Every single cat is unique.... why?

Every single cat has a different purrsonality. Every single cat is an individual. There is no "average cat." No single rule for every single cat.

So, humans, live with it...

And why is that? Well for a start, look at the picture. Five kittens of three different colours. Maybe three different fathers! Three different sets of genes.

Then there's the way our mum coped during her pregnancy. That affects us in the womb. If she was stressed out, we will be stress-prone kittens when we grow up. 

Next there is the influence of our first eight weeks of life. If we meet gentle loving humans, we love humans. If we don't meet humans, we grow up as wild cats without humans in our lives.

Finally, there's what happens to us. A single shattering experience can change how we act and feel - just as it does with humans.

So humans. Study each individual kitten. Study each individual cat. Only then you will know what we want and need.

 

 

How I got my tabby markings

 

Striped tabbies have the ancestral tabby pattern

Spots, stripes or blotches, we tabbies have beautiful coat markings. I am a silver tabby but tabby markings can be found in beige or brown coated cats and a few gingers too. It's the background colour that varies.

Now some human geneticists have been studying just how it happens... in order to find out how the leopard got its spots. (Did you spot the Kipling reference there?)

First they found a gene they called Taqpep. Depending on how this gene worked, a tabby was striped or blotched and (guess what) cheetahs were just large tabbies when it came to coat colourings.

Then they investigated further and found that tabby markings happen very early before birth. The skin surrounding the feline fetus starts growing thicker or thinner. This is even before there are any melanocytes, the cells which are responsible for different colours.

Then slowly the hair folicules develop and with them the colouring, the melanin. Some folicules have dark melanin called pheomelanin and some have light melanin called eumelanin.

This coincides with the tabby patterning. The eumelanin defines the background colour to the stripes, blotches or spots.

They then looked back even further into the earliest days of the embryo and found  the patterning could be recognised at an even earlier stage. The Taqpep gene influenced the pattern of how a protein coding gene Dkk4 was expressed.

With me? Difficult if you are not a geneticist.

Their conclusion was that it was a reaction-diffusion model, a sort of genetic game whereby a colouring gene was inhibited or  expressed.

And all this led back to a very clever human Alan Turing who in the l950s suggested this particular kind of gene expression.

As for me, I don't understand all of this but what I do know is that tabbies are the most beautiful of all cats, whether they are pussycats like me or big fierce cats like tigers.

PS. Want to know more? Put Developmental genetics of color pattern establishment in cats into Google Scholar!

Of humans and DNA... thoughts on this.

Dear George,

I’m reading a book about human DNA with my mummy and I’m very excited and amused. Excited because I have a peculiar interest in the topic and amused because of the humans’ beliefs. The book says that the scientists (human not feline) discovered that the human DNA is only 4% coded and 96% is not and therefore they called it “junk DNA”. That makes me Laugh Out Loud. If God created us all how could they believe that God coded only 4% of their DNA but coded all of ours (the cats)? Sorry, George but I can’t stop laughing! Ok, I pondered for a minute if I should tell mummy that all human DNA is coded but humans need to evolve to understand the “spiritual” codes; they need to transcend to a higher level of consciousness as multidimensional beings! But how could they if they are so stuck in 3D and linear thinking? So, I decided to say nothing because having humans stuck in 3D it is a huge advantage for us (over them). We were able to decode our DNA long ago and the Egyptians knew it – that’s why they held us in high regard as “sacred beings” and treated us better than Royalty.

But…today’s humans? They really believe they “train” and “control” us! I roar with laughter! You see the irony? They don’t realize we take advantage of their primitive nature and their exceptionally good response to emotional blackmailing (big smile). I laughed so much and so hard that I need a nap to rest and recover (photo attached). George, may we hear your opinion please? After all you are a magnificent… human behaviourist!

Chico

Dear Chico,
It is typical of humans that they called non-coding DNA "junk" or "barren" or "non-functioning," when this kind of DNA switches on and off vital DNA processes. Humans are always ready to despise and sneer instead of accepting their ignorance.
They share 90% of our genes but seem unable to say "We don't know"when they don't.
As you say, they think they control us when we control them. We moved in with them when they were sophisticated enough to make dry sheltered housing for us and now we have purrsuaded them to feed us, stroke us, and love us. Unlike dogs we do not have to guard or hunt for them. (We hunt for ourselves.) And they think they domesticated us when it is the other way round!
George
PS. My blog is disgracefully late, as I was locked up in a prison facility while my human jaunted about on the top of a Roman wall in Scotland. I have not forgiven her. Nor have I forgotten her. I punished her yesterday by easing her right to the edge of my double bed. To my amusement she had a nightmare about earth moving artics.
PPS. There were the remains of cats in the Roman camps.
 

