Cats and dogs.
Across the UK, we own around 18 million of them.
KITTEN SQUEAKS
That's one for every two households in the country.
Oh, I know!
No other animal comes close to our affections.
In this series, we'll reveal how these four legged fur balls
became the nation's best loved pets.
Are they living with us because we feed them
or because they love us?
We'll see how the latest scientific discoveries are shedding new light
on our obsession with these extraordinary creatures.
This time -
Cats,
the world's most popular furry pet.
Who's a good kit?
Famously enigmatic and totally unreadable.
We will often pretend to know what they're thinking. Are we right?
CAT HISSES Maybe not.
So what's the story behind the cat's rise to domestic domination?
Wow.
Archaeological discoveries allow us to uncover the cat's dark past.
There were festivals formed around the torturing and killing of cats.
CAT CRIES OUT
Molecular genetics is throwing new light on the cat's journey
from wild animal to domestic bliss.
We can really drill down and say definitively
where domestic cats come from.
Discoveries in neuroscience are starting to explain why
we find cats so appealing.
It's clear that these auditory sounds are plugging
straight into our emotions.
And what can science tell us about their future?
Humans have hybridised the domestic cat
with a completely different species.
CAT HISSES
Can we finally unlock the secrets of cats?
In the UK, we like to think of ourselves as a nation of cat lovers.
So much so, we own around ten million pet cats.
But compared to America, we're amateurs.
They have over 58 million of them,
so it's not surprising they have some of the largest cat shows
in the world.
Welcome to Las Vegas, for the 40th TICA cat show.
We have 447 cats
and we have 247 exhibitors.
Shows like this are a testament to our love of cats.
Poppy is a Canadian Sphynx.
They're a very sweet breed.
Basically, if you're a cat lover,
there's a cat out there with your name on it.
He's a white Oriental Shorthair,
which is a Siamese in a designer coat.
Yeah, he's a sweet boy.
This is a Toyger, I invented it.
He has a fantastic temperament.
Most cats aren't designer at all.
In the UK, around 80% of all cats are the good old-fashioned moggy.
But all cats have one thing in common,
their owners love every one of them.
They've got so many little quirks that make me laugh every day.
She's a big part of my life and she's important to me.
Whenever I come home, I know that she's going to be there.
Why are so many people obsessed with their cats?
KITTEN SQUEAKS
The latest scientific research suggests owners
literally can't help themselves.
CAT MEOWS
Professor Morten Kringelbach studies hedonia - pleasure.
My research interest is in pleasure and meaningful pleasure,
including why it is that infants and animals are so cute.
He researches what makes people happy.
Pleasure is probably one of the most interesting tricks
that evolution ever played on us.
It's basically making us do what it is that we need to do to survive.
To understand how humans experience pleasure,
Morten uses a magnetoencephalograph, or MEG,
to map and measure electrical activity
in our brains in real time.
What is really exciting about this technique is that it allows us
to basically look at how the brain is thinking,
how the brain is having emotions.
We can measure, over milliseconds,
the way that the electromagnetic signals in your brain changes,
and we can start to see how the brain is unfolding in real time.
It is as close as Morten can get to reading a subject's mind.
OK, we're just about ready to start.
Just sit nice and still, and just listen to the sounds.
In extensive trials, Dr Kringelbach's team have tracked
the brain's responses to the sound of a newborn baby.
BABY WAILS
What we're seeing here is
how the signal gets into the auditory cortex,
this bit here and here,
so it's basically just near to your ears,
and you can see that after about 130 milliseconds,
you get the maximum response.
Now, when you're listening to an infant crying,
you also get activity in the orbitofrontal cortex
and that's happening at exactly the same time
as when you're actually trying to make sense
of what it is that you're hearing.
The orbitofrontal cortex is central to processing emotions.
The experiment suggested that the sound of a baby crying
triggered a response there
before the subjects had consciously identified the sound.
BABY CRIES
It seems to be an instinctive emotional reaction
that may not even require rational thought.
It's clear that these auditory sounds are plugging
straight into our emotions.
In his tests, when subjects listen to the sound of an adult crying,
a much weaker response was triggered in the orbitofrontal cortex,
suggesting only certain sounds trigger a strong emotional response.
But there was another sound that produce the same reaction
as a baby's cry.
A cat's meow.
HIGH PITCHED MEOW
There seems to be striking similarities between the way
that we process a cat meowing and that of a baby crying.
CAT MEOWS
We get activity in the auditory cortices
just like we do with anything else,
but before we become conscious of it
we get activity in the orbitofrontal cortex,
suggesting that this is something that we need to take care of.
The fact that a new-born's cry and a cat's meow initiated
the same emotional response could have been a coincidence,
except for one thing.
Meowing in adult cats is really interesting
because it turns out that they only really do it to humans.
When cats meow to us, it's as if they're hijacking
our emotional responses to make us love and care for them.
HIGH PITCHED YOWL
But are they doing it on purpose?
It's not necessarily something that is conscious,
it's just that they know that this works, just like we know that
smiling at our parents worked when we were kids.
