A novel of cats and murder - Notes

 Of all mammals, cats are world champions at sleeping. They spend about sixteen hours a day in the arms of Morpheus, thus beating even the large and lazy panda, which spends just ten hours of the day asleep. Being switched off for two-thirds of its time, so to speak, a nine-year-old cat has in effect spent only three years awake. However, quantity is not the same thing as quality, so the comfortably laid-back cat cannot relax as thoroughly as its two-legged retainers. Cats do not take their sleep all at once, like humans, but in the short snatches sometimes known as cat-naps. During these naps, which consist of several sleep cycles, their brains are nowhere near as completely 'disconnected' as the human brain. So far as bio-signals are concerned, the cat's deep sleep is more like our own light sleep. And appropriately for a hunter, the cat's 'radar' remains alert even during a siesta. If even a distant mouse-like rustling is heard, the alarm system immediately comes on, and the tiger on stand-by is wide awake at once.

Cats, who often assume the most artistically ornate positions as they doze, can indulge in this lethargic life-style only because they are extremely efficient hunters with few natural enemies. Their natural prey, on the other hand, often consists of creatures who can never sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, such as hares. For obvious reasons, cats are popular 'guinea-pigs' for scientists researching into the nature of sleep, and in that capacity have made heroic contributions to various pioneering discoveries.

2. Some people regard neutering with revulsion, as barbaric butchery and the infringement of a cat's right to develop its personality freely. They believe that we mutilate our animal companions cruelly to make them easy-care soft toys, and then hypocritically argue that it was a harmless therapeutic measure and all for the pet's own good; sex, we point out, doesn't make you happy. The natural drives of the sanitised Barbie cat cease to be a nuisance to us, and it becomes a toy lion acceptable in polite company.

However, the author can see the arguments on the other side too. Tom cats with their family jewels still functional are genuinely uncontrollable, and in considerable danger of getting severely injured during their constant fights. They also give off a pungent erotic aroma which smells pestilential - to their tin-openers, anyway. Female cats (or queens) who still have all their equipment may easily be 'calling' for a mate the whole time, turning the home upside down with their rampageous behaviour. Too many pregnancies at frequent intervals will leave them suffering from stress, exhaustion, and very likely gynaecological complications too. There is also the constant danger of over-population, since cats breed like the proverbial rabbits. Finally, when you remember that neutered cats live two or three years longer without getting conspicuously overweight, neutering is probably the lesser of two evils in a standard urban household.

3. Cats have an irresistible impulse to sharpen and clean their claws, and will often do it on the sofa or some other treasured piece of furniture. Many cat owners regard this activity as they might the appearance of a nightmare figure from a horror film running amok with a set of knives. However, amputation of a cat's claws for inappropriate scratching is a barbaric mutilation and a peculiarly cruel kind of torture. For one thing, the cat uses its claws in the daily task of grooming, for combing and cleaning the fur, and cannot do without them. Anyone who has ever been unable to scratch in order to relieve an itch will understand the gravity of the situation. Moreover, de-clawed cats cannot get a proper grip when they try to climb in instinctive response to another animal need, and if they are in flight from a dog (or another and hostile cat) the consequences can be fatal. If an ill-disposed neighbour goes for it with malicious intent, a cat deprived of its sharp daggers cannot defend itself properly. And finally, cats whose claws have been amputated are unable to hunt and so cannot fend for themselves in an emergency.

Amputation of the claws, also euphemistically known by the ancient Greek term 'onyxectonomy', is illegal in many European countries. In the leading international cat breeding associations it is condemned even more strongly than doping in the Olympic Games. You should do everything possible in the way of conditioning to divert your cat's urges to an official scratching post. At the first sign that your pet vandal has his beady eye on the furniture, take him to the spot where scratching is allowed. If in doubt, it is really better not to keep a cat at all if you cannot live with its claws as well as its velvet paws.

