The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World

The project took nearly ten years but the results were worth the wait: from blue-blooded Persians to mangy strays, from Manhattan’s street-smart alley cats to the ferals of the New Zealand forest, it turns out that all house cats come not from a genetic mash-up of many feline species but only from Felis silvestris. More astonishingly, they are descended solely from the lybica subspecies, the Near Eastern type native to southern Turkey, Iraq, and Israel, where it still lives today.

Likewise, the hard-won victory over the house cats of tiny San Nicolas Island, off the coast of California, was a “monumental achievement ” for the United States Navy, according to the commanding officer overseeing the missile-testing base there. It took years of planning, 18 months of trapping, and $3 million to expel the cats, which were hunting an endemic deer mouse and a federally protected species of night lizard. The cat stalkers had to be careful not to disturb Native American archaeological sites and to use special radio channels so they didn’t accidentally trigger naval munitions. Meanwhile, the battle-tested cats employed guerrilla tactics, eluding dogs and custom-built computerized traps and spurning “felid-attracting phonics,” aka digitally recorded meows. Finally, a professional bobcat hunter finished the job.

Our [current] great ape relatives don't eat much meat, and neither did our early human-like kin, who started coming down out of the trees in Africa 6 or 7 million years ago, long after cats had settled into their spot at the tippy-top of the food chain
[Well actually…. latest research indicates bipedal hominids originated outside, then migrated to, Africa, which casts doubts on the whole tree to plains theory]
[...]
Scientists are just starting to formally study our own legacy as prey, finding, for instance, that our color vision and depth perception may have first evolved as a system for detecting snakes. Experiments have shown that even very young children are better at recognizing the shapes of serpents than lizards; they also spot lions faster than antelope. Antipredation strategies persist in a host of modern human behaviors, from our tendency to go into labor in the deepest part of night (many of our predators would have hunted at dawn and dusk) to, perhaps, our appreciation of eighteenth-century landscape paintings, whose sweeping vistas give the pleasing sense that we would have seen danger coming before it ever got close.

“Cats are reproductive machines,” says the Tufts University veterinarian Robert McCarthy. “All you need is males and females around. I pulled every paper. There is zero—zero—data that TNR works. It just doesn’t work at the level that it needs to work. If you have 100 cats and you neuter 30 of them, it’s not like the problem is 30 percent better. It’s nothing. You didn’t make any progress. It’s zero percent better.”

From the perspective of a parasite transmitted via cat poop, this inbred terror of cat pee would be “a huge obstacle in transmission,” says Joanne Webster, who led the Oxford study. “We wanted to see if the parasite could dampen down that effect.” What they observed was more than a dampening—the parasite seemed to completely mute the rats’ fear instinct. The infected rodents no longer avoided cat urine. “It actually made them attracted,” Webster says.[...]The finding, which has since been replicated in many other labs, jibed with scientists’ growing interest in the so-called manipulation hypothesis.

Even in people with healthy immune systems, researchers are now picking up correlations between the parasite and a laundry list of ailments: Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, obesity, brain cancer (an especially contested association), migraines, depression, bipolar disorder, infertility, heightened aggression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. A University of Chicago study recently noted a connection to road rage incidents.