Cats live in millions of homes, yet remain deeply mysterious. From sacred worship in Ancient Egypt to persecution in medieval Europe, their fortunes have wildly changed.
This episode looks at how these wild mouse hunters became our companions, and why we still struggle to understand them.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of the history of animals.
[00:00:30] In case you missed part one, we learned about man’s best friend, his loyal canine companion, the dog.
[00:00:38] Next up, in part three, we will talk about the mysterious phenomenon of dragons.
[00:00:44] But today, in part two, it’s the cat. How did they come to live with us? What do we know about them? What remains a mystery? And what are some of the most interesting and unusual facts about cats through history.
[00:00:59] We have a lot to get through, so let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:07] The cat is, by some measures, the second most popular animal in the world, after the dog of course.
[00:01:14] There are an estimated 600 million worldwide, of whom just over a third are domesticated, house cats.
[00:01:24] Perhaps you are listening to this episode right now with a cat purring beside you, or there is one on your lap which you are stroking in a Bond-villain-esque way.
[00:01:37] The strange thing is, for the second most popular animal in the world, we actually know remarkably little about cats.
[00:01:46] We don't fully understand why they purr. There are theories, but no scientific consensus.
[00:01:55] We don't know exactly why they bring us dead mice and birds. Are they teaching us to hunt? Offering gifts? Showing off their skills? Nobody really knows for sure.
[00:02:09] We're not entirely sure why adult cats knead with their paws, pushing in and out like they're making bread.
[00:02:18] And perhaps most mysteriously of all, we don't really know why cats decided to live with us in the first place.
[00:02:27] Unlike dogs, who co-evolved alongside humans over tens of thousands of years, developing an almost telepathic ability to read our gestures and emotions, cats remain, well, inscrutable, mysterious.
[00:02:46] They live in our homes. They sleep on our beds. They grace us with their presence.
[00:02:52] But they do so on their own terms, keeping their secrets, maintaining an air of mystery.
[00:03:01] While a dog might look at you with utter adoration, a cat will look at you with what can only be described as mild disdain, as if to say, "Yes, human, you may continue existing in my presence."
[00:03:18] And yet, despite this aloofness—or perhaps because of it—hundreds of millions of people around the world have chosen to share their homes with these enigmatic creatures.
[00:03:30] So, to understand why cats are so different from every other animal we've domesticated, and to understand why they remain so mysterious after ten thousand years of living alongside us, we need to go back to the very beginning.
[00:03:47] To a time when cats were not curled up on sofas, but were wild predators prowling the edges of the world's first farms.
[00:03:58] Imagine, if you will, the Fertile Crescent about ten thousand years ago.
[00:04:04] This region, which spanned parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran, this was where humans first figured out agriculture.
[00:04:16] Instead of following herds of wild animals and gathering whatever plants they could find, humans began to plant crops, harvest grain, and store it for later use.
[00:04:30] This was revolutionary. It meant staying in one place. It meant building permanent settlements. It meant the birth of civilisation as we know it.
[00:04:42] But there was a problem.
[00:04:45] Grain stores attracted mice and rats by the bucketload.
[00:04:51] But with the mice and rats came other animals, predators that hunted them.
[00:04:57] Enter the African wildcat, a small, sandy-coloured cat native to the Middle East and North Africa.
[00:05:07] These wildcats were solitary hunters, and excellent at what they did. And they quickly realised that these human grain stores were essentially an all-you-can-eat buffet of rodents.
[00:05:23] So they moved in.
[00:05:26] Not because humans encouraged them or invited them. Not because humans captured and tamed them.
[00:05:33] They moved in because it made sense.
[00:05:37] And here's where the story of cats diverges dramatically from the story of dogs.
[00:05:44] Dogs, as we learned in the previous episode, went through a process of self-domestication over thirty thousand years or more.
[00:05:54] The wolves that became dogs changed profoundly, in their physical appearance, in terms of their behaviour, and even genetically.
[00:06:03] Their snouts shortened, their ears flopped, they developed the ability to digest human food, they even grew a special muscle to make those irresistible "puppy dog eyes."
[00:06:16] Cats did none of this.
[00:06:19] Cats domesticated themselves too, in a sense, but firstly, they did it much more recently, only about ten thousand years ago.
[00:06:29] And secondly, they did it incompletely.
[00:06:33] Genetically, your pet cat is around 95% identical to its wild ancestor.
[00:06:40] A modern house cat can still breed with an African wildcat and produce fertile offspring.
[00:06:48] Or to put another way: cats are barely domesticated at all.
[00:06:54] And this goes a long way to explaining their behaviour.
[00:06:59] A dog has been bred for thousands of generations to understand humans, to work with humans, to please humans.
[00:07:08] A cat? A cat just needs to be good at killing small animals.
[00:07:13] It doesn't need to understand your pointing gestures.
[00:07:16] It doesn't need to look to you for guidance.
[00:07:19] It doesn't need to care whether you're happy with it or not.
[00:07:24] Because for most of its history as a "domestic" animal, a cat had exactly one job: murder rodents. Kill mice and rats.
[00:07:36] If it performed that job well, humans tolerated its presence.
[00:07:41] There was no partnership, no co-evolution of complex tasks like herding sheep or pulling sleds.
[00:07:48] Cats simply existed near humans because it was mutually beneficial.
[00:07:55] Humans got pest control.
[00:07:57] Cats got easy meals.
[00:08:00] And critically, in the early days at least, humans didn't try to breed cats for temperament.
[00:08:08] The friendly cats stuck around, sure, but there was no strong selection pressure for friendliness the way there was with dogs.
[00:08:17] A grumpy, antisocial cat that was excellent at hunting was just as valuable as a friendly one.
[00:08:23] Perhaps even more so.
[00:08:26] And this arrangement carried on for thousands of years, with cats living on the edges of human civilisation, tolerated but not treasured.
[00:08:37] Until, that is, they arrived in Egypt.
[00:08:41] If you had to pick one place and time in history when cats reached the absolute peak of their social status, it would be Ancient Egypt, starting around 3,000 BC.
[00:08:54] The Egyptians didn't just like cats.
[00:08:58] They worshipped them.
[00:09:00] One of the most important gods in ancient Egypt was called Bastet, or Bast for short.
[00:09:07] She was the goddess of home, fertility, childbirth, and protection, and she was depicted either as a woman with the head of a cat, or simply as a cat.
[00:09:21] Cats themselves became sacred animals.
[00:09:24] Killing a cat, even accidentally, was punishable by death.
[00:09:30] When a family's cat died, the members of the household would go into mourning, shaving their eyebrows as a sign of grief.
[00:09:39] Cats were mummified and buried with great ceremony, sometimes with mummified mice to sustain them in the afterlife. In 1888, an Egyptian farmer discovered a cat cemetery containing an estimated eighty thousand mummified cats.
[00:09:59] Eighty thousand.
[00:10:01] Now, why do people believe the Egyptians were so intensely fond of cats?
[00:10:06] Well, partly, it was probably practical. Egypt's economy was particularly dependent on grain, and cats protected that grain from rodents.
[00:10:18] But it was deeper than that.
[00:10:22] Cats were seen as embodying qualities the Egyptians admired: grace, cleanliness, being fierce when necessary, and calm when not.
[00:10:33] A cat could be a loving presence in the home, and a ruthless killer of pests.
