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The New York Times, June 28, 2007

Scientists Link Housecats to Wildcat Subspecies

By NICHOLAS WADE



Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wild cat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats, and the rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey for her.

Seeing she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.



At least five females, of the wildcat subspecies known as Felis silvestris lybica, accomplished this delicate transition from forest to village, scientists have concluded, based on new DNA research. And from these five matriarchs, all the world’s 600 million housecats are descended.



Carlos A. Driscoll of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues spent more than six years collecting species of wildcat from Scotland to Israel. He then analyzed the DNA of the wildcats, of many ordinary house cats and of the fancy cats that breeders started to develop in the 19th century.



Five subspecies of wildcat spread across the Old World. They are known as the European wildcat, the Near Eastern wildcat, the Southern African wildcat, the Central Asian wildcat and the Chinese desert cat. Their patterns of DNA fall into 5 clusters. The DNA of all house cats and fancy cats falls within the Near Eastern wildcat cluster, making clear that this subspecies is their ancestor, Dr. Driscoll and his colleagues report in today’s issue of Science.



The wildcat DNA closest to that of modern house cats came from 15 individuals collected in the remote deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the researchers say.



The house cats in the study fell into five lineages, based on analysis of their mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down solely through the female line. Since the oldest known archaeological site with a cat burial is about 9,500 years old, the geneticists suggest that the founders of the five lineages lived around this time and were the first cats to be domesticated.



Wheat, rye and barley had been domesticated in the Near East by 10,000 years ago, so it seems likely that the granaries of early Neolithic villages harbored mice and rats, and that the settlers would have welcomed the cats’ help in controlling them.



Unlike other domestic animals, which were tamed by people, cats probably domesticated themselves, perhaps accounting for the haughty independence of their descendants. “The cats were adapting themselves to a new environment, so the push for domestication came from the cat side, not the human side,” Dr. Driscoll said.



Cats are “indicators of human cultural adolescence,” he remarked, since they entered human experience as people were making the difficult transition from hunting and gathering, their way of life for millions of years, to settled communities.



Until recently the cat was commonly believed to have been domesticated in ancient Egypt, where it was a cult animal. But three years ago a group of French archaeologists led by Jean-Denis Vigne discovered the remains of an eight-month-old cat buried with what was presumably its human owner at a Neolithic site in Cyprus. The Mediterranean island was settled by farmers from Turkey who brought their domesticated animals with them, presumably including cats, because there is no evidence of native wildcats in Cyprus.



The date of the burial, some 9,500 years ago, far precedes Egyptian civilization. Together with the new genetic evidence, it places the domestication of the cat in a different context, the beginnings of agriculture in the Near East, and probably in the villages of the Fertile Crescent, the belt of land that stretches up through the countries of the eastern Mediterranean and down through what is now Iraq.



Dr. Stephen O’Brien, an expert on the genetics of the cat family and a co-author of the Science report, described the domestication of the cat as “the beginning of one of the major experiments in biological history,” because the number of house cats in the world now exceeds half a billion, while most of the 36 other species of cat, and many wildcats, are now threatened with extinction.



So a valuable outcome of the new study is the discovery of genetic markers in the DNA that distinguish native wildcats from the house cats and feral domestic cats with which they often interbreed. In Britain and other countries, true wildcats may be highly protected by law but stray cats are not.



David Macdonald of Oxford University in England, a co-author of the report, has spent 10 years trying to preserve the Scottish wildcat, of which only 400 or so remain. “We can use some of the genetic markers to talk to conservation agencies like the Scottish Natural Heritage,” he said.

The Vampire Cat

Author : Lord Halifax



The Vampire Cat



Mr Everard Meynell, who told the following story in a letter to Lord Halifax, was the latter's nephew, being the son of his brother, the Hon. Frederick Wood, who changed his name to Meynell on succeeding to the estate at Hoar Cross.



I was siting in my club after dinner, smoking a cigarette and drinking my coffee, when a friend of mine, whom I had not seen for some time, came up and began to talk to me on various subjects. At length he said that he had just experienced a most singular adventure.



It appears that last Sunday he went down to Eastbourne to stay with some friends for the week-end, hoping to get a little fresh air and recuperate generally after a period of somewhat severe work, during which he had been suffering a good deal from sleeplessness. On the Saturday evening, when he arrived, he found a cheerful party in the house and was congratulating himself upon having been able to get away from London.



Before going up to dress for dinner, his attention was attracted by the behaviour of a large black cat, which rushed forward to meet him as he came into the hall and began to display violent signs of affection, rubbing itself against his leg and trying to climb up to his shoulder. This struck my friend as being most odd, and in a way that he could hardly explain, rather repulsive, as he had always had an irrational repugnance for cats. However, as the animal seemed to be entirely devoted to him he allowed it to follow him upstairs, but on reaching his bedroom shut the door against it. When he went down to dinner, the cat was still outside the door and following him into the dinning-room, where its apparent devotion was the subject of much chaff. The same performance was repeated at bed-time, when again he saw to it that the cat was left outside the door of his room. During the whole of Sunday, the cat continued to behave in this strange way, making almost desperate attempts to climb up to my friend's neck. On Sunday evening when he went to bed he had forcibly to prevent the cat from following him into his room.



