Introduction

As a cat grows up, its characteristics and behaviour develop with regularity and consistency. Most kittens open their eyes during their second week, for example, and start to eat their first solid food at around one month of age. Cats are also adaptable and modifiable in their behaviour, responding sensitively to changes in their environments. Moreover, they are highly variable in their habits. Some domestic cats spend much of their time hunting, while others seldom leave the comfort of their owner’s armchair. Explaining how and why such consistencies and differences arise during development is the main theme of this chapter.

Biology presents many wonders, but one of the most remarkable is how an animal as complex as a cat grows from a single cell. Until recently, the processes involved seemed largely beyond understanding and, even now, much remains to be discovered. Nevertheless, some factual certainties have been self-evident for a long time. Different species in the cat family share many patterns of behaviour in common. The play of the cheetah cub, for example, is strongly reminiscent of the play of a domestic kitten. These ‘robust’ constancies of development are profound and real. At the same time, every cat is capable of adapting to many challenges posed by its environment. It can cope with disabilities generated by accidents or disease. It can learn to recognise particular members of its species and acquire preferences for particular foods that are available to it. Above all, it is highly adaptable, readily solving difficult challenges posed for it in its life. The plasticity of the cat is as remarkable as its robustness. Here, however, lies a trap for the unwary. It does not follow that two distinct processes can be cleanly separated, one leading to an invariant outcome and the other generating an individual’s distinctiveness due to its previous experience over and above its particular genome.

Introduction

When a cat behaves socially towards a human, the person has been treated as though he or she were a cat, although very possibly a particular type of cat. Anybody who loves cats is irresistibly drawn to treat them as though they had some of the characteristics of humans. Cat owners project themselves into the heads of cats and, in so doing, empathise with them. Whether or not they are right to do so raises a big and largely unanswered question. In any event, owners will have seen their cats behave in ways that are often puzzling and enigmatic. Why are they sometimes so friendly and at other times so distant? Those who study the behaviour of cats scientifically are often asked to provide the real answers to such questions. Unfortunately, many aspects of cat behaviour that most interest the lay public have not been the subject of extensive investigation. In part this is because the implied question is: ‘Why does the animal need to behave in this way?’ This is a question about the current utility to the animal of behaving in a particular fashion and is not an easy one to answer. The question also raises questions about the evolution of the domestic cat.

To understand the biological value to the animal of behaving in a particular fashion, scientists ask how the behaviour of a cat, freely living in a natural environment, helps it to survive and breed now. To understand the evolution of the behaviour, they must speculate about the natural environment of the modern cats’ wild ancestors. If some patterns of behaviour have worked to the individual’s advantage better than others in the past and they were inherited, they would eventually tend to be shared by most members of the cat population. The presumption is that by the process of Darwinian evolution, cats behave in a way that is well-adapted to the type of social and physical environment in which their ancestors lived.