[00:10:39] c
[00:10:44] And there's a famous story, or legend, perhaps, that illustrates just how seriously the Egyptians took their cat worship.
[00:10:55] In 525 BCE, the Persian army laid siege to the Egyptian city of Pelusium.
[00:11:03] According to one report, the Persians knew about the Egyptians' mania for cats.
[00:11:09] The Persian soldiers, so the story goes, painted images of the cat goddess Bastet on their shields, and either carried live cats into battle or released hundreds of cats onto the battlefield.
[00:11:25] The Egyptian soldiers were completely unwilling to risk harming a single cat, so they refused to fight back.
[00:11:34] And the city fell without much resistance.
[00:11:39] Now, there are some question marks as to whether this actually happened, but the fact that the story exists at all gives us an indication of how highly cats were prized in Egypt.
[00:11:51] They weren't just pets.
[00:11:53] They were sacred.
[00:11:55] And because Egypt was a major trading power, cats didn't stay confined to the Nile Valley.
[00:12:03] The Egyptians tried to ban the export of cats, considering them too valuable, but Phoenician traders smuggled them out and sold them across the Mediterranean.
[00:12:15] Cats spread via trade routes and ships, where they served a vital function: pest control on long sea voyages.
[00:12:25] By Roman times, cats were found throughout Europe, Asia, and North Africa.
[00:12:31] But their fortunes were about to take a dark turn.
[00:12:37] If Ancient Egypt represented the peak of the cat's status in human society, medieval Europe represented its absolute nadir, its lowest point.
[00:12:49] As Christianity spread across Europe in the early medieval period, cats began to be viewed with suspicion.
[00:12:58] Why? Well, partly because of their association with pagan religions. After all, they'd been worshipped as gods in Egypt.
[00:13:07] But there was something else.
[00:13:10] Cats were independent. Aloof. Impossible to control.
[00:13:16] Dogs were obedient, loyal, seen as "natural" companions to humans.
[00:13:22] Cats, on the other hand, came and went as they pleased. They hunted at night. They seemed to answer to no one.
[00:13:32] In a religious and social order that valued obedience and hierarchy, the cat's independence was seen as almost... unnatural.
[00:13:43] And by the 13th century, this suspicion had transformed into something far darker.
[00:13:52] Cats, particularly black cats, became associated with witchcraft and the devil.
[00:14:00] The logic, such as it was, went something like this: witches were in league with Satan, and Satan could send them animal companions called 'familiars' to do their bidding.
[00:14:14] What better familiar than a cat? An animal that prowled at night, that seemed to see in the darkness, that moved silently and killed without mercy?
[00:14:27] Pope Gregory IX allegedly issued a papal decree in 1233 called Vox in Rama, which condemned cats as instruments of Satan.
[00:14:38] Now, historians debate whether this decree specifically targeted cats, or whether it was more broadly about heresy, but regardless, the result was the same.
[00:14:51] Across Europe, particularly during the height of the witch trials from the 13th to the 17th centuries, cats were persecuted.
[00:15:01] They were killed en masse. Burned alive. Thrown from towers. Hunted for sport.
[00:15:09] In some towns, killing cats became a form of entertainment. In France, there was a tradition of burning bags of live cats as part of festivals.
[00:15:21] If you were a cat, well, life in Medieval France was about as bad as it got.
[00:15:27] And then, in 1347, came the consequences.
[00:15:32] The Black Death arrived in Europe, likely via trading ships from Asia.
[00:15:37] The plague was caused by a bacterium carried by fleas that lived on black rats.
[00:15:45] Now, you probably know something about The Black Death already, and we also have an episode on it; it’s episode number 129.
[00:15:53] Long story short, it would kill somewhere between 75 and 200 million people—roughly one-third of Europe's entire population.
[00:16:04] And here's the bitter irony: Europeans had spent the previous century killing the one animal that could have helped control the rat population.
[00:16:16] Cats.
[00:16:17] Now, to be clear, no historian is suggesting that cats alone could have stopped the plague, but more cats would have meant fewer rats, which would have meant fewer plague-carrying fleas, and fewer dead bodies.
[00:16:32] It was one of history's great tragic ironies, a cautionary tale about the dangers of superstition and mass hysteria.
[00:16:41] And while Europe was busy persecuting cats, other parts of the world took a very different view.
[00:16:49] In the Islamic world, cats remained popular and respected.
[00:16:54] The Prophet Muhammad was said to have loved cats.
[00:16:57] In Islamic culture, cats were considered clean animals, unlike dogs, and were welcome in homes and even mosques.
[00:17:07] They remained valued for their pest control abilities and their companionship.
[00:17:13] Similarly, in parts of Asia, cats maintained their status.
[00:17:18] In Japan, where cats had arrived around the 6th century, they became culturally significant.
[00:17:25] They appeared in art and literature, and eventually became symbols of good fortune—think of the Maneki-neko, the "lucky cat" figurine you see in Japanese shops.
[00:17:38] Back in Europe, however, it would take several more centuries before cats could shake off their demonic reputation and return to human favour.
[00:17:49] The rehabilitation of the cat in European society began slowly, but by the 19th century, cats were firmly back in fashion.
[00:18:00] During the Victorian era, the same period when dogs were transitioning from workers to companions, cats saw a similar transformation.
[00:18:11] But there was a key difference.
[00:18:14] Victorian society loved to classify, categorise, and "improve" things through selective breeding.
[00:18:22] And cats, unlike dogs, had never really been bred for specific purposes beyond basic mousing ability.
[00:18:32] This was about to change.
[00:18:35] In July 1871, the first major cat show was held at the Crystal Palace in London.
[00:18:44] It was organised by a man named Harrison Weir, an artist and cat enthusiast who wanted to elevate the status of cats and promote their breeding.
[00:18:55] The show featured over 160 cats, and it was a massive success.
[00:19:01] Thousands of people came to see cats of different colours, patterns, and coat lengths, all competing for prizes.
[00:19:09] This event sparked the beginning of the "cat fancy"—the deliberate breeding of cats for specific aesthetic traits.
[00:19:19] Suddenly, cats weren't just mousers or companions; they were status symbols, living works of art.
[00:19:28] But perhaps the real reason cats made such a successful comeback in the Victorian era and beyond had less to do with fashion and more to do with practicality.
[00:19:40] As Europe and North America urbanised rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, more and more people moved into cities, into smaller homes and apartments.
[00:19:52] Dogs required space. They needed daily walks. They demanded attention and training. They needed to go outside to go to the toilet.
[00:20:02] Cats, on the other hand, were perfect for urban living.
[00:20:07] They were self-sufficient. They didn't need to be walked. They were happy in smaller spaces.
[00:20:14] They were, in short, the ideal pet for the modern city dweller.
[00:20:20] And then, in 1947, came an invention that would change cat ownership forever: the cat litter box.
[00:20:29] Before this, cats either went outside to do their business, or they used boxes filled with sand or ashes, which were messy and smelled terrible.
[00:20:41] An American businessman called Edward Lowe had a breakthrough. He discovered that a particular type of absorbent clay worked brilliantly for this purpose.
[00:20:54] He packaged it, called it "Kitty Litter," and created an entirely new industry.
[00:21:02] Suddenly, keeping a cat indoors full-time became not just possible, but pleasant.
[00:21:10] And by the mid-20th century, particularly after World War II, cat ownership exploded.