Benefiting doubtless by the sea air and quiet surroundings, he at once fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, a thing which he had not been able to do for many weeks. He was awakened very gradually by a curious drawn feeling down one side of him. In his own words he felt as though he "was breathing only on one side of his body." At the same time he had a feeling of faintness and languor which tempted him to turn over and go off to sleep again, but a sharp pricking sensation over his heart caused him to place his hand to his side, where he felt something warm and furry. He started up and found the cat pressed closely against him, with its head buried under his arm, and the whole of one side of his night-shirt drenched with blood. He sprang out of bed and said something to the cat, which at once stopped purring, came to the end of the bed, and began to spit and curse at him with a hatred which more than equalled its previous affection. Needless to say, it was the work of a moment to throw the creature out of the room.



Subsequent enquiries explained how the cat had got in. My friend had given instructions to be called early as he wished to catch a train. The footman, however, mistaking the time had come to his bedroom an hour too soon, at six o'clock instead of seven, and when opening the door he remembered having let the cat in and having been unable to chase it out again. It was seven-thirty when my friend awoke, so the cat had about an hour and a half, uninterrupted, in which time it had managed to suck quite a quantity of blood. An extraordinary circumstance was that, although it had drawn so much blood, it must have had to lick through the night-shirt. All the skin on the left side of my friend's body was furrowed up and down, leaving exact marks of the animal's tongue.



It was an extremely unpleasant experience and the cat's immediate discovery of some horrible affinity between it and my friend makes the story the more ghastly. When my friend returned to London he consulted two doctors, who were able to reassure him that the wound was perfectly healthy, and to dispel any fears that he might have of the sanity of the cat.



Extract from “Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book”

http://www.mysterymag.com/theunexplained/?page=article&subID=84&artID=150

American Feline Gothic



Mystery, murder and madness all figured large in Edgar Allan Poe's work, so why should his story about a cat be different?



· Justine Hankins

· The Guardian, Saturday 26 October 2002



Readers of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Black Cat probably don't imagine that the master of horror was a cat lover. The black cat is an "odious presence", "a detested creature" who inspires "terror and horror" with its "loathsome caresses".



But the fact behind the fiction is that Poe adored cats. Indeed, cats were a source of much solace to the writer whose life was as tormented as his tales.



The narrator of The Black Cat favourably compares "the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute" with "the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man". Surely an echo of Poe's own bitter sentiments? Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809, was orphaned at the age of three and had a troubled relationship with his foster father. He gave up college, then abandoned a career in the military and struggled to make a living as a writer. Meanwhile, he'd amassed large debts and taken to drink.



In 1836, he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm. Impoverished and frustrated, Poe and his wife moved frequently in search of a suitable outlet for his considerable talent. They were joined on their journey by Catarina, a tortoiseshell cat who would sit on Poe's shoulders while he worked.



Despite Poe's affection for his wife, his poverty, excessive drinking and bouts of depression made him less than the ideal husband. By the time Virginia developed tuberculosis in 1842, she had little more than a cat for comfort. One visitor to the Poe household describes how the ailing wife had no source of warmth other than her husband's coat and the cat. He wrote: "The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness."



The Black Cat - first published in 1843 - describes the moral descent of a man who first tortures his cat, then murders his wife. An odd choice of subject matter, perhaps, for a man who experienced both female and feline devotion.



But then, the villain of the piece is not the cat but the husband who narrates the tale. Like the story's creator, he is afflicted by a drink problem that edges himself and his family towards tragedy. He starts out a perfectly decent man, fond of his wife and his many pets, in particular a black cat called Pluto. But then comes alcohol. The "Fiend Intemperance" makes him first irritable, then violent. He becomes aggressive towards his wife and gouges out one of Pluto's eyes with a penknife. Racked with a guilt that begets hatred, he later puts a noose around the cat's neck and hangs it from a tree.



The narrator soon finds himself "in a den of more than infamy" where he spots a cat that is remarkably like Pluto in all respects, except it has a white patch on its chest. He takes the cat home with him and is horrified to discover that this replacement is missing an eye. He is haunted by its brooding malevolence and develops an "unutterable loathing" for the creature. He even fancies that the patch has taken on the shape of the gallows. It's open to question whether the cat is Pluto's vengeful ghost or whether its fiendish aspects are merely the fantastical imaginings of the self-loathing, guilt-ridden narrator.



Plagued by the cat's presence, he tries to kill it with an axe. His wife intervenes, and he kills her instead. He conceals her corpse in a wall, but the cat will have its revenge. Its "wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph", resounds from within the wall, alerting the police to the terrible deed.



Virginia finally succumbed to her illness in 1847, sending Poe into another bout of gin-addled depression. He himself died in somewhat mysterious circumstances following another heavy drinking session in 1849 at the age of 40. As for Catarina, no one knows. Be nice to cats this Halloween, her spirit may be watching you.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2002/oct/26/shopping.homes/print