depopulation as a stepping stone to industrialisation,” Daskalova told me.

Stoyanov pointed to the reservoir below the fields. His grandparents helped dig it themselves. Then, a few years ago, a company was granted cheap contracts by the municipality to take fish from it. The process followed a brutal, short-term logic: they installed pumps, drained the reservoir, and scooped the fish out. Almost everything else died. “They got about 20 tonnes of fish,” Stoyanov said. The remaining villagers were furious, and mounted a successful campaign to have the contract ended. The reservoir has slowly refilled, with water, fish, birds. Over time, he hopes parts of the village will refill, too. They have new opponents now, including a limestone quarry proposed at the village boundary.

To harness the full environmental possibilities offered by the great abandonment will require changing our conception of humanity’s relationship to nature, and understanding how our species can benefit ecosystems as well as harm them. It will also require human intention: neglect alone is not enough. Around Slavcho’s herds, the backdrop of Tyurkmen was transforming. Patches of forest thrust outward, vines demolished villas, chemical-smelling invasive thickets occupied meadows. The march of nature seemed inexorable, but its future was still uncertain, contingent on the remaining people: what would they allow to grow? What would they keep at bay?

This point about uncertainty recurs again and again in conversations with scientists studying abandoned land. For biodiversity to thrive it needs time. The same forces that drive people from a place – pandemics, wars, shifting economic tides – can send them flowing back. He Yin, working with a group of scholars, found that millions of hectares of abandoned land were recultivated within a few decades. Their neglect was “too ephemeral” to translate into true gains for nature.

At one of Daskalova’s longest-abandoned monitoring sites, she had seen the trees grow thick and steady, undisturbed since the last occupants left. “Nobody had stepped on that plot in nearly half a century,” she said. Then, this year, a new set of owners appeared. They had plans for a guesthouse, transforming the isolated plot into a sanctuary for holidaymakers. “The first thing they did was to clear every single bit of vegetation – they just bulldozed the whole thing,” she said. The forest was shorn back and ploughed into dirt, the plot left dotted with a few invasive weeds.

After clearing the land, the buyers realised their new project would not be profitable. “They gave up on the guesthouse idea,” Daskalova said. “Now it’s abandoned again.”

The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear? By Tess McClure. The Guardian,  November 28, 2024.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Meow Is A Feline Invention For Conversing With People, The Hidden Language of Cats

 

Chapter 1

Wildcats and Witches

Cat said, "I am not a friend, and I am not a servant. I am the Cat who walks by himself, and I wish to come into your cave."

-Rudyard Kipling, The Cat That Walked by Himself

I stood in the corridor outside the walk-in cat pen at the rescue center and watched through the wire mesh door. The center manager, Ann, already inside the pen, approached the big glaring ginger cat who was crouched against a side wall, eyes like saucers, fur fluffed to the maximum, hissing and growling in a truly terrifying manner. Undeterred, Ann wielded her syringe of vaccine and, with fearless skill and dexterity, quickly jabbed him with the needle. Big Ginger, as we later named him, launched himself. Not at Ann, but up the wall, across the ceiling, down the other side, and into a box to hide in the blink of an eye. Retracing his route with my eyes, I asked Ann, "Did he actually just run over the ceiling?" She smiled. "The ferals often do that." Rookie postgrad that I was, I had to confess to her this was my first proper experience with feral cats, which are unsocialized domestic cats that have reverted to a semi-wild existence. People had laughed when I said I was going to study domestic cat behavior for my doctorate. "Domestic cats? Aren't they a bit boring? Don't you want to go abroad and study big wildcats somewhere?" I figured this one was probably wild enough for me.

While Big Ginger and the other cats from his colony were being looked after at the rescue center, my colleagues and I visited the cats' future home, a farm. We put up a shed as a base from which to feed them and, lining the shelves inside with beds, cut a cat-size hole in the door so they could use it for shelter too. A few months later, to offer them some extra cover, next to the shed we built a square wooden structure with a hinged lid containing four compartments, separated from one another internally and each with its own entrance hole. We grandly named it the "catterama."

The day after the cats were released at the farm, I stood hopefully by the shed, a tin of cat food in my hand, and surveyed the land around. There was not a cat in sight. Occasionally a flash of black and white or ginger would catch my eye and then be gone. At one point I could just about make out two little eyes reflecting back at me from the darkness of the bushes nearby. Hmm, so much for a "study" colony, I thought-would any of them ever venture out into the open again?

As I embarked on my studies of cats and their communication, words like tame, feral, domestic, socialized, and wildcat floated through the literature in a bewildering fashion. So much to disentangle. What did they all mean? Can you tame a wildcat? What, really, is a domesticated animal? And is a feral cat still a domestic cat? Slowly, as I learned more about Big Ginger, his colony mates, and their ancestors, I began to find answers to my questions. I realized that when looking at how my colony cats communicated, it was important to consider the history of cats, and how they have adapted and changed. For example, the life of a wildcat is so different from that of a domestic cat, there surely had to be differences in their language too.

Domestication

Is the "domestic" cat actually domesticated? It is a question that's been asked time and time again, the cause of endless debates and raised fur among cat-loving and cat-hating communities around the world. Looking for an answer requires some consideration of the difference between a tame animal and a domesticated one and where the modern-day cat fits in.

 Taming describes the process whereby an animal becomes biddable and often friendly toward the handler over the course of its lifetime. It applies to a single animal, not a population or species. Wild individuals of many species are tamed by people and have been for millennia.

Domestication, on the other hand, is a much longer process that involves genetic change in a whole population over time. Humans have been trying to domesticate animals, to adapt them to living with us under our terms, for thousands of years. While we have succeeded with some-like dogs-for other species it has proved an impossible challenge. Often the best result we can achieve is taming, and with many animals, even that option remains elusive.