[00:21:18] In many countries, cats began to rival, and in some cases overtake, dogs in popularity.
[00:21:26] Still, despite the hundreds of millions that live alongside humans today, and having lived alongside humans for ten thousand years, there's still so much we don't understand about them.
[00:21:39] Take purring, for example.
[00:21:42] You probably think you know why cats purr—they're happy, right?
[00:21:47] Well, maybe. But cats also purr when they're stressed, injured, or giving birth.
[00:21:56] Scientists have several theories. One is that purring is a self-soothing behaviour, a way for cats to calm themselves in stressful situations.
[00:22:08] Another theory suggests that the frequency of a cat's purr may actually promote healing, encouraging bone growth and reducing pain.
[00:22:18] Cats may literally be purring themselves better.
[00:22:23] But we don't know for certain. After thousands of years, the purr remains a mystery.
[00:22:30] Then there's kneading, pushing their paws in and out like they are making bread, or bringing you dead animals. There are plenty of theories about why cats do this, but no consensus.
[00:22:44] There’s a lot we don’t understand, but an increasing amount we do. Scientists have made some recent discoveries about cat behaviour that are genuinely fascinating.
[00:22:55] For one thing, we now know that cats have somewhere in the region of 276 different facial expressions.
[00:23:05] For comparison, dogs have about 27.
[00:23:09] Cats are far more expressive than we give them credit for, we just haven't learned to read them properly. Scientists have also confirmed what cat owners have long suspected: cats absolutely can recognise their owner's voice.
[00:23:27] They just... often choose not to respond.
[00:23:31] One study played recordings of strangers calling a cat's name, then recordings of the cat's owner calling its name.
[00:23:40] The cats showed clear recognition of their owner's voice—their ears moved, their pupils dilated—but they rarely bothered to actually come when called.
[00:23:53] Dogs, of course, mostly come running when they hear their owner’s voice.
[00:23:59] Cats? They think about it, decide whether it's worth their time, and then usually go back to sleep.
[00:24:06] And perhaps that's the most honest thing about cats.
[00:24:11] They live with us, but they haven't fundamentally changed who they are to please us.
[00:24:17] Your house cat is still 95% wildcat.
[00:24:21] It's still a predator, an apex hunter in a small, fluffy package.
[00:24:27] When it's kneading on your lap and purring, it's not doing it because you trained it to.
[00:24:33] It's doing it because, for whatever mysterious reason of its own, it wants or needs to.
[00:24:40] And there's one more theory about cats that I should mention, even though the scientific evidence for it is... let's say, controversial.
[00:24:50] It involves a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii.
[00:24:55] This parasite can only reproduce sexually inside a cat's digestive system, but it can infect other animals, including humans, usually through contact with cat faeces.
[00:25:10] In most people, it's harmless.
[00:25:13] But here's where it gets interesting.
[00:25:16] Some scientists have suggested that Toxoplasma might actually alter human behaviour in subtle ways, making infected people more fond of cats, more likely to keep cats, more tolerant of cat behaviour.
[00:25:33] In other words, the parasite might be manipulating us to ensure its own survival by making us like its primary host.
[00:25:43] The evidence for this is somewhat weak, and most scientists are sceptical.
[00:25:49] But if it were true, it would be the ultimate cat trick.
[00:25:54] Making us think we chose them, when really, they chose us all along.
[00:26:00] So where does this leave us with cats?
[00:26:03] They've achieved this remarkable success by being, fundamentally, themselves.
[00:26:10] They didn't co-evolve with us like dogs did.
[00:26:13] They didn't develop special muscles to make appealing faces.
[00:26:17] They didn't learn to understand our pointing gestures or look to us for guidance.
[00:26:23] They simply decided that living near humans was convenient, we decided that having them around was useful, and things progressed from there.
[00:26:33] Now, I should probably have confessed earlier on in this episode that I am more of a dog than a cat person.
[00:26:42] For me, you can’t beat the unconditional, undying loyalty and love of a dog.
[00:26:48] If you are more of a cat person, you will probably think this is simple and base.
[00:26:54] Dogs love anyone; cats make you work for it.
[00:27:00] And when a cat does decide to curl up on your lap, or head-butt your hand demanding attention, well, you know you've earned it.
[00:27:09] Or perhaps the cat is just cold and you're warm.
[00:27:13] Or perhaps it's hungry and you're useful.
[00:27:17] With cats, you never quite know.
[00:27:20] Dogs, as they say, have owners.
[00:27:24] Cats have staff.
[00:27:26] And after ten thousand years of this arrangement, I think we can quite safely say: that's exactly how they like it.
[00:27:36] OK then, that is it for today's episode on cats, the enigmatic, independent, and utterly mysterious animals that somehow convinced us to let them live in our homes.
[00:27:48] As a reminder, this was part two of our three-part mini-series on animals throughout history.
[00:27:54] Next up, in part three, we'll be talking about an animal that never existed at all, but has captured human imagination for thousands of years across almost every culture on Earth: the dragon.
[00:28:07] Fire-breathing, treasure-hoarding, princess-kidnapping dragons.
[00:28:11] You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:28:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of the history of animals.
[00:00:30] In case you missed part one, we learned about man’s best friend, his loyal canine companion, the dog.
[00:00:38] Next up, in part three, we will talk about the mysterious phenomenon of dragons.
[00:00:44] But today, in part two, it’s the cat. How did they come to live with us? What do we know about them? What remains a mystery? And what are some of the most interesting and unusual facts about cats through history.
[00:00:59] We have a lot to get through, so let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:07] The cat is, by some measures, the second most popular animal in the world, after the dog of course.
[00:01:14] There are an estimated 600 million worldwide, of whom just over a third are domesticated, house cats.
[00:01:24] Perhaps you are listening to this episode right now with a cat purring beside you, or there is one on your lap which you are stroking in a Bond-villain-esque way.
[00:01:37] The strange thing is, for the second most popular animal in the world, we actually know remarkably little about cats.
[00:01:46] We don't fully understand why they purr. There are theories, but no scientific consensus.
[00:01:55] We don't know exactly why they bring us dead mice and birds. Are they teaching us to hunt? Offering gifts? Showing off their skills? Nobody really knows for sure.
[00:02:09] We're not entirely sure why adult cats knead with their paws, pushing in and out like they're making bread.
[00:02:18] And perhaps most mysteriously of all, we don't really know why cats decided to live with us in the first place.
[00:02:27] Unlike dogs, who co-evolved alongside humans over tens of thousands of years, developing an almost telepathic ability to read our gestures and emotions, cats remain, well, inscrutable, mysterious.
[00:02:46] They live in our homes. They sleep on our beds. They grace us with their presence.
[00:02:52] But they do so on their own terms, keeping their secrets, maintaining an air of mystery.
[00:03:01] While a dog might look at you with utter adoration, a cat will look at you with what can only be described as mild disdain, as if to say, "Yes, human, you may continue existing in my presence."
[00:03:18] And yet, despite this aloofness—or perhaps because of it—hundreds of millions of people around the world have chosen to share their homes with these enigmatic creatures.
[00:03:30] So, to understand why cats are so different from every other animal we've domesticated, and to understand why they remain so mysterious after ten thousand years of living alongside us, we need to go back to the very beginning.
[00:03:47] To a time when cats were not curled up on sofas, but were wild predators prowling the edges of the world's first farms.