Black is beautiful - and superior for survival

This is me up a tree doing my leopard act. I want to grow up to be a black panther like Bagheera. I used to think I could catch birds this way. Nowadays I just do it to amuse and alarm Celia. She stands underneath saying "Pleeeeease George, come down." She remembers when I climbed up as a tiny kitten one frosty December day, and was only rescued when a passing Human Hero got off his tractor, climbed up 30 feet, grabbed me and climbed down using only one hand.
My colour - black is called melanistic by scientists - may give me superior health and survival skills. Stephen O Brien (see earlier blog on 7/2/07) and Eduardo Eizirik, of the Cat Genome Project at the US National Cancer Institute have tracked down the melanism gene in 11 of the cat species. I have it in common with black panthers (melanistic leopards) and jaguars and jaguarundis. "Perhaps the selective pressure that allowed these mutations to survive in cats may not be camouflage. Perhaps the mutations cause resistance of the cats to bugs," O'Brien told Reuters in 2004.
Interestingly many stray cats are black or black and white. It is theorised that this happens because humans dislike black and therefore are more likely to adopt "pretty' strays - tabbies or tabbies and white like my elderly companion William. They just leave the black kittens to grow up wild and hungry. (Honestly, there is so much to dislike about humans. Colour prejudice is one of their more disagreeable traits.) And the black cats stay longer in rescue establishments because nobody wants them.
But maybe there are more of us on the streets partly because we survive better. I ought to try to contact the Italians who are holding Black Cat Day in November (see blog 8/27/07) to tell them this. We black cats are lucky not unlucky. Black power rules in catland.

When did cats domesticate humans?

Humans are anthropocentric in their views about domestication. For years and years they have believed in a myth - that we cats were domesticated by humans. Their general view was that humans went out into the desert, found some wild kittens of Felis silvestris Lybica, brought them home and then brought them up as companion animals about 4000 years ago to become Felis catus. This happened in Ancient Egypt when gods were worshipped in animal form including goddesses like the cat Bastet.
Now those in charge of the cat genome project, headed by Stephen O Brien, chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, have had to accept that this isn't how it was. It all started much earlier. The scientist discovered five lineages of mitochondrial DNA in modern cats. Because of this variation, the researchers believe domestication occurred a half-dozen times or so in the Middle East.
According to the genome research the five female ancestors of Felis catus were Felis silvestris Lybica, African wild cats, mousing their way across the deserts some 130,000 years ago. So that settles our ancestry. But how did it happen? Five separate sets of adopted kittens? I think not. More likely five adventurous female Felis silvestris Lybica. The discovery of five different events of domestication suggests domestication was the other way round - or so I think. Cats moved into human life of their own accord.
The theory was that cats turned up in human settlements when man first started growing grain. But now we know that early man settled in one place before the advent of grain farming. And the cats moved in on him. Why? Not because grain brings mice but because human garbage (with or without grain) brings rats and mice. Rats are bigger and better prey. And also because humans offer dry shelter for us. Of course rats can be found among wandering human tribes that don't settle in one place. Celia has seen for herself the rats in a Beduin camp. But because we cats have a decent sense of territory (unlike dogs who started following human tribes much earlier) we don't move around much. Tents are dry shelter but they keep being taken down and set up in a new place. So we had to wait till man was civilised enough to settle in one spot.
Then we moved in. It was nothing to do with captured kittens (a ridiculous idea). We moved in and we began to overcome our disgust at Homo sapiens, a species which hitherto we had avoided at all costs. In order to benefit from their garbage rats and mice (and later more mice when they started grain growing) we had to put up with them. And their buildings gave us valuable warmth and shelter, so we moved a bit closer. Or at least those five desert cats did. And their descendants who could put up with the nearness of mankind flourished better than the descendants that simply couldn't bear being around this blundering species.
There's a posh word for it - commensality. We began living side by side, seperate but equal. (Well, not exactly equal. More like separate but essentially different in status, cats above and humans below.) Then we began to tame them so that they started behaving better to us. They threw us the occasional scrap of food as well as understanding our valuable contribution to the grain economy. We worked as natural pesticides and rodent control operatives. Their babies and children grew up near cats and became socialised to them. We also socialised them by sleeping close to them for warmth and amusing them with our antics.
Some cats have even put forward the theory that Homo sapiens (so called) started settling in one place because they looked at our behaviour and imitated it. First they learned about social hunting from dogs, because they followed the wolf packs and, like hyenas, shooed off the wolves and ate their prey. So they imitated their hunting methods, were successful, and some of the wolves started following them instead. But imitating dogs could only help with primitive hunting and social life. They needed more to become modern and civilised.
They saw that territoriality worked for cats and opted to follow in our paw prints. It makes sense to me. Having a proper home den and a hunting range helps with the safe bearing of kittens, whether cat or human. And this is a great deal more likely that nonsense about humans kidnapping kittens and taming them to their requirements. Everybody knows that, as Saki put it, "the cat is only domesticated as far as it suits his own ends." I would merely add humans are the most completely domesticated species on earth. They show much more of the juvenility of domestication than we do. (More on that later perhaps)
Our lineage dates back 130,000 years (beat that, Debretts!) and we domesticated humans.