The challenge is that for domestication to occur, a species needs certain qualities. The first, and most important, is approachability and the potential to be handled by humans-that is, they must possess the capacity to become tame. For tameness to develop into domestication, the general rule of thumb is that the animals must have the ability to live in social groups or herds controlled by a leader (and be accepting of humans in this role). They must also be flexible with their diet, eating whatever we have available to feed them. In particular, for domestication to progress, animals must be able to breed in captivity, again under the control of humans who select individuals that possess the most favorable traits. All in all, a big ask for many species of animal-not least the cat.

How do we tell if a species is domesticated? In 1868, Charles Darwin noted, with some intrigue, how domesticated mammals have certain behavioral and physical characteristics in common with one another compared with their wild ancestors. As well as the expected increase in friendliness toward people, there were odd things such as smaller brains and coat color variations. Ninety years later, in a remote research station in Siberia, what is probably the most famous ongoing domestication study in history began. Russian scientists Dmitri Belyaev, Lyudmila Trut, and their team re-created the domestication process starting with a captive population of silver foxes that had originally been reared for their luxurious fur. Although the foxes all appeared very wild, there was some natural variation in their behavior toward people. Belyaev selected those that were least reactive to approach by humans and bred from them. He then chose the tamest offspring of these matings and bred from them and so on until, after only ten generations, he had a small population of friendly, waggy-tailed, vocal, and interactive foxes. As more generations were bred, the foxes started to display physical changes, too, such as spotted coats, floppy ears, and shorter, curlier tails. Amazingly, these traits appeared simply as a side effect of selection for tameness.

Domestication syndrome, as it is now described, refers to an array of both physical and physiological traits exhibited by species that have undergone domestication. The list has grown over the years as Belyaev's fox study and others have identified additional traits, including smaller teeth, a tendency toward more juvenile facial features and behavior, reduced stress hormone levels, and a change in the reproductive cycle.

Most domestic animals exhibit a selection of these changes but rarely all of them, their expression varying among species. With so much variability, some scientists have begun to question whether domestication "syndrome" as such exists. Even Belyaev's studies have come under deeper scrutiny with the discovery that the original foxes on his farm came from fur farms in Canada and may therefore have already undergone some previous selection for handleability. While the debate about an overall syndrome continues, there seems little doubt that domestication does bring about some physical as well as genetic changes in many species compared with their wild ancestors.

Interestingly, these types of changes have also been observed in contemporary populations of certain undomesticated species. With more and more species adapting to thrive near people, some are starting to exhibit traits similar to those of domesticated species. In the UK, for example, red foxes have become increasingly present in urban areas where they show reduced fear of people. Some of these urban foxes have been found to have shorter and wider snouts and narrower brain cases compared with rural foxes, physical changes that resemble those associated with domestication in other species.

"Domesticated" cats show a few physical features that distinguish them a little, but not a whole lot, from their wildcat ancestors. Their legs are a bit shorter, their brains slightly smaller, and they have longer intestines. Domesticated cats' coats vary in color and pattern, too, compared with the consistently striped (mackerel) tabby markings of the wildcat. Floppy ears, however, do not occur, and neither do shorter, curlier tails. That there are so few obvious physical differences between them and the wildcat has caused many to question how domesticated the cat is.

So just how qualified are cats in the domestication stakes? They certainly have the capacity to become tame. On the whole, they seem happy to eat what we feed them (apart from those who have perfected the art of fussiness)-their longer intestine compared with that of wildcats is thought to be an adaptation to feeding off human scraps. They have also adapted to living in groups, although mostly only where necessary or advantageous to them. However, the list fizzles out around there. That cats regard humans as their "leaders" seems highly questionable. And perhaps because of this there is another, much bigger gap in the cat's qualification for true domestic status. Although cats are able to reproduce in captivity, selective breeding by humans to produce those with known pedigrees is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating from around the late 1800s. The popularity of such pedigreed cats as pets has grown in recent years, yet surveys indicate that still only 4 percent of owners in the US and 8 percent in the UK acquire their cats from a specialist breeder. Most domestic cats are what are known as random bred, with mixed or unknown parentage. Some are lucky enough to live as well-cared-for pets, either permanently indoors or with outdoor access, but millions of cats worldwide have no home and live very different lives, often quite independently from humans. Today many pet house cats are neutered, itself a form of breeding control by humans, albeit preventive rather than selective in nature. However, huge numbers of pet cats remain unneutered, many of them wandering freely outdoors, and these cats, along with the millions of unowned ones, form a vast reproductively intact cat population on the lookout for mates. These cats breed indiscriminately, very much not under the control of people, although often literally right on our doorsteps. Some say this widespread lack of human influence over cats' choice of mates means that they aren't fully domesticated. As a result, cats have been variously described as semidomesticated, partially domesticated, or commensal in their unique relationship with humankind.

Socialization and Feralization

However we decide to label it, the modern-day "domestic" cat does possess a genetic predisposition for friendliness toward humans. It is only a predisposition, though, and cats aren't just magically friendly to humans from the minute they're born. Kittens must first meet humans at a very early age-between two and seven weeks old-in order to become tolerant of and friendly toward humans as adults.

Take this scenario. A friendly, socialized female pet cat, let's call her Molly, falls on hard times. Molly's owners move away and abandon her, so she resorts to a life on the street, finding food where she can. If unneutered, she may become pregnant courtesy of a wandering tomcat and give birth to kittens, tucked away wherever she can find a safe, sheltered spot. These kittens may not encounter a human in the first two months of their lives, even if Molly is still friendly toward people, because, to the best of her ability, she will hide her babies from any potential danger. If left long enough without human contact, the kittens will grow up nervous toward people and will avoid them for the rest of their lives, often hanging around human habitation to glean food but avoiding interaction. As these growing kittens then breed with other stray cats, their offspring and successive generations become increasingly wary of people.