4. With mysterious regularity, cats will often say goodbye to the four walls of home and go on their travels with some unknown end in view. It is as mysterious an exodus as the strange disappearance of a husband who pops out for cigarettes and vanishes into some twilight zone never to be seen again. Humans were puzzling over this behaviour pattern even in ancient times; superstition says that the departure of a cat means someone in a house is going to die. There is an old Flemish proverb, 'When the cat goes out, death comes in.' Today, however, more rational explanations are sought. Perhaps the sensitive runaway is simply responding 'allergically' to some subtle change in its familiar surroundings and urgently requires a change of scene. Or then again, perhaps the cat has received Zen enlightenment during its meditative trance beside the radiator and is following in the steps of Siddhartha to turn the wheel of Karma. Or of course there is the remote possibility that E.T. and the rest of the UFO brigade are regularly stealing cats for vivisection with a view to solving the cosmic mystery of self-satisfaction.

5. The Chartreux (sometimes called the Chartreuse), a French breed extremely similar to the British Blue, is a handsome, muscular animal with a broad head and well-proportioned short legs, about the closest a cat comes to being a teddy bear. With its yellow or golden eyes and its short, thick, velvety fur, grey to blue-grey in colour, this cuddly creature captures small children's hearts. The Chartreux may appear calm and lethargic, but it can be a tiger in sheep's clothing, and in emergency will show its pugnacious, battling nature.

There is a widespread idea that the monks of La Grande Chartreuse monastery in France bred these cats in the Middle Ages to rid themselves of mice. According to this story the good clerics, who also made a commercial hit with their famous green liqueur, raised their new breed from related cats imported from South Africa. Unfortunately closer examination shows that the legend is only an old wives' tale. According to the Prior of La Grande Chartreuse, no sister house ever existed in South Africa, nor did any Carthusian monks ever bring back African cats. The theory that the cat takes its name from the simple grey robes allegedly worn by Carthusian monks also belongs in the realm of fantasy, since the Carthusians have always worn pure white habits. More probably the name goes back to a kind of wool widely known in France in the past. Finally, the fact that no written records whatever about any kind of cat-breeding experiments exist at La Grande Chartreuse casts further doubt on the legend.

However, those culinary experts the French did add to the history of the Chartreux cat, if not very creditably. According to Linnaeus, these cats used to be fattened, killed and eaten, for instance stuffed and roasted; this gruesome dish even found its way into old German menus as 'Dachshund'. Furriers cured the coat and sold it as 'petit gris'; the finished product, trimmed and dyed, was sold to gullible consumers as otter skin.

The famous natural scientists Linnaeus and Buffon recognised the Chartreux cat as a separate breed, and in the 1930s a French veterinary surgeon gave it a scientific name of its own: Felis catus cartusianorum. Our oldest documented record of a blue-grey cat dates from 1558 and comes from Rome: a poet sadly laments the death of his little pet.

6. When the cat lies lazily in the sun licking itself it is not just cooling itself off (through evaporation) and getting clean. Using elements already present in the body, ultra-violet rays produce an essential elixir of life in the fur: this is vitamin D, the sunlight or anti-rickets vitamin. The cat supplements its normal diet with this extract, which enables it to store calcium and phosphate in its bones. Calcium, the silver-grey alkaline earth metal, gives the teeth their biting power and the bones their strength. Rickets, a severe form of bone softening in children, was known on the continent of Europe in the past as the English disease; the idea was that the prevalence of fog in the British Isles kept the invigorating rays of the sun away. Children affected by rickets were a pitiful sight, pigeon-breasted and with severely deformed skeletons.

Rickets in the strict sense seldom occurs in cats, but similar conditions have been found in kittens with inadequate calcium or vitamin D in their diet. The condition deprives the cat of vitality and causes fragile, deformed or fractured bones. Vitamin D is present in milk, fish products and tinned cat-food. It is particularly important to make sure that housebound cats who seldom or never see 'real' daylight out of doors get an adequate supply. Paradoxically, however, too much vitamin D can be harmful, causing symptoms similar to a lack of it.