[00:03:58] Imagine, if you will, the Fertile Crescent about ten thousand years ago.
[00:04:04] This region, which spanned parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran, this was where humans first figured out agriculture.
[00:04:16] Instead of following herds of wild animals and gathering whatever plants they could find, humans began to plant crops, harvest grain, and store it for later use.
[00:04:30] This was revolutionary. It meant staying in one place. It meant building permanent settlements. It meant the birth of civilisation as we know it.
[00:04:42] But there was a problem.
[00:04:45] Grain stores attracted mice and rats by the bucketload.
[00:04:51] But with the mice and rats came other animals, predators that hunted them.
[00:04:57] Enter the African wildcat, a small, sandy-coloured cat native to the Middle East and North Africa.
[00:05:07] These wildcats were solitary hunters, and excellent at what they did. And they quickly realised that these human grain stores were essentially an all-you-can-eat buffet of rodents.
[00:05:23] So they moved in.
[00:05:26] Not because humans encouraged them or invited them. Not because humans captured and tamed them.
[00:05:33] They moved in because it made sense.
[00:05:37] And here's where the story of cats diverges dramatically from the story of dogs.
[00:05:44] Dogs, as we learned in the previous episode, went through a process of self-domestication over thirty thousand years or more.
[00:05:54] The wolves that became dogs changed profoundly, in their physical appearance, in terms of their behaviour, and even genetically.
[00:06:03] Their snouts shortened, their ears flopped, they developed the ability to digest human food, they even grew a special muscle to make those irresistible "puppy dog eyes."
[00:06:16] Cats did none of this.
[00:06:19] Cats domesticated themselves too, in a sense, but firstly, they did it much more recently, only about ten thousand years ago.
[00:06:29] And secondly, they did it incompletely.
[00:06:33] Genetically, your pet cat is around 95% identical to its wild ancestor.
[00:06:40] A modern house cat can still breed with an African wildcat and produce fertile offspring.
[00:06:48] Or to put another way: cats are barely domesticated at all.
[00:06:54] And this goes a long way to explaining their behaviour.
[00:06:59] A dog has been bred for thousands of generations to understand humans, to work with humans, to please humans.
[00:07:08] A cat? A cat just needs to be good at killing small animals.
[00:07:13] It doesn't need to understand your pointing gestures.
[00:07:16] It doesn't need to look to you for guidance.
[00:07:19] It doesn't need to care whether you're happy with it or not.
[00:07:24] Because for most of its history as a "domestic" animal, a cat had exactly one job: murder rodents. Kill mice and rats.
[00:07:36] If it performed that job well, humans tolerated its presence.
[00:07:41] There was no partnership, no co-evolution of complex tasks like herding sheep or pulling sleds.
[00:07:48] Cats simply existed near humans because it was mutually beneficial.
[00:07:55] Humans got pest control.
[00:07:57] Cats got easy meals.
[00:08:00] And critically, in the early days at least, humans didn't try to breed cats for temperament.
[00:08:08] The friendly cats stuck around, sure, but there was no strong selection pressure for friendliness the way there was with dogs.
[00:08:17] A grumpy, antisocial cat that was excellent at hunting was just as valuable as a friendly one.
[00:08:23] Perhaps even more so.
[00:08:26] And this arrangement carried on for thousands of years, with cats living on the edges of human civilisation, tolerated but not treasured.
[00:08:37] Until, that is, they arrived in Egypt.
[00:08:41] If you had to pick one place and time in history when cats reached the absolute peak of their social status, it would be Ancient Egypt, starting around 3,000 BC.
[00:08:54] The Egyptians didn't just like cats.
[00:08:58] They worshipped them.
[00:09:00] One of the most important gods in ancient Egypt was called Bastet, or Bast for short.
[00:09:07] She was the goddess of home, fertility, childbirth, and protection, and she was depicted either as a woman with the head of a cat, or simply as a cat.
[00:09:21] Cats themselves became sacred animals.
[00:09:24] Killing a cat, even accidentally, was punishable by death.
[00:09:30] When a family's cat died, the members of the household would go into mourning, shaving their eyebrows as a sign of grief.
[00:09:39] Cats were mummified and buried with great ceremony, sometimes with mummified mice to sustain them in the afterlife. In 1888, an Egyptian farmer discovered a cat cemetery containing an estimated eighty thousand mummified cats.
[00:09:59] Eighty thousand.
[00:10:01] Now, why do people believe the Egyptians were so intensely fond of cats?
[00:10:06] Well, partly, it was probably practical. Egypt's economy was particularly dependent on grain, and cats protected that grain from rodents.
[00:10:18] But it was deeper than that.
[00:10:22] Cats were seen as embodying qualities the Egyptians admired: grace, cleanliness, being fierce when necessary, and calm when not.
[00:10:33] A cat could be a loving presence in the home, and a ruthless killer of pests.
[00:10:39] c
[00:10:44] And there's a famous story, or legend, perhaps, that illustrates just how seriously the Egyptians took their cat worship.
[00:10:55] In 525 BCE, the Persian army laid siege to the Egyptian city of Pelusium.
[00:11:03] According to one report, the Persians knew about the Egyptians' mania for cats.
[00:11:09] The Persian soldiers, so the story goes, painted images of the cat goddess Bastet on their shields, and either carried live cats into battle or released hundreds of cats onto the battlefield.
[00:11:25] The Egyptian soldiers were completely unwilling to risk harming a single cat, so they refused to fight back.
[00:11:34] And the city fell without much resistance.
[00:11:39] Now, there are some question marks as to whether this actually happened, but the fact that the story exists at all gives us an indication of how highly cats were prized in Egypt.
[00:11:51] They weren't just pets.
[00:11:53] They were sacred.
[00:11:55] And because Egypt was a major trading power, cats didn't stay confined to the Nile Valley.
[00:12:03] The Egyptians tried to ban the export of cats, considering them too valuable, but Phoenician traders smuggled them out and sold them across the Mediterranean.
[00:12:15] Cats spread via trade routes and ships, where they served a vital function: pest control on long sea voyages.
[00:12:25] By Roman times, cats were found throughout Europe, Asia, and North Africa.
[00:12:31] But their fortunes were about to take a dark turn.
[00:12:37] If Ancient Egypt represented the peak of the cat's status in human society, medieval Europe represented its absolute nadir, its lowest point.
[00:12:49] As Christianity spread across Europe in the early medieval period, cats began to be viewed with suspicion.
[00:12:58] Why? Well, partly because of their association with pagan religions. After all, they'd been worshipped as gods in Egypt.
[00:13:07] But there was something else.
[00:13:10] Cats were independent. Aloof. Impossible to control.
[00:13:16] Dogs were obedient, loyal, seen as "natural" companions to humans.
[00:13:22] Cats, on the other hand, came and went as they pleased. They hunted at night. They seemed to answer to no one.
[00:13:32] In a religious and social order that valued obedience and hierarchy, the cat's independence was seen as almost... unnatural.
[00:13:43] And by the 13th century, this suspicion had transformed into something far darker.
[00:13:52] Cats, particularly black cats, became associated with witchcraft and the devil.
[00:14:00] The logic, such as it was, went something like this: witches were in league with Satan, and Satan could send them animal companions called 'familiars' to do their bidding.
[00:14:14] What better familiar than a cat? An animal that prowled at night, that seemed to see in the darkness, that moved silently and killed without mercy?