These are known as feral cats. They are still genetically identical to domestic cats and retain the domestic cat's ability to live in close proximity to other cats when necessary. This is usually to exploit a local concentrated abundance of food, such as handouts from a restaurant or scraps from waste bins. Groups of feral cats often become established in an area, and if allowed to reproduce, they rapidly expand in number to form larger colonies.

It's not just a one-way process, though. Molly's kittens could become quite feral within a generation through missing out on socializing with people. But as domestic cats, they still retain and genetically pass on the ability to be friendly toward humans if socialized. The progeny of these potential ferals, if introduced to people early enough, could become properly socialized and live with people as happily adjusted pet cats, just like their grandmother Molly once did.

It was in just such a colony that Big Ginger started life. We have no idea how many generations of ferals had lived under the school buildings where we first met him and his colony mates, but it's safe to say Big Ginger was well and truly suspicious of people. As were most of the other adult cats. Four of the females gave birth to litters of kittens while in the rescue center-judging by the telltale ginger and tortoiseshell coats among them, we assumed Big Ginger was the father of at least some of them. Despite their antisocial dad, these kittens were young enough to be introduced to people and socialized at the rescue center before finding homes. This would not have been possible for Big Ginger. He would never be able to tolerate living in such close proximity to humans, although as time went on, he gradually accepted my daily presence outdoors at the farm and would sit politely some distance away waiting for his dinner.

The Origins of the Domestic Cat

Where did it all begin? It is only really in the past twenty years that we have discovered the true origins of today's domestic cat. Prior to that, from the many artistic portrayals of cats on ancient Egyptian tombs and temples from around three and a half thousand years ago, we simply knew that a special relationship with cats existed at that time. Images of cats sitting under people's chairs or on their laps led to the assumption that it was the ancient Egyptians who first domesticated the cat. But which "cat" did they domesticate? And did cat domestication only occur in ancient Egypt?

 The first step toward finding the answers to these questions came in 2007, when a study of the DNA of the entire cat family-the Felidae-revealed that it was composed of eight distinct groups or lineages. These groups diverged from their common ancestor, the catlike Pseudaelurus, at different times, beginning with the Panthera lineage (containing, among others, lions and tigers) over ten million years ago. The very last group to branch off the family tree, around 3.4 million years ago, was a lineage containing various species of small wildcat-the Felis lineage. From genetic comparisons within the study, researchers found that the domestic cat fit within this lineage.

Excerpted from The Hidden Language of Cats by Sarah Brown. 

Penguin Random House

 

“That one in there—he just sits and hisses.” The school caretaker pointed to a hole underneath the old building. I crouched down, peered in, and said, “Hello there,” to the dirty, scrawny little cat, who promptly hissed at me with all his tiny might. Hissing Sid, as he became affectionately known, was one of a colony of feral cats that my colleagues and I went on to rescue from the grounds of the school, where they were becoming something of a nuisance. After a little sojourn in a rescue shelter where they were all neutered and their kittens found new homes, the cats were relocated to a farm. Over the next few years, feeding them in their special cat shed on the farm every day, these cats became part of my life. Here, as they learned to trust me, they worked out new ways to communicate with me. Ways that included less hissing and more of the friendly sounds we associate with our sweet‐talking pet cats.

In a cat’s world, where smells are paramount, it must be a bewildering experience when they first hear a person speak. So many different, unfamiliar sounds directed either at another person or, even more perplexingly, at the cat. Humans are very preoccupied with the spoken word, babbling away at everyone and everything we meet. Intrigued as to what their “spoken” sounds mean, we have developed something of a fascination with the vocalizations of cats too. Nestled deep in the history books, a diary entry by the Abbé Galiani of Naples, dated March 21, 1772, offers some of the earliest recorded insights into cat vocalizations.

“I am rearing two cats and studying their habits—a completely new field of scientific observation . . . Mine are a male and a female; I have isolated them from other cats in the neighborhood, and have been watching them closely. Would you believe it— during the months of their amours they haven’t miaowed once: thus one learns that miaowing isn’t their love language, but rather a signal to the absent.”

Little did he know it, but Galiani was ahead of the game with his observation that his two cats never meowed to each other. The true purpose of meowing would only be discovered centuries later, when larger scientific studies of cats became more accepted.

Through the intervening years, feline literature embarked on something of a magical mystery tour of the apparent linguistic talents of cats. Writers mostly attempted to define cat vocalizations along the lines of human language, identifying consonants and vowel patterns and certain “human” letters in their cats’ speech. Reflecting on the differences between cats and dogs, Dupont de Nemours, an eighteenth‐century naturalist, wrote, “The cat, also, has the advantage of a language which has the same vowels as pronounced by the dog, and with six consonants in addition, m, n, g, h, v, and f.”

Some authors took this a step further to describe cats’ use of actual human words. In 1895 Marvin R. Clark, a musician and lover of cats, published an enchanting and slightly bewildering book titled Pussy and Her Language. In this he includes “A Paper on the Wonderful Discovery of the Cat Language,” apparently penned by a French professor named Alphonse Leon Grimaldi. In it, Grimaldi claimed to have elucidated the language of cats, providing an in‐depth analysis of the cat’s use of vowels, consonants (apparently used “daintily” by cats), and grammar, as well as words and numbers.

 Grimaldi’s paper included a list of what he considered to be seventeen of the most important words in the feline language:

He went on to elaborate, “In the feline language the rule is to place the noun or the verb first in the sentence, thus preparing the mind of the hearer for what is to follow.” As if this weren’t skilled enough, Grimaldi also considered cats capable of counting. He compiled a comprehensive list, including “Aim” for number one and “Zule” for millions.

Grimaldi’s “translations” were not surprisingly met with mixed reactions; many authors dismissed them as nonsense. However, among his rather bizarre suggestions, he did include a few wonderful nuggets of insight. His description of an enraged cat, for example, will resonate with many people:

“The word ‘yew’ . . . when uttered as an explosive, is the Cat’s strongest expression of hatred, and a declaration of war.”