7. It is one of the persistent and proverbial myths about the animal kingdom that hostility must inevitably exist between dogs and cats because 'language barriers' and their irreconcilably different characters preclude peaceful coexistence on the part of the two arch-enemies. In nature - and therefore in their genetic information - there is no provision for cats and dogs to meet, since they occupy different ecological niches and hunt different prey. Temperamentally, dog and cat are indeed opposites. At a first encounter the cat will remain cool and reserved, sounding out the situation as befits a loner. The dog, on the other hand, with its extrovert pack-animal nature, will immediately makes a boisterous attempt at rapprochement. The cat misinterprets this boisterous approach as a hostile infringement of its own personal space (or 'flight distance'). Many further misunderstandings can easily arise because non-verbal messages mean different things in dog and cat language. Cats, decorous creatures that they are, touch noses with each other as a greeting. The dog observes no such niceties, but puts his nose straight up to the cat's tail to sniff it -from the cat's point of view, a serious breach of good manners. The cat will raise a paw in warning, making the dog even more bumptious, since among dogs a raised paw is a friendly gesture. The dog gets the wrong message from the agitated twitching of a cat's tail, because his own kind wag their tails when they are feeling friendly and relaxed. If the cat eventually turns and runs because (as we all know) the cleverer gives way first, it is only giving the dog the fatal signal to act as a hound and start the chase. In a direct frontal attack from a cat, however, the dog will usually be the loser, because cats have faster reactions and because a prey animal which turns to attack simply does not fit into the canine scheme of things. Cats are just as surprised if an aggressive rat ventures to attack.

In spite of such handicaps, the two hostile powers can easily come to tolerate each other and even strike up firm friendships. Out of over five million dogs in German households, almost half live with other domestic pets, a great many of them with cats. Fraternisation works best, of course, if the two 'enemies' come into the house as young animals and grow up together. In those circumstances even cats and mice can become good friends.

An affectionate female gorilla called Koko recently attracted much attention by making a pet of a cat; when her pet died as a result of an accident Koko grieved until she was given another cat.

Murr the cat, the amusing protagonist in a novel by the Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann, makes friends with a poodle called Ponto in his youth. In the course of the novel Murr even writes a learned treatise of his own (entitled 'Thought and Instinct, or Cat and Dog'), proving among other things that 'words' used by the two species (e.g. the dog's 'bow-wow' and the cat's 'miaow') have the same etymological origin.

This is not really so fantastic a notion, for many million years ago dog and cat were indeed closely related, both belonging to a super-family of dog-like and cat-like carnivores. Recently a French clergyman and his family moved to a new parish some two hundred kilometres away. They took their German Shepherd dog with them but left their cat in their old home. Two weeks after the move the dog disappeared - and came back to his new home seven weeks later with the cat in tow.

8. There is probably no other beast of prey in the wild so misunderstood, as a result of ignorance and direct horror propaganda, as the European wildcat (Felis silvestris). The wild cousin of our domestic cat is noticeably larger and sturdier and can weigh up to thirteen kilograms. The wildcat has shorter legs, smaller ears and a more sloping forehead than the domestic cat, as well as a thick ringed tail. At first glance, its coat pattern suggests a grey tabby domestic cat, but the blurred black striped pattern of the wildcats' fur is in fact unique to them.Felis silvestris lives in thickly overgrown woodland areas, and will also make itself a nest in cracks in the rock or hollow trees. It is a timid loner, impossible to approach, and leads a largely solitary life, coming together with other members of its species only for a few weeks in spring in order to mate. After mating, the female wildcat has two to four kittens, which are blind at birth. These kittens cannot be kept as domestic pets; sooner or later, however sweet and playful they seem, they will change and become ferocious. Wildcats occupy an important ecological niche, keeping mice and other harmful vermin in check.

The wildcat lived in Central European forests for over three hundred thousand years, but it has been systematically decimated in the last few centuries. In the British Isles it now survives only in Scotland. In modern Germany, the setting of this novel, there are only about fourteen hundred wild cats. Continental hunters deliberately spread disinformation to the effect that wildcats attacked hares, fawns and other of their own favourite prey. The 'grey ghost' was even said to be in touch with the powers of darkness and able to kill a grown man. For superstitious reasons, most hunters would 'bless' their guns with holy water before going after wildcats. Many experts believe that the systematic reintroduction of Felis silvestris to various parts of Europe can at most only delay the extinction of the species.

9. Although our tame domestic cats were probably created by breeding from their African ancestors, they can interbreed successfully with the European wildcat. As things stand, the domestic cat can even produce offspring by the North American lynx. Finally, there is even a possibility that there are no limits at all to mating between small cats (of the genus Felis). According to the textbooks, the cross-breeding of wild and domestic cats ought to produce infertile hybrids, but some of these bastard cats have obviously retained the ability to reproduce. There are some strange hybrids in the depths of northern European forests, and it would be surprising if the domestic cat did not have a few drops of wild European blood in its veins. That transfusion very probably occurred in the ancient forests of European folklore; it cannot yet be proved for certain, but at some point new forensic techniques such as genetic fingerprinting will give us a definite answer. So far as today's domestic cat is concerned, a fling with a wildcat can take a nasty turn; foresters have seen such wildcats turn to scratching furies at the sight of a decadent domestic pet.