Come here, you monster.
They probably don't mean to manipulate us, but they do.
So we have some idea of what's going on in our heads
around cats, but will we ever know what's going on in their heads?
I definitely think cats are more aloof than dogs.
I do think that they can be very emotionally distant.
We will often pretend to know what they're thinking.
Are we right? Maybe not, but it's fun to imagine.
Cats are famously enigmatic, so it's tough to figure out
what they're feeling by looking at their faces.
Happy cat.
Angry cat.
Sad cat.
Or is that the sad cat?
We may not be able to figure out what our cats are feeling
but can science shed any light on it?
Historically, cats aren't seen as very expressive
so there is that idea that they are particularly cold
when it comes to interacting with us.
Compare that to a dog whose face seems full of expression.
Empathy. Happiness,
Sadness.
Guilt.
Why aren't cats just as communicative?
They're not really able to frown
or have that sad sort of puppy dog eye expression,
they don't seem to have the right musculature for that.
Dogs and humans have evolved
the levator anguli oculi medialis muscle,
responsible for raising the inner eyebrow,
which we use for showing things like sadness and concern,
but cats don't have this muscle.
So, cats are physically incapable of having faces as expressive as dogs.
However, Dr Finka's research suggests that cats can communicate
some emotion on their faces.
It's just we don't speak the language.
So, we know that the muscles of the cat's face are quite different
from other species, and certainly from humans.
They use the muscles in different ways
and also have different types of muscles,
and different collections of muscles will do different things.
Dr Finka studies how cats' faces change
when illness or injury produces pain.
This is the only feeling she can currently say
with confidence that a cat is experiencing.
We are looking at cats when they come into the vet's
with a painful condition,
and we do know that they're actually changing their expressions
in relation to how they're feeling, and if they're in pain.
She's identified a set of incredibly subtle markers
to help track their feelings.
We have a series of 48 facial coordinates
and we can actually look to see how these coordinates are altering
based on what the cat's experiencing,
so whether they're in pain or not in pain,
or whether they're relaxed and comfortable,
or perhaps fearful or frustrated.
Dr Finka has identified some telltale signs,
such as a cat's ears turning very slightly outwards and down,
or a tiny reduction in the distance between the cheeks,
mouth and nose region.
These are all signs that the cat is not happy and in pain.
But if you think this is going to usher in a new age
of cat-human communication, think again.
It's very, very subtle, so statistically it's significant
but in terms of the average cat owner trying to look
at their cat's face, it might be a little bit more problematic.
It looks like our struggle to read cats' emotions
isn't going away any time soon.
But could a cat read our emotions?
To find out, researchers in the US conducted
a series of cognitive behavioural tests.
Because it's quite difficult to test cats, we know a lot less
about their cognitive abilities compared to dogs.
Doesn't mean that they don't necessarily have the same level
of skills and abilities,
it just means that it's much harder for us to find the right context
to test them in and get them to play ball
in the way that we need them to.
Pepper the cat has been placed in a room with her handler
who pulls various faces at her.
First up - scowling.
Can Pepper detect that this is a negative emotion and steer clear?
It appears cats are less likely to react positively
to someone they know if they have an angry expression.
Next, a positive smiling face.
By running the test multiple times,
scientists compiled statistics suggesting that a cat is more likely
to approach someone they recognise if they are smiling at it.
What the research suggests is that they are able to differentiate
between our different expressions and they're using this information
to change the way that they are responding.
The research also suggested that cats react more strongly to
both the positive and negative emotions of their owners
than to those of strangers.
The behaviour of owners is much more important to the cat
because we are the ones that feed the cat and we look after them.
So maybe they're more interested in paying attention to us
for that reason.
So, we may struggle to read cats' faces
but apparently we are an open book to them.
What persuaded us to invite these unusual animals
into our lives in the first place?
To answer that, we need to understand their origins.
Domestic cats are part of a much larger and wilder family,
a family with some very big footprints to fill.
The lion, the tiger, the leopard.
Predators at the top of their food chain.
But whatever our cats may think,
these are not their direct ancestors.
All felines, or felids, evolved from the proailurus,
an animal living in Eurasia roughly 25 million years ago.
These felids were probably slightly larger in size,
lived more in trees than our domestic cats do,
but otherwise it's going to have the same teeth and claws,
just like a domestic cat does.
So all cats, whether they're a lion, a tiger or a little domestic cat
sitting on your lap, they're going to have very similar characteristics
that makes a cat a cat.
Big cats - the lion, the tiger, the jaguar -
separated from the common ancestor
around 10.8 million years ago.
Large American cats, like the lynx and bobcat,
separated 7.2 million years ago.
The domestic cat's ancestor,
the most recent branch of the felid tree,
appeared 3.4 million years ago.
Felis silvestris, the wildcat.
It's a much smaller subspecies of feline
that relies more on surprise and stealth than brute force.
This explains the origins of some of the strange behaviours
owners see in their pets.
There are several clues in cats' behaviour
that they're perhaps not the apex predators,
and, in fact, are prey as well as predators.