[00:14:27] Pope Gregory IX allegedly issued a papal decree in 1233 called Vox in Rama, which condemned cats as instruments of Satan.
[00:14:38] Now, historians debate whether this decree specifically targeted cats, or whether it was more broadly about heresy, but regardless, the result was the same.
[00:14:51] Across Europe, particularly during the height of the witch trials from the 13th to the 17th centuries, cats were persecuted.
[00:15:01] They were killed en masse. Burned alive. Thrown from towers. Hunted for sport.
[00:15:09] In some towns, killing cats became a form of entertainment. In France, there was a tradition of burning bags of live cats as part of festivals.
[00:15:21] If you were a cat, well, life in Medieval France was about as bad as it got.
[00:15:27] And then, in 1347, came the consequences.
[00:15:32] The Black Death arrived in Europe, likely via trading ships from Asia.
[00:15:37] The plague was caused by a bacterium carried by fleas that lived on black rats.
[00:15:45] Now, you probably know something about The Black Death already, and we also have an episode on it; it’s episode number 129.
[00:15:53] Long story short, it would kill somewhere between 75 and 200 million people—roughly one-third of Europe's entire population.
[00:16:04] And here's the bitter irony: Europeans had spent the previous century killing the one animal that could have helped control the rat population.
[00:16:16] Cats.
[00:16:17] Now, to be clear, no historian is suggesting that cats alone could have stopped the plague, but more cats would have meant fewer rats, which would have meant fewer plague-carrying fleas, and fewer dead bodies.
[00:16:32] It was one of history's great tragic ironies, a cautionary tale about the dangers of superstition and mass hysteria.
[00:16:41] And while Europe was busy persecuting cats, other parts of the world took a very different view.
[00:16:49] In the Islamic world, cats remained popular and respected.
[00:16:54] The Prophet Muhammad was said to have loved cats.
[00:16:57] In Islamic culture, cats were considered clean animals, unlike dogs, and were welcome in homes and even mosques.
[00:17:07] They remained valued for their pest control abilities and their companionship.
[00:17:13] Similarly, in parts of Asia, cats maintained their status.
[00:17:18] In Japan, where cats had arrived around the 6th century, they became culturally significant.
[00:17:25] They appeared in art and literature, and eventually became symbols of good fortune—think of the Maneki-neko, the "lucky cat" figurine you see in Japanese shops.
[00:17:38] Back in Europe, however, it would take several more centuries before cats could shake off their demonic reputation and return to human favour.
[00:17:49] The rehabilitation of the cat in European society began slowly, but by the 19th century, cats were firmly back in fashion.
[00:18:00] During the Victorian era, the same period when dogs were transitioning from workers to companions, cats saw a similar transformation.
[00:18:11] But there was a key difference.
[00:18:14] Victorian society loved to classify, categorise, and "improve" things through selective breeding.
[00:18:22] And cats, unlike dogs, had never really been bred for specific purposes beyond basic mousing ability.
[00:18:32] This was about to change.
[00:18:35] In July 1871, the first major cat show was held at the Crystal Palace in London.
[00:18:44] It was organised by a man named Harrison Weir, an artist and cat enthusiast who wanted to elevate the status of cats and promote their breeding.
[00:18:55] The show featured over 160 cats, and it was a massive success.
[00:19:01] Thousands of people came to see cats of different colours, patterns, and coat lengths, all competing for prizes.
[00:19:09] This event sparked the beginning of the "cat fancy"—the deliberate breeding of cats for specific aesthetic traits.
[00:19:19] Suddenly, cats weren't just mousers or companions; they were status symbols, living works of art.
[00:19:28] But perhaps the real reason cats made such a successful comeback in the Victorian era and beyond had less to do with fashion and more to do with practicality.
[00:19:40] As Europe and North America urbanised rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, more and more people moved into cities, into smaller homes and apartments.
[00:19:52] Dogs required space. They needed daily walks. They demanded attention and training. They needed to go outside to go to the toilet.
[00:20:02] Cats, on the other hand, were perfect for urban living.
[00:20:07] They were self-sufficient. They didn't need to be walked. They were happy in smaller spaces.
[00:20:14] They were, in short, the ideal pet for the modern city dweller.
[00:20:20] And then, in 1947, came an invention that would change cat ownership forever: the cat litter box.
[00:20:29] Before this, cats either went outside to do their business, or they used boxes filled with sand or ashes, which were messy and smelled terrible.
[00:20:41] An American businessman called Edward Lowe had a breakthrough. He discovered that a particular type of absorbent clay worked brilliantly for this purpose.
[00:20:54] He packaged it, called it "Kitty Litter," and created an entirely new industry.
[00:21:02] Suddenly, keeping a cat indoors full-time became not just possible, but pleasant.
[00:21:10] And by the mid-20th century, particularly after World War II, cat ownership exploded.
[00:21:18] In many countries, cats began to rival, and in some cases overtake, dogs in popularity.
[00:21:26] Still, despite the hundreds of millions that live alongside humans today, and having lived alongside humans for ten thousand years, there's still so much we don't understand about them.
[00:21:39] Take purring, for example.
[00:21:42] You probably think you know why cats purr—they're happy, right?
[00:21:47] Well, maybe. But cats also purr when they're stressed, injured, or giving birth.
[00:21:56] Scientists have several theories. One is that purring is a self-soothing behaviour, a way for cats to calm themselves in stressful situations.
[00:22:08] Another theory suggests that the frequency of a cat's purr may actually promote healing, encouraging bone growth and reducing pain.
[00:22:18] Cats may literally be purring themselves better.
[00:22:23] But we don't know for certain. After thousands of years, the purr remains a mystery.
[00:22:30] Then there's kneading, pushing their paws in and out like they are making bread, or bringing you dead animals. There are plenty of theories about why cats do this, but no consensus.
[00:22:44] There’s a lot we don’t understand, but an increasing amount we do. Scientists have made some recent discoveries about cat behaviour that are genuinely fascinating.
[00:22:55] For one thing, we now know that cats have somewhere in the region of 276 different facial expressions.
[00:23:05] For comparison, dogs have about 27.
[00:23:09] Cats are far more expressive than we give them credit for, we just haven't learned to read them properly. Scientists have also confirmed what cat owners have long suspected: cats absolutely can recognise their owner's voice.
[00:23:27] They just... often choose not to respond.
[00:23:31] One study played recordings of strangers calling a cat's name, then recordings of the cat's owner calling its name.
[00:23:40] The cats showed clear recognition of their owner's voice—their ears moved, their pupils dilated—but they rarely bothered to actually come when called.
[00:23:53] Dogs, of course, mostly come running when they hear their owner’s voice.
[00:23:59] Cats? They think about it, decide whether it's worth their time, and then usually go back to sleep.
[00:24:06] And perhaps that's the most honest thing about cats.
[00:24:11] They live with us, but they haven't fundamentally changed who they are to please us.
[00:24:17] Your house cat is still 95% wildcat.
[00:24:21] It's still a predator, an apex hunter in a small, fluffy package.
[00:24:27] When it's kneading on your lap and purring, it's not doing it because you trained it to.
[00:24:33] It's doing it because, for whatever mysterious reason of its own, it wants or needs to.
[00:24:40] And there's one more theory about cats that I should mention, even though the scientific evidence for it is... let's say, controversial.
[00:24:50] It involves a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii.