In 1944, Mildred Moelk revolutionized the world of cat language with her in‐depth study of the phonetics of the sounds produced by her own house cats. Her approach was to divide the vocal sounds of domestic cats into three main categories based on how they are produced. First, those made by the cat with their mouth closed, such as purrs, trills, chirrups, and murmurs. Second, the sounds made while the cat’s mouth is opened and then gradually closed—these include the meow, the male and female mating calls, and the aggressive howl. The last group are all made while the mouth is held continuously open, generally associated with aggression, defense, or pain in cats. They include growls, snarls, yowls, hisses, spits, more intense mating cries, and shrieks of pain.

The difficulty in this vocal categorization lies in the huge amount of variation in the production of sounds, both between cats and within the repertoire of a single individual. As Moelk so elegantly put it, “The house‐cat, unlike man, has enforced upon it no model of traditional language and no standard of correct pronunciation to which it must conform.” Her work has been used as the basis for the analysis of cat vocalizations ever since. Some investigators have attempted to classify them using phonetic criteria like Moelk, while others have examined their acoustic qualities or concentrated on their behavioral contexts.

Although cats have a huge range of vocalizations, in cat‐to‐cat interactions they generally reserve these sounds for three types of occasions: finding a mate, fighting, and communicating between kittens and their mothers. The first two involve supernoisy sounds that we tend to hear at nighttime. Caterwauling, shrieking, bloodcurdling noises—the sorts of calls that make you rush outside to identify the source or cover your ears to block them out. In their quest to communicate with humans, cats seem to have ingeniously worked out that it is the gentle sounds, like those used between a mother cat and her kittens, that appeal to us most.

*

Newborn kittens start life with the ability to purr, spit, and produce a few simple “mew” noises. At least they sound simple to us. What sounds like a lot of squeaking to the human ear is actually a range of different kitten calls. In addition to crying when they are hungry, kittens have a distress call that varies in tone, length, and volume depending on the reason for their anxiety. The mew of a kitten that is too cold has the highest pitch; becoming lost from the nest produces the loudest mew; and the most urgent and persistent mew is reserved for when they are somehow trapped. This last cry often happens as the mother sprawls out on her side to allow her kittens to nurse, inadvertently lying on some of them in the process. Depending on the type of cry, she responds by retrieving the lost kitten or by changing her position a little. Shifting her body as she lies nursing her litter encourages a kitten that has dropped off a nipple and become chilled to snuggle back in, or enables a squashed kitten to wriggle back out. A study by Wiebke Konerding and co‐researchers looked more closely at the responses of both male and female adult cats to recordings of two different types of cries made by kittens. One type had been recorded in what the authors describe as a “low arousal” context, made by kittens that had simply been spatially separated from their mother and the nest. The other was recorded in a “high arousal” context in which, as well as being separated from their mother, the kittens were held by the experimenter (restrained/trapped). On hearing these recordings, adult female cats oriented themselves toward the source of the cry (a loudspeaker) faster for the more urgent (trapped) kitten calls compared with the less urgent (strayed from nest) ones, indicating that they distinguished between the two. This happened regardless of whether they had ever had kittens themselves. Male cats, on the other hand, although they reacted to the kitten cries, showed no difference in their reactions to the two call types. Female cats therefore seem somehow hardwired to identify distress calls of kittens. Studies have also shown that each kitten develops its own individual versions of these calls and that these remain constant as it grows older. Whether mother cats can recognize their individual kittens from their calls alone remains unknown. In turn, mother cats have a very special type of call they use when interacting with their kittens. Often described as a chirrup or chirp, this gentle trill‐like sound was written by Moelk as “mhrn”* phonetically. It is a delicate, cheerful sound, described by the nineteenth‐century writer Lafcadio Hearn as “a soft, trilling coo, a pure caress of tone.”

To humans this enchanting call sounds much the same in all mother cats. Kittens, though, can recognize the chirrup of their own mother when they are only four weeks old. They can distinguish it not only from her meows but also from the chirrups and meows of different mothers. Researchers discovered this by videoing and analyzing the responses of four-week‐old kitten litters when hearing vocalizations of their own and other mother cats. While a mother cat was absent from the room, experimenters played recordings of vocalizations from behind a screen to her litter of kittens still in their nest. They played them a meow and a greeting chirrup from their own mother as well as a meow and chirrup from an unknown mother cat, at an equivalent stage of motherhood to their own. Looking at the kittens’ responses, the researchers found that they became alert faster to chirrups than to meows. They also stayed alert longer, were quicker to approach the source of the sound (the loudspeaker), and stayed there significantly longer when hearing their own mother’s chirrup compared with any other of the sounds. That kittens can do this from such an early age suggests an advanced level of cognition at a time when they are only just beginning to move around and explore their world. This may be an adaptation for survival in the wild, where litters of kittens are often hidden out of sight by their mother while she goes off to hunt or find food. Her reassuring chirrup as she returns lets them know that it is safe to come out.

As kittens mature into adult cats and their vocal cords develop, their tiny mews gradually change into the more elaborate sounds that we describe as “meows.” I’d been studying my adult hospital and farm cats for a while before I realized, just like Galiani back in 1772, that I had never heard them meow to each other. They would hiss occasionally and may well have quietly purred when sitting together, but that was the extent of their vocalizations. Later studies confirmed this discovery—the iconic meow of adult cats is almost exclusively reserved for cat‐human interactions.

 

In the wild, away from the comforts of a human home, mew vocalizations gradually decrease as kittens become more independent. In house cats, though, meows are by far the most frequent vocalizations directed toward humans. Our pet cats often combine the meow with extra sounds such as trills or purrs. Some cats, like people, are chattier than others. Certain pure breeds, particularly oriental ones such as Burmese and Siamese, have a reputation for being more vocal. That said, many random‐bred house cats, or moggies, spend their days meowing hopefully at their owners.