10. The belief that cats have an amazing and indeed paranormal ability to find their way home is so deeply rooted that it periodically surfaces in the media, embroidered with ever new episodes. Almost every week you can hear of some Puss in Boots who accidentally fetches up in a strange and distant place but finds his way home with dreamlike certainty. Americans, with their taste for the road movie, have versions in which the trip is country-wide, from coast to coast. Examined closely, the tale has two different variants which should be distinguished from each other. The conventional variety, whereby the cat finds its way home from some strange place, can be explained in principle without calling on any psi factor. The cat may have an acoustic picture of the sounds of home at the back of its head, and finds its way by that map. Or it may take a fix from the position of the sun, as travellers in former times used to. Perhaps cats, like whales, may even have a magnetic sense which allows them to navigate as if by a compass.

However, there are cases suggesting some paranormal force at work, stories in which a cat has been left behind but follows its master long distances to a new and hitherto entirely unknown home. This variant cannot be explained by even the most remarkable achievements of the senses, and is often called psi-trailing and regarded as an extra-sensory talent. Some decades ago the American parapsychologist J.B. Rhine collected and analysed all documented cases. The biggest sensation was a cat belonging to a New York veterinary surgeon who moved from New York to California. Several months later the cat, who had been left behind in New York, turned up energetically demanding entry to his new home and made straight for his favourite place in a comfortable armchair.

We can make what we like of such mysterious journeys. Desmond Morris, the British cat expert, thinks it is pointless and leads nowhere to look for parapsychological explanations of the marvels and mysteries of nature, thus stifling the curiosity of the inquiring mind. Ever since the times of the Ancient Egyptians, however, the cat has presented mankind with mysteries which are peculiar to itself and will put the abilities of any two-legged medium in the shade.

11. Although the eyes of the cat are among the greatest masterpieces created by the 'Blind Watchmaker' - evolution - those amazing organs are not much good at perceiving colour. As with primates (including humans), they face forward, and display their aesthetic beauty in some of mankind's oldest painted records. They are very large in relation to skull size and therefore absorb a great deal of light. In addition, the back of the eye is covered by the reflective tapetum, which throws back the 'used' rays of light. This amplifier of the residual light makes the cat's reflective eyes powerful tools for night vision, and military commanders have tried to make use of them in nocturnal warfare.

The light-sensitive layer of the eyes, the retina, consists of two kinds of photocells, rods and cones. The rods, which are far more numerous than the cones, react very sensitively to differences between light and dark, and are situated mainly in the outer area of the retina. The cones, responsible for colour perception and close-up vision, function only in daylight and are concentrated in the centre of the retina, in humans a circular pit or fovea. The feline fovea, containing only a few cones, is a horizontal line. Cats thus have very sharp eyes for spotting mice who happen to wander across their field of vision, but it would be hard for them to see the letters of newsprint properly, and they have difficulty in adjusting their lenses to the macro-area which shows close-up detail. Cats are therefore sometimes disorientated if the object of their interest is right in front of their faces.

Because of the small number of colour cones in cats' eyes, it was thought for a long time that they could see the world only in black and white. However, it was then shown that they can be trained, rather laboriously, to distinguish between certain primary colours. In time they can tell red, blue and white apart. On the whole, however, colour is not very important to them: all mice are grey at night anyway. But American zoologists have recently discovered that the domestic cat has a latent ability to see in colour at birth. The Spanish wildcat, which like many other archaic relations of our domestic cat hunts its prey in the bright midday sun, has about twice as many cones in its pupil and is thus fully able to perceive colour. When it is born the domestic cat, whose forebears at some point took to seeking food by night near human settlements, has just the same kind of colour-perceptive fovea. The ability to see colour, however, is soon eradicated by genetic programming. Probably this ghost of an ability in the cat's eye still exists only because it could be useful at some point if the cat were ever to revert to its old life-style.

FELIDAE ON THE ROAD(Felidae Part II)

Akif Pirinçci

A novel of cats and murder