[00:24:55] This parasite can only reproduce sexually inside a cat's digestive system, but it can infect other animals, including humans, usually through contact with cat faeces.
[00:25:10] In most people, it's harmless.
[00:25:13] But here's where it gets interesting.
[00:25:16] Some scientists have suggested that Toxoplasma might actually alter human behaviour in subtle ways, making infected people more fond of cats, more likely to keep cats, more tolerant of cat behaviour.
[00:25:33] In other words, the parasite might be manipulating us to ensure its own survival by making us like its primary host.
[00:25:43] The evidence for this is somewhat weak, and most scientists are sceptical.
[00:25:49] But if it were true, it would be the ultimate cat trick.
[00:25:54] Making us think we chose them, when really, they chose us all along.
[00:26:00] So where does this leave us with cats?
[00:26:03] They've achieved this remarkable success by being, fundamentally, themselves.
[00:26:10] They didn't co-evolve with us like dogs did.
[00:26:13] They didn't develop special muscles to make appealing faces.
[00:26:17] They didn't learn to understand our pointing gestures or look to us for guidance.
[00:26:23] They simply decided that living near humans was convenient, we decided that having them around was useful, and things progressed from there.
[00:26:33] Now, I should probably have confessed earlier on in this episode that I am more of a dog than a cat person.
[00:26:42] For me, you can’t beat the unconditional, undying loyalty and love of a dog.
[00:26:48] If you are more of a cat person, you will probably think this is simple and base.
[00:26:54] Dogs love anyone; cats make you work for it.
[00:27:00] And when a cat does decide to curl up on your lap, or head-butt your hand demanding attention, well, you know you've earned it.
[00:27:09] Or perhaps the cat is just cold and you're warm.
[00:27:13] Or perhaps it's hungry and you're useful.
[00:27:17] With cats, you never quite know.
[00:27:20] Dogs, as they say, have owners.
[00:27:24] Cats have staff.
[00:27:26] And after ten thousand years of this arrangement, I think we can quite safely say: that's exactly how they like it.
[00:27:36] OK then, that is it for today's episode on cats, the enigmatic, independent, and utterly mysterious animals that somehow convinced us to let them live in our homes.
[00:27:48] As a reminder, this was part two of our three-part mini-series on animals throughout history.
[00:27:54] Next up, in part three, we'll be talking about an animal that never existed at all, but has captured human imagination for thousands of years across almost every culture on Earth: the dragon.
[00:28:07] Fire-breathing, treasure-hoarding, princess-kidnapping dragons.
[00:28:11] You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:28:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part two of our three-part mini-series on the theme of the history of animals.
[00:00:30] In case you missed part one, we learned about man’s best friend, his loyal canine companion, the dog.
[00:00:38] Next up, in part three, we will talk about the mysterious phenomenon of dragons.
[00:00:44] But today, in part two, it’s the cat. How did they come to live with us? What do we know about them? What remains a mystery? And what are some of the most interesting and unusual facts about cats through history.
[00:00:59] We have a lot to get through, so let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:07] The cat is, by some measures, the second most popular animal in the world, after the dog of course.
[00:01:14] There are an estimated 600 million worldwide, of whom just over a third are domesticated, house cats.
[00:01:24] Perhaps you are listening to this episode right now with a cat purring beside you, or there is one on your lap which you are stroking in a Bond-villain-esque way.
[00:01:37] The strange thing is, for the second most popular animal in the world, we actually know remarkably little about cats.
[00:01:46] We don't fully understand why they purr. There are theories, but no scientific consensus.
[00:01:55] We don't know exactly why they bring us dead mice and birds. Are they teaching us to hunt? Offering gifts? Showing off their skills? Nobody really knows for sure.
[00:02:09] We're not entirely sure why adult cats knead with their paws, pushing in and out like they're making bread.
[00:02:18] And perhaps most mysteriously of all, we don't really know why cats decided to live with us in the first place.
[00:02:27] Unlike dogs, who co-evolved alongside humans over tens of thousands of years, developing an almost telepathic ability to read our gestures and emotions, cats remain, well, inscrutable, mysterious.
[00:02:46] They live in our homes. They sleep on our beds. They grace us with their presence.
[00:02:52] But they do so on their own terms, keeping their secrets, maintaining an air of mystery.
[00:03:01] While a dog might look at you with utter adoration, a cat will look at you with what can only be described as mild disdain, as if to say, "Yes, human, you may continue existing in my presence."
[00:03:18] And yet, despite this aloofness—or perhaps because of it—hundreds of millions of people around the world have chosen to share their homes with these enigmatic creatures.
[00:03:30] So, to understand why cats are so different from every other animal we've domesticated, and to understand why they remain so mysterious after ten thousand years of living alongside us, we need to go back to the very beginning.
[00:03:47] To a time when cats were not curled up on sofas, but were wild predators prowling the edges of the world's first farms.
[00:03:58] Imagine, if you will, the Fertile Crescent about ten thousand years ago.
[00:04:04] This region, which spanned parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran, this was where humans first figured out agriculture.
[00:04:16] Instead of following herds of wild animals and gathering whatever plants they could find, humans began to plant crops, harvest grain, and store it for later use.
[00:04:30] This was revolutionary. It meant staying in one place. It meant building permanent settlements. It meant the birth of civilisation as we know it.
[00:04:42] But there was a problem.
[00:04:45] Grain stores attracted mice and rats by the bucketload.
[00:04:51] But with the mice and rats came other animals, predators that hunted them.
[00:04:57] Enter the African wildcat, a small, sandy-coloured cat native to the Middle East and North Africa.
[00:05:07] These wildcats were solitary hunters, and excellent at what they did. And they quickly realised that these human grain stores were essentially an all-you-can-eat buffet of rodents.
[00:05:23] So they moved in.
[00:05:26] Not because humans encouraged them or invited them. Not because humans captured and tamed them.
[00:05:33] They moved in because it made sense.
[00:05:37] And here's where the story of cats diverges dramatically from the story of dogs.
[00:05:44] Dogs, as we learned in the previous episode, went through a process of self-domestication over thirty thousand years or more.
[00:05:54] The wolves that became dogs changed profoundly, in their physical appearance, in terms of their behaviour, and even genetically.
[00:06:03] Their snouts shortened, their ears flopped, they developed the ability to digest human food, they even grew a special muscle to make those irresistible "puppy dog eyes."
[00:06:16] Cats did none of this.
[00:06:19] Cats domesticated themselves too, in a sense, but firstly, they did it much more recently, only about ten thousand years ago.
[00:06:29] And secondly, they did it incompletely.
[00:06:33] Genetically, your pet cat is around 95% identical to its wild ancestor.
[00:06:40] A modern house cat can still breed with an African wildcat and produce fertile offspring.
[00:06:48] Or to put another way: cats are barely domesticated at all.
[00:06:54] And this goes a long way to explaining their behaviour.
[00:06:59] A dog has been bred for thousands of generations to understand humans, to work with humans, to please humans.
[00:07:08] A cat? A cat just needs to be good at killing small animals.
[00:07:13] It doesn't need to understand your pointing gestures.
[00:07:16] It doesn't need to look to you for guidance.
[00:07:19] It doesn't need to care whether you're happy with it or not.
[00:07:24] Because for most of its history as a "domestic" animal, a cat had exactly one job: murder rodents. Kill mice and rats.