So why do they meow at us? It seems that over the ten thousand odd years that they have associated with us, cats have learned that we don’t always understand their wonderfully subtle language of scents, twitches of the tail, and flicks of the ears. They need to make noise in order to get our attention. And lots of it. For the ever‐adaptable cat, what could be more logical than to use vocalizations that, as a kitten, so effectively achieved a response from their mother?

What exactly is a meow? A simple answer is hard to find, and it depends on who you ask. Nicholas Nicastro from Cornell University has studied the meow and our understanding of it extensively. His wonderful though head‐spinningly technical definition describes the acoustics of the meow: . . . a quasiperiodic sound with at least one band of tonal energy enhanced by the resonant properties of the vocal tract. The call ranges between a fraction of a second to several seconds in duration. The pitch profile is generally arched, with resonance changes often reflected in formant shifts that give the call a diphthong‐like vowel quality. . . . This call type very often includes atonal features and garnishments (trills or growls) that may serve to differentiate the calls perceptually.

A slightly simpler, more phonetic version comes from Susanne Schötz and her team in the Meowsic project at Lund University in Sweden: “. . . a voiced sound generally produced with an opening‐closing mouth and containing a combination of two or more vowel sounds (e.g. [eo] or [iau]) with an occasional initial [m] or [w]…”

Urban Dictionary’s definition is far more succinct but to the point: “Meow is the sound a cat makes. It is also the sound a human makes when they are imitating a cat.”

To the human ear, meows can sound friendly, demanding, sad, assertive, persuasive, persistent, plaintive, complaining, endearing, and even annoying. Some investigators have attempted to categorize meows into different subdivisions, but their classification proves tricky because, just like other cat vocalizations, the meow varies substantially among cats—and even changes in the same cat at different times. Despite this variability, there seems to be a word for “meow” in every language, from the Danish “mjav” to the Japanese “nya.”

However we choose to say or spell it, the sound of a cat meowing is unmistakable. Unless that meow you thought you heard is actually a baby crying? Both sounds are generated by the vibration of the vocal cords in the larynx, and the acoustics of the two are remarkably similar, particularly with respect to what is known as fundamental frequency, or the number of waves of sound that occur per second. To the listener this frequency is perceived as the pitch of the sound—the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. The cries of healthy babies have been shown in various studies to have an average frequency of 400 to 600 Hz and are described as having a falling or rising‐falling pattern as the cry continues. Adult domestic pet cat meows, although hugely variable, were found by Nicastro to average 609 Hz. Other researchers, such as Schötz, have reported similar figures.

Pitched around the same level, both cat meows and baby cries seem to be particularly hard to ignore. The much‐researched cries of babies have been shown to elicit alertness and distress in adults. In fact, Joanna Dudek and coworkers from the University of Toronto demonstrated that hearing babies’ cries affects our ability to perform other tasks. No one has tested yet whether cat meows have the same effect but, given the acoustic resemblance to baby cries and the creativeness of cats, we can probably assume they are quite distracting.

Is this why cats are so hard to ignore? Have they somehow hot‐wired our brains so we simply must respond to an urgent need to take care of them like a baby? Possibly yes, but probably not intentionally. Throughout domestication, we may have unwittingly selected for cats with the most persuasive meows, those that tend to resemble the cries of our own infants. Nicastro’s study showed that compared with African wildcats (the ancestors of the domestic cat), the meows of domestic pet cats sound much more pleasant to human listeners. This may well be related to the differing pitches of their vocalizations, with the wildcat calls averaging 255 Hz compared with the much higher 609 Hz pitch of the domestic cats. Another study, exploring the acoustics of feral cat and pet cat meows, found the pitches of feral cat meows to be much lower than those of pet cats too. The meows of the ferals more closely resembled those of the wildcats in Nicastro’s study. This suggests that socialization and experience with humans in some way modifies the meows of domestic cats.

Interestingly, while feral cats barely meow at all when first looked after by a human, rescue workers often report that ferals increase their rate of meowing as they spend more time in their company. Even some of the feral cats that I watched on the farm, who only ever came near me very briefly when I dished up their food before leaving each day, gradually began to learn to meow a little as time passed. Cats learn fast.

 

Excerpt from : Sarah Brown’s The Hidden Language of Cats: How They Have Us at Meow. Dutton.

You Had Me At Meow: On the Hidden Language of Cats.  Scientist Sarah Brown Confirms That Your Cat Really Is Talking To You. By Sarah brown. LitHub, October 18, 2023.

Few animals are more aloof and impenetrable than the cat, no matter how much we bond with them. Eager to unlock the mysteries of her own cat, Olivia Petter invited feline expert, and author of the forthcoming ‘The Hidden Language of Cats’, Dr Sarah Brown to meet – and hopefully diagnose – her adorable Blanche DuBois

If there’s any domestic animal in need of some good PR, it’s the cat. In the pet world, they are a much-maligned anomaly. While other animals are permitted depth of character, cats are often reduced to stereotypes. They’re aloof. They’re demanding. They think they’re better than you. Some of that might be true. But internationally renowned cat expert Dr Sarah Brown has made a career out of proving why it isn’t always the case.

Dr Brown began her studies more than 30 years ago, and has spent years analysing the minutiae of feline behaviour, highlighting all the quirks and complexities that motivate cats. Having done her PhD on feral cats, she also works as a cat behaviour counsellor, visiting owners in their homes to try and help solve their pets’ problems. Typical issues range from spraying around the house to attacking owners’ ankles. On one occasion, Dr Brown dealt with a cat who’d been chewing the television cables. “That was a pretty dangerous one,” she recalls.