[00:07:36] If it performed that job well, humans tolerated its presence.
[00:07:41] There was no partnership, no co-evolution of complex tasks like herding sheep or pulling sleds.
[00:07:48] Cats simply existed near humans because it was mutually beneficial.
[00:07:55] Humans got pest control.
[00:07:57] Cats got easy meals.
[00:08:00] And critically, in the early days at least, humans didn't try to breed cats for temperament.
[00:08:08] The friendly cats stuck around, sure, but there was no strong selection pressure for friendliness the way there was with dogs.
[00:08:17] A grumpy, antisocial cat that was excellent at hunting was just as valuable as a friendly one.
[00:08:23] Perhaps even more so.
[00:08:26] And this arrangement carried on for thousands of years, with cats living on the edges of human civilisation, tolerated but not treasured.
[00:08:37] Until, that is, they arrived in Egypt.
[00:08:41] If you had to pick one place and time in history when cats reached the absolute peak of their social status, it would be Ancient Egypt, starting around 3,000 BC.
[00:08:54] The Egyptians didn't just like cats.
[00:08:58] They worshipped them.
[00:09:00] One of the most important gods in ancient Egypt was called Bastet, or Bast for short.
[00:09:07] She was the goddess of home, fertility, childbirth, and protection, and she was depicted either as a woman with the head of a cat, or simply as a cat.
[00:09:21] Cats themselves became sacred animals.
[00:09:24] Killing a cat, even accidentally, was punishable by death.
[00:09:30] When a family's cat died, the members of the household would go into mourning, shaving their eyebrows as a sign of grief.
[00:09:39] Cats were mummified and buried with great ceremony, sometimes with mummified mice to sustain them in the afterlife. In 1888, an Egyptian farmer discovered a cat cemetery containing an estimated eighty thousand mummified cats.
[00:09:59] Eighty thousand.
[00:10:01] Now, why do people believe the Egyptians were so intensely fond of cats?
[00:10:06] Well, partly, it was probably practical. Egypt's economy was particularly dependent on grain, and cats protected that grain from rodents.
[00:10:18] But it was deeper than that.
[00:10:22] Cats were seen as embodying qualities the Egyptians admired: grace, cleanliness, being fierce when necessary, and calm when not.
[00:10:33] A cat could be a loving presence in the home, and a ruthless killer of pests.
[00:10:39] c
[00:10:44] And there's a famous story, or legend, perhaps, that illustrates just how seriously the Egyptians took their cat worship.
[00:10:55] In 525 BCE, the Persian army laid siege to the Egyptian city of Pelusium.
[00:11:03] According to one report, the Persians knew about the Egyptians' mania for cats.
[00:11:09] The Persian soldiers, so the story goes, painted images of the cat goddess Bastet on their shields, and either carried live cats into battle or released hundreds of cats onto the battlefield.
[00:11:25] The Egyptian soldiers were completely unwilling to risk harming a single cat, so they refused to fight back.
[00:11:34] And the city fell without much resistance.
[00:11:39] Now, there are some question marks as to whether this actually happened, but the fact that the story exists at all gives us an indication of how highly cats were prized in Egypt.
[00:11:51] They weren't just pets.
[00:11:53] They were sacred.
[00:11:55] And because Egypt was a major trading power, cats didn't stay confined to the Nile Valley.
[00:12:03] The Egyptians tried to ban the export of cats, considering them too valuable, but Phoenician traders smuggled them out and sold them across the Mediterranean.
[00:12:15] Cats spread via trade routes and ships, where they served a vital function: pest control on long sea voyages.
[00:12:25] By Roman times, cats were found throughout Europe, Asia, and North Africa.
[00:12:31] But their fortunes were about to take a dark turn.
[00:12:37] If Ancient Egypt represented the peak of the cat's status in human society, medieval Europe represented its absolute nadir, its lowest point.
[00:12:49] As Christianity spread across Europe in the early medieval period, cats began to be viewed with suspicion.
[00:12:58] Why? Well, partly because of their association with pagan religions. After all, they'd been worshipped as gods in Egypt.
[00:13:07] But there was something else.
[00:13:10] Cats were independent. Aloof. Impossible to control.
[00:13:16] Dogs were obedient, loyal, seen as "natural" companions to humans.
[00:13:22] Cats, on the other hand, came and went as they pleased. They hunted at night. They seemed to answer to no one.
[00:13:32] In a religious and social order that valued obedience and hierarchy, the cat's independence was seen as almost... unnatural.
[00:13:43] And by the 13th century, this suspicion had transformed into something far darker.
[00:13:52] Cats, particularly black cats, became associated with witchcraft and the devil.
[00:14:00] The logic, such as it was, went something like this: witches were in league with Satan, and Satan could send them animal companions called 'familiars' to do their bidding.
[00:14:14] What better familiar than a cat? An animal that prowled at night, that seemed to see in the darkness, that moved silently and killed without mercy?
[00:14:27] Pope Gregory IX allegedly issued a papal decree in 1233 called Vox in Rama, which condemned cats as instruments of Satan.
[00:14:38] Now, historians debate whether this decree specifically targeted cats, or whether it was more broadly about heresy, but regardless, the result was the same.
[00:14:51] Across Europe, particularly during the height of the witch trials from the 13th to the 17th centuries, cats were persecuted.
[00:15:01] They were killed en masse. Burned alive. Thrown from towers. Hunted for sport.
[00:15:09] In some towns, killing cats became a form of entertainment. In France, there was a tradition of burning bags of live cats as part of festivals.
[00:15:21] If you were a cat, well, life in Medieval France was about as bad as it got.
[00:15:27] And then, in 1347, came the consequences.
[00:15:32] The Black Death arrived in Europe, likely via trading ships from Asia.
[00:15:37] The plague was caused by a bacterium carried by fleas that lived on black rats.
[00:15:45] Now, you probably know something about The Black Death already, and we also have an episode on it; it’s episode number 129.
[00:15:53] Long story short, it would kill somewhere between 75 and 200 million people—roughly one-third of Europe's entire population.
[00:16:04] And here's the bitter irony: Europeans had spent the previous century killing the one animal that could have helped control the rat population.
[00:16:16] Cats.
[00:16:17] Now, to be clear, no historian is suggesting that cats alone could have stopped the plague, but more cats would have meant fewer rats, which would have meant fewer plague-carrying fleas, and fewer dead bodies.
[00:16:32] It was one of history's great tragic ironies, a cautionary tale about the dangers of superstition and mass hysteria.
[00:16:41] And while Europe was busy persecuting cats, other parts of the world took a very different view.
[00:16:49] In the Islamic world, cats remained popular and respected.
[00:16:54] The Prophet Muhammad was said to have loved cats.
[00:16:57] In Islamic culture, cats were considered clean animals, unlike dogs, and were welcome in homes and even mosques.
[00:17:07] They remained valued for their pest control abilities and their companionship.
[00:17:13] Similarly, in parts of Asia, cats maintained their status.
[00:17:18] In Japan, where cats had arrived around the 6th century, they became culturally significant.
[00:17:25] They appeared in art and literature, and eventually became symbols of good fortune—think of the Maneki-neko, the "lucky cat" figurine you see in Japanese shops.
[00:17:38] Back in Europe, however, it would take several more centuries before cats could shake off their demonic reputation and return to human favour.
[00:17:49] The rehabilitation of the cat in European society began slowly, but by the 19th century, cats were firmly back in fashion.