I’ve invited her to my house to meet my own cat, Blanche DuBois, and it only takes a few minutes for her to decipher our entire dynamic. “I imagine you don’t leave her alone much,” she says. “I can tell you’re very bonded with her.” She’s right: I am completely obsessed with Blanche. Although I’m not sure it takes a cat expert to work that one out.

Much of Dr Brown’s new book, The Hidden Language of Cats, revolves around debunking some of the common misconceptions surrounding the animals. In it, she traces cats back to their ancestral roots and examines historical records and scientific studies to illustrate some of the previously unexamined magic behind these furry creatures. “A lot of people misunderstand cats,” she says, putting this down to the fact that they descend from North African wildcats, which is an entirely solitary species.

“They didn’t come across each other very much and would communicate via scent,” Dr Brown explains. “Face-to-face contact wasn’t really a thing for these animals; unlike dogs, which descend from social wolves, cats had to develop their language from scratch, so to speak.” In short, they had a lot more work to do, and some have clearly worked harder than others.

Cats also haven’t been domesticated for as long as dogs, which, in part, is why their signals for communication are often more subtle. “It’s things like whether their tail is up or down, and which way their whiskers are pointing,” says Dr Brown. “Their ears alone have seven different ways of moving. It’s not that they’re aloof; it’s that most of what they’re doing we’re not noticing. You just need to look harder.”

New research is coming out all the time to prove this. In fact, just this week a new study published in the Behavioural Processes journal revealed that cats have 276 facial expressions, a range that is thought to have evolved as a result of living with humans. The researchers found that through a variety of facial muscle movements, including nose licks, nose wrinkles, and blinks, cats were able to express themselves in far more ways than experts have previously thought.

 

It’s a number that isn’t far off from the 357 expressions that have been spotted in chimpanzees; but it’s a far cry from the 27 facial movements observed in dogs, though no one has studied the number of expressions that can be derived from a combination of these movements. Still: take that, dog lovers.

In terms of the things cats are trying to communicate, Dr Brown explains it’s mostly along the lines of, “feed me, let me out, let me in, pet me, play with me, leave me alone!”. “The thing with cats is that they like to lead interactions, to have them on their own terms,” she says.

This is something I know all too well. You see, Blanche does not like to be told what to do. Whenever I have to shut her in a room, for example, she scratches furiously on the door, meowing until I open it. That said, she is hardly a problem cat. If anything, her only issue is that she does not have enough issues. An indoor high priestess who spends her days perusing her kingdom (my flat) from either her palace (cat tree) or her conservatory (chest of draws that overlooks a shared garden), Blanche is nothing if not overindulged. Occasionally, I worry this affects her behaviour. Dr Brown, who has spent the last 30 minutes assessing her, assures me this is not the case.

“She seems like a pretty standard, marvellously rewarding cat,” she says, holding up a piece of string that Blanche is happily pawing at. “For an indoor cat like her, enrichment is really important. So it’s great you have things like the scratching post and plenty of toys. It’s key to make her life as interesting as possible.” Throughout our chat, Blanche pads around the flat, climbing her cat tree, hiding under a chest of drawers, and meowing into the room. “She’s very busy, isn’t she?” Dr Brown remarks, noting how her tail flicks up when she comes towards her, which, apparently, is a sign she’s greeting her and being friendly. Phew.

We have a very close relationship, Blanche and I. And I explain as much to Dr Brown. Again, though, I think this requires no explanation. Given that I work from home, we spend a lot of time together. She sleeps on the pillow next to me most nights, sometimes placing her paw over my hand, and enjoys being near me wherever I am in the flat. “Clearly, she feels very safe with you,” says Dr Brown. “She doesn’t really seem that interested in wanting her own space and actually just wants to be in your space and be a part of your social group.”

Much of Dr Brown’s book is about how cats communicate with us. There are many types of meows, for example, and they differ between cats. “People who live closely with their cats may develop a repertoire where you start to understand some of their meows,” she says. “They use it as a prompt to tell you what they want or need.”

That’s all very well and good. But what about when it comes to us communicating with our cats? There are endless memes on the internet, for example, about how cats don’t even know their own names. This, Dr Brown points out, is not strictly true. “Studies have shown that cats can recognise their own name among other words that sound similar to it,” she says. “They won’t come running down the stairs when they hear it like dogs, but they might stop what they’re doing and suddenly pay more attention to you.”

 

We can also tell them that we love them, although perhaps not in those exact terms. “The best way of showing cats love is to notice what they’re doing and try to read their signals and respond,” says Dr Brown. “That might be giving them space when they need it or affection when they ask for it.”

There are a few specific things Blanche does that I want to ask Dr Brown about. Why, for example, does she always roll on her back with her little feet in the air when I come home? “That’s a really big compliment and means she’s really relaxed and comfortable,” she says. “But people think that means ‘come and rub my tummy’ and most cats hate that.” Indeed, Blanche is not always a fan.

Another thing she hates? Children. She has hissed at three toddlers in the past year alone. “That’s quite common,” says Dr Brown. “Children can be quite forthcoming with their movements and cats don’t like it when people go straight in to handle them. They like any form of contact to be on their terms.” So far, so straightforward. A slightly more niche query I have: why, whenever I roll out my yoga mat at home, does Blanche rush to lie on it with me, often stretching herself. Does she want to do yoga too? “Cats really like it when you get down on the floor because then you are on their level,” says Dr Brown. “I think it’s a case of you’re doing something interesting that you don’t normally do and she thinks that’s fun and wants to get involved.”

I also want to address one key concern. Aside from me, Blanche doesn’t tend to like women, at least not for a while – she meows and wriggles away whenever they try to pick her up or interact with her. However, she has always warmed very quickly to men, flopping into their arms to let them cuddle her, posing in her prettiest positions whenever one comes round. Is my cat a misogynist? Or perhaps just a bit slutty?

“This is possibly down to her early upbringing,” suggests Dr Brown. “It might be that she was around more men than women when she was between two and seven weeks old, which is where all the socialisation happens for cats. Maybe they had an interaction style with her that she particularly liked, or she enjoys the way men handle her. It’s interesting because generally cats prefer the way in which women interact with them.”

This brings me to my last question for Dr Brown. I want to ask her about the people who own cats. Because as much as cats themselves might be misunderstood, that stigma is nothing compared to that which we attach to cat owners, particularly if, like me, they’re women. As any female cat owner will know, the “crazy cat lady” trope is a pervasive one both socially and culturally, making appearances everywhere from Friends to The Simpsons. It’s also something I’ve been called many times.

 “Am I one? I probably am,” says Dr Brown, who herself has one cat named Smudge. I assure her that if she is, then I am too. “It’s interesting because cats have a long history of being associated with women, beginning with Egyptian goddesses, and then witches.” It’s not clear exactly when women started being accused of witchcraft, or when cats started being perceived as their familiars and, in some cases, their magical doubles. But by 1233, cats had become so closely linked to witchcraft and evil spirits that Pope Gregory IX gave a sanction to exterminate all cats. And so from the 13th to 17th centuries, cats were massacred and often burnt at the stake along with women who’d been accused of witchcraft. So while cats have had a bit of a rollercoaster relationship with humans in general, women seem to have always been inextricably linked with them.

 Speaking to Dr Brown and reading her book has only strengthened my love of and fascination with cats, particularly in comparison to other animals. “They’re less domesticated than dogs,” says Dr Brown. “So I think that makes them more interesting. Perhaps more challenging, too.”

And if people want to call me a “crazy cat lady”, it’s a label I’ll embrace with pride.

 

I asked an expert why my cat hates women and children. By Olivia Petter. The Independent, November 4, 2023.

 

“At last, a brilliant voice to give cats the recognition they deserve." –Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

 Cats are fascinating animals. I'm always eager to learn what research is revealing about their hidden and not-so-hidden lives and the often mysterious ways in which they negotiate their own social worlds and their relationships with humans.1 These are among the reasons I was thrilled to learn of a new book by cat expert Dr. Sarah Brown called The Hidden Language of Cats: How They Have Us at Meow. In this wide-ranging discussion of cat behavior that will help make you "fluent in feline," we learn about different forms of communication—cat language—including vocalizations, tail signals, scents, rubbing, and ear movements and that the cat's meow is a feline invention for conversing with us.

 Here's what Sarah had to say about her extremely important, myth-busting book. Although intriguing and somewhat mysterious, cats aren't as asocial as some people claim they are. In fact, they're extremely adaptable and actually have plenty to say for themselves.

 Marc Bekoff: Why did you write The Hidden Language of Cats?

 Sarah Brown: During my studies of and work with cats over the last 30 years, I’ve often felt they were rather misrepresented, frequently described as aloof, inscrutable, or uncommunicative, particularly in comparison with our other best friends, dogs. In reality, cats have a whole host of social signals that they use both with one another and with us humans. It’s all just a bit more subtle than with dogs. So, my aim was to show, by exploring all the wonderful scientific research on cat behavior, the many ways in which cats communicate, hopefully enabling readers to better understand the cats in their lives.

 MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?

 SB: Having studied zoology as an undergraduate, I was fascinated by animal behavior and began studying cats in the late 1980s when I embarked on my doctorate. Focusing my studies on two colonies of neutered feral cats, I discovered some intriguing new scientific facts about the social interactions within these groups, particularly how they used tail signals and rubbing in their day-to-day lives. After my Ph.D., I continued to work with cats, and have done ever since, keeping up with the science and working as a cat behavior counselor and a consultant for the cat toy industry and carrying out research for cat rescue organizations in the UK, as well as writing books about cats.

 My book pulls together all the science, both older and more modern, on cat communication. It also includes stories from my work with cats, right from the earliest farm cats that I studied, to the cats I worked with in shelters, and some of my own cats, too.

 MB: Who is your intended audience?

 SB: Anyone who has a cat or loves cats and is interested in learning more about how cats communicate, and about how best to interact with them.

 MB: What are some of the topics you weave into your book and what are some of your major messages?

 SB: I discuss the varied forms of communication cats use and about how amazing this is considering they are descended from a solitary wildcat ancestor that relied mainly on scent for communication. These wildcats rarely met one another apart from to breed, and so long-distance methods of communication by scent were ideal. As cats became more domesticated, they had to adapt to living in close quarters with other cats and with people, too, so they found more visual and tactile ways to communicate. I talk about the behaviors I recorded cats using in their day-to-day interactions with one another such as Tail Up, which is a good indicator of friendly intentions when one cat approaches another. This often leads to rubbing between cats, an intriguing cat behavior that I explore in more detail. Cats use these same behaviors when interacting with people, too.

 For humans, the preferred method of communication tends to be talking. Cats seem to have worked this out and have developed their iconic meow especially to communicate with people—they rarely meow to one another apart from the little mews from kittens to their mothers. I explore meows in detail—What are the different types? Why are they so hard to ignore? And do we really understand what they mean?

 I also take a look at the different ways in which humans interact with cats. One of my most important messages is for people to be very conscious of the ways in which they interact with cats. Try and let the cat lead the interactions, bear in mind how cats prefer to be petted, and notice from their body language when they have had enough. Hopefully people’s conversations with cats will be much longer and more rewarding as a result!

MB: How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

 SB: My book combines a detailed look at the many scientific discoveries of cat behavior (both my own work and that of other researchers) with stories of some of the cats behind this science, plus other cats I have had the pleasure of working with and living alongside over the years. It also contains simple, light-hearted line drawings of cats being cats. I hope this combination of science, illustrations, and meeting cats such as Hissing Sid, one of my feral farm cats, helps make the science feel more accessible.

 MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about the language of cats they will treat them with more respect?