[00:18:00] During the Victorian era, the same period when dogs were transitioning from workers to companions, cats saw a similar transformation.
[00:18:11] But there was a key difference.
[00:18:14] Victorian society loved to classify, categorise, and "improve" things through selective breeding.
[00:18:22] And cats, unlike dogs, had never really been bred for specific purposes beyond basic mousing ability.
[00:18:32] This was about to change.
[00:18:35] In July 1871, the first major cat show was held at the Crystal Palace in London.
[00:18:44] It was organised by a man named Harrison Weir, an artist and cat enthusiast who wanted to elevate the status of cats and promote their breeding.
[00:18:55] The show featured over 160 cats, and it was a massive success.
[00:19:01] Thousands of people came to see cats of different colours, patterns, and coat lengths, all competing for prizes.
[00:19:09] This event sparked the beginning of the "cat fancy"—the deliberate breeding of cats for specific aesthetic traits.
[00:19:19] Suddenly, cats weren't just mousers or companions; they were status symbols, living works of art.
[00:19:28] But perhaps the real reason cats made such a successful comeback in the Victorian era and beyond had less to do with fashion and more to do with practicality.
[00:19:40] As Europe and North America urbanised rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, more and more people moved into cities, into smaller homes and apartments.
[00:19:52] Dogs required space. They needed daily walks. They demanded attention and training. They needed to go outside to go to the toilet.
[00:20:02] Cats, on the other hand, were perfect for urban living.
[00:20:07] They were self-sufficient. They didn't need to be walked. They were happy in smaller spaces.
[00:20:14] They were, in short, the ideal pet for the modern city dweller.
[00:20:20] And then, in 1947, came an invention that would change cat ownership forever: the cat litter box.
[00:20:29] Before this, cats either went outside to do their business, or they used boxes filled with sand or ashes, which were messy and smelled terrible.
[00:20:41] An American businessman called Edward Lowe had a breakthrough. He discovered that a particular type of absorbent clay worked brilliantly for this purpose.
[00:20:54] He packaged it, called it "Kitty Litter," and created an entirely new industry.
[00:21:02] Suddenly, keeping a cat indoors full-time became not just possible, but pleasant.
[00:21:10] And by the mid-20th century, particularly after World War II, cat ownership exploded.
[00:21:18] In many countries, cats began to rival, and in some cases overtake, dogs in popularity.
[00:21:26] Still, despite the hundreds of millions that live alongside humans today, and having lived alongside humans for ten thousand years, there's still so much we don't understand about them.
[00:21:39] Take purring, for example.
[00:21:42] You probably think you know why cats purr—they're happy, right?
[00:21:47] Well, maybe. But cats also purr when they're stressed, injured, or giving birth.
[00:21:56] Scientists have several theories. One is that purring is a self-soothing behaviour, a way for cats to calm themselves in stressful situations.
[00:22:08] Another theory suggests that the frequency of a cat's purr may actually promote healing, encouraging bone growth and reducing pain.
[00:22:18] Cats may literally be purring themselves better.
[00:22:23] But we don't know for certain. After thousands of years, the purr remains a mystery.
[00:22:30] Then there's kneading, pushing their paws in and out like they are making bread, or bringing you dead animals. There are plenty of theories about why cats do this, but no consensus.
[00:22:44] There’s a lot we don’t understand, but an increasing amount we do. Scientists have made some recent discoveries about cat behaviour that are genuinely fascinating.
[00:22:55] For one thing, we now know that cats have somewhere in the region of 276 different facial expressions.
[00:23:05] For comparison, dogs have about 27.
[00:23:09] Cats are far more expressive than we give them credit for, we just haven't learned to read them properly. Scientists have also confirmed what cat owners have long suspected: cats absolutely can recognise their owner's voice.
[00:23:27] They just... often choose not to respond.
[00:23:31] One study played recordings of strangers calling a cat's name, then recordings of the cat's owner calling its name.
[00:23:40] The cats showed clear recognition of their owner's voice—their ears moved, their pupils dilated—but they rarely bothered to actually come when called.
[00:23:53] Dogs, of course, mostly come running when they hear their owner’s voice.
[00:23:59] Cats? They think about it, decide whether it's worth their time, and then usually go back to sleep.
[00:24:06] And perhaps that's the most honest thing about cats.
[00:24:11] They live with us, but they haven't fundamentally changed who they are to please us.
[00:24:17] Your house cat is still 95% wildcat.
[00:24:21] It's still a predator, an apex hunter in a small, fluffy package.
[00:24:27] When it's kneading on your lap and purring, it's not doing it because you trained it to.
[00:24:33] It's doing it because, for whatever mysterious reason of its own, it wants or needs to.
[00:24:40] And there's one more theory about cats that I should mention, even though the scientific evidence for it is... let's say, controversial.
[00:24:50] It involves a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii.
[00:24:55] This parasite can only reproduce sexually inside a cat's digestive system, but it can infect other animals, including humans, usually through contact with cat faeces.
[00:25:10] In most people, it's harmless.
[00:25:13] But here's where it gets interesting.
[00:25:16] Some scientists have suggested that Toxoplasma might actually alter human behaviour in subtle ways, making infected people more fond of cats, more likely to keep cats, more tolerant of cat behaviour.
[00:25:33] In other words, the parasite might be manipulating us to ensure its own survival by making us like its primary host.
[00:25:43] The evidence for this is somewhat weak, and most scientists are sceptical.
[00:25:49] But if it were true, it would be the ultimate cat trick.
[00:25:54] Making us think we chose them, when really, they chose us all along.
[00:26:00] So where does this leave us with cats?
[00:26:03] They've achieved this remarkable success by being, fundamentally, themselves.
[00:26:10] They didn't co-evolve with us like dogs did.
[00:26:13] They didn't develop special muscles to make appealing faces.
[00:26:17] They didn't learn to understand our pointing gestures or look to us for guidance.
[00:26:23] They simply decided that living near humans was convenient, we decided that having them around was useful, and things progressed from there.
[00:26:33] Now, I should probably have confessed earlier on in this episode that I am more of a dog than a cat person.
[00:26:42] For me, you can’t beat the unconditional, undying loyalty and love of a dog.
[00:26:48] If you are more of a cat person, you will probably think this is simple and base.
[00:26:54] Dogs love anyone; cats make you work for it.
[00:27:00] And when a cat does decide to curl up on your lap, or head-butt your hand demanding attention, well, you know you've earned it.
[00:27:09] Or perhaps the cat is just cold and you're warm.
[00:27:13] Or perhaps it's hungry and you're useful.
[00:27:17] With cats, you never quite know.
[00:27:20] Dogs, as they say, have owners.
[00:27:24] Cats have staff.
[00:27:26] And after ten thousand years of this arrangement, I think we can quite safely say: that's exactly how they like it.
[00:27:36] OK then, that is it for today's episode on cats, the enigmatic, independent, and utterly mysterious animals that somehow convinced us to let them live in our homes.
[00:27:48] As a reminder, this was part two of our three-part mini-series on animals throughout history.
[00:27:54] Next up, in part three, we'll be talking about an animal that never existed at all, but has captured human imagination for thousands of years across almost every culture on Earth: the dragon.
[00:28:07] Fire-breathing, treasure-hoarding, princess-kidnapping dragons.
[00:28:11] You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:28:16] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