 SB: Very much so. As people realize how well cats have actually learned to communicate with one another and with us, even though their language is less obvious than that of dogs, I hope that cats will lose their reputation for being cool or aloof. They are far from it, and often work much harder than humans at trying to get their message across. Their ability to live both in social groups or as solitary individuals and to easily change from one to the other shows an amazing adaptability, one which deserves some serious respect!

 References

 In conversation with Dr. Sarah Brown. Sarah gained her Ph.D. on the social behavior of neutered domestic cats while working at the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. She has since worked as an independent cat behavior counselor and as a consultant for the cat toy industry, and has conducted research for and worked with several UK animal charities. Sarah's other books include The Cat: A Natural and Cultural History and The Behaviour of the Domestic Cat, 2nd edition, and she contributed to The Domestic Cat: The Biology of Its Behaviour, 3rd edition.

 

The Hidden and Not-So-Hidden Social Lives of Cats.  Cat expert Sarah Brown's new book will help make you "fluent in feline." By Mark Bekoff. Psychology Today, October 16, 2023. 

How well do you know your pets? Pet Psychic takes some of the musings you’ve had about your BFFs (beast friends forever) and connects them to hard research and results from modern science.

 What does the phrase cat communication make you think of? Probably a meow—or a hiss, if you’ve ever crossed a kitty’s boundaries. Yet much of what cats “say” to each other and to humans isn’t expressed out loud. Rather, it’s conveyed by their tails.

 There’s the side-to-side swish when they’re agitated; the straight-down, puffed-out position of fright; the horizontal line for neutrality; and many more back-end gestures shared among the feline family. But one movement is largely confined to adult domestic cats: tail-up, whereby the articulate appendage is held perpendicular to the cat’s back, with the tip pointed forward at an approaching individual.

 “You look at all the other wild cats in the world and they all have very similar mannerisms and behaviors. [The tail-up signal] is specific to domestic cats and to lions,” says Sarah Brown, a cat behavior specialist and author of The Hidden Language of Cats. “I think that’s just amazing.”

 In the early 1990s, Brown tracked the behaviors and relationships of a free-living cat colony in Southampton, England. She observed that the tail-up position preceded amicable interactions, with cats often affectionately rubbing heads and sometimes sitting together afterward. Subsequent studies by researchers elsewhere bore those observations out. In tests where cats were presented with images of felines whose tails pointed up or down, the tail-up pictures elicited friendlier responses.

 It’s also been demonstrated that cats use the tail-up cue in a similar manner with their humans—attentive kitty keepers may have already come to this conclusion. But it’s less evident where the expression came from. How did our lap-loving, couch-climbing companions end up sharing a behavior with the so-called king of the jungle?

 Even Felis lybica, the African wildcat from whom domestic cats evolved, makes the tail-up gesture in kittenhood. That’s a telltale sign of an origin in their domestic history, which is thought to have started about 10,000 years ago as wild cats congregated to hunt rodents around the fields and storehouses of Mesopotamian farmers. There they lived in closer proximity to one another than ever before.

 Suddenly, cats had a pressing need to negotiate social interactions. Having an easy-to-read pose that quickly conveyed approachability and ease would help them avoid unnecessary conflict. Natural selection would “favor this behavior because it improves the cohesion of that social group,” says Eugenia Natoli, an evolutionary biologist who has studied the behaviors of free-living cats in Rome. “The reproductive success of individuals who cooperate would be higher than the success of individuals who don’t cooperate. It would then move on to the next generation, and so on.”

 Some scientists have even suggested that tail-up evolved in captive-bred colonies of ancient Egypt, where cats were sacred and also sacrificed in mind-boggling numbers—an estimated 385,000 feline mummies were buried in a single temple. These large-scale rearing facilities would likely have been a crucible for new adaptations to communal living.

 

 Whether this body language started on farms or in cat mills, we may never know, but both possibilities dovetail with its presence in lions, who typically live in prides with up to several dozen individuals. Other cat species are mostly solitary: They may have consistent relationships—mountain lions, for example, belong to complex hierarchical societies—but they’re not spending much time together.

 Only domestic cats and lions share that life history. However, if sociality can explain the evolution of the tail-up signal, here’s a question: How did cats settle on that rather than some other behavior to convey good vibes?

 There are three possible answers so far, summarized by Brown in her book. According to one, tail-up was a riff off the crouching, haunches-raised sexual displays of female cats. The second idea is that it originated from the tail position that cats use when spraying urine to mark their territory or send a message to neighbors. The last hypothesis suggests that it comes from the movements kittens reflexively make when approaching their mothers.

 “As soon as they become mobile and Mum’s coming toward them, that little tail goes up,” says Brown. “They all do it.” Precisely why is another mystery. Natoli thinks it’s a biologically hard-wired way of helping mothers identify kittens by smell—cats have scent glands on their flanks and tails, and by lifting their tails, they make these easier to sniff. But both she and Brown think the third explanation for the tail-up origin is most likely.

 “Perhaps [solitary wild cats] didn’t meet many other cats once they left their mother. They got out of the habit of putting their tail up. But [domestic] cats today are so constantly surrounded by other cats or people, they just carry on doing it,” says Brown.

 That would make tail-up a neotenic behavior—one that is performed early in life and continues during adulthood. Kneading—when nursing kittens and snuggling mature cats flex their paws—is another neotenic behavior. (This one may be shared across felines.) Tail-up has positive emotional associations for a little one who’s happy to see Mom, and it could retain those associations for grown-ups.

 At some point, cats took the small leap to pointing their tails at their favorite humans. Over a 10,000-year history, we became members of their group. They chose to befriend us—and they remind us of that every time that tail forms a furry thumbs-up.

. This tell-tail sign means your cat likes you.  As they grew tamer over time, cats forged an unlikely friendship using their tails. By Brandon Keim. PopSci+, October 12, 2023.