For example, the cat likes to hide, it likes to conceal itself,
it often likes to be up high where it feels safe
and where it can be very vigilant.
According to genetic research,
Felis silvestris split into five distinct subspecies.
The European Wildcat,
the Chinese Mountain Cat,
the Southern and North African wildcat
and the Central Asian Wildcat.
But which one of them was the actual ancestor of our cats?
People have been speculating about it for hundreds of years
about where they came from,
whether or not they came from many different species
or many different subspecies of one species,
and where they were domesticated.
In 2007, geneticist Carlos Driscoll started a ground-breaking study,
collecting DNA samples from wildcats
and comparing their DNA to domestic cats.
With the advent of molecular genetic techniques,
we can really drill down and say definitively
where domestic cats come from,
by building a family tree of all the different groups that make up
Felis silvestris, the ancestral species of the domestic cat.
Each subset of Felis silvestris has a distinct DNA signature.
DNA's identity come from combinations of the four chemicals,
adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine.
By matching these to the domestic cat,
Driscoll was able to pinpoint which subspecies was its ancestor.
Domestic cats are derived from one single group
of Felis silvestris in the wild -
Felis silvestris lybica.
Felis silvestris lybica, the North African wildcat.
A solitary animal found throughout Northern Africa
and the Middle East, longer legged than our domestic cats
with a coat that ranges from reddish to grey
to camouflage it in different habitats.
But when did this wildcat become our domestic companion?
In 2004, on the small Mediterranean island of Cyprus,
archaeologists found evidence of the earliest known encounter
between cat and human.
A team led by Jean-Denis Vigne was excavating
a 9,500-year-old human settlement.
During the excavation, they discovered a grave.
Alongside its human occupant was the skeleton of a cat.
A Felis silvestris lybica.
It was amazing to find a complete animal,
especially a cat beside a human.
It was so early that it was really surprising
to have such evidence of connection between one cat and one human.
The way the bones were laid out suggested that the cat
had been intentionally placed next to the man.
They were facing each other in death, in the afterlife.
And this is a scene which has been arranged by people.
But what really caught scientists' interest was the fact that Cyprus
is an island and no trace has ever been found of native wild cats.
So how did this cat get here?
The fact that this burial was found on Cyprus means that somebody
brought these cats to the island by boat.
The Cyprus settlement closely matches sites found in Turkey
so archaeologists believe that's where the settlers originated
and where we know that Felis silvestris lybica was common.
It suggests these people, or their ancestors,
must have brought a cat with them.
But the Cyprus cat was different to mainland wildcats
in one very significant respect.
This cat was very big,
much bigger than all the other cats.
This meant that, probably, it has been fed,
so maybe it was more or less a pet.
A larger skeleton indicates that the cat is domesticated
because he's getting enough nutrition that he can devote
all that energy obtained from food into growth.
Cats in the wild can't spare the energy to grow big
if they want to survive.
There's a time cost to hunting,
so you would have energy diverted into fuelling your hunts,
therefore you'll be smaller.
On its own, the evidence of the Cyprus cat isn't enough to
confirm that this 9,500-year-old cat was domesticated.
But there's now evidence from genetic research
that supports this theory.
To date the split between wildcats and domestic cats,
scientists use mitochondrial DNA.
Unlike other DNA, mitochondrial material comes almost exclusively
from the mother, so it is passed down the generations unaltered,
except for random mutations that happen at a known rate.
By calculating that rate of mutation,
we can actually calculate the age of a specimen that we are studying.
So we use the mitochondrial clock a lot with different organisms
to try to figure out their age in evolutionary time.
And it shows that our domestic cats split from wildcats
approximately 10,000 years ago,
very close to the time of the Cyprus cat.
Why did it happen then?
Well, at that moment in history
humans were also going through a big transformation -
The Agricultural Revolution.
This started in an area of the Near East archaeologists call
the Fertile Crescent.
And Turkey, where the Cyprus cat originated, was part of it.
The Fertile Crescent was so rich an area for hunting and gathering
that people could have little encampments
that eventually grew into towns,
so throughout all seasons they could be in one spot.
This new way of life relied not only on the ability to grow food
but also to store it.
But what's the dawn of civilisation got to do with cats' domestication?
Humans, by this point, were harvesting grains and caching them,
putting big stores of grains in baskets in holes in the floors
of their houses.
But the grain stores were an easy target for hungry wild rodents.
They had the potential to devour these new food reserves.
Luckily for our ancestors, this new concentration of rodents
attracted something else, something wild.
Cats were likely drawn into these new human settlements
because they could hear something we couldn't.
Cat hearing is really just truly amazing.
So they can actually hear very low frequencies
and very high frequencies.
And, of course, much of the prey is squeaking at high frequencies.
Humans can't hear some rodent squeaks at all
as they vocalise at frequencies beyond our hearing range.
But cats have ultrasonic hearing.
When we hear nothing, they hear this.
HIGH PITCHED SQUEAKING
The pitch of these rat squeaks has to be lowered by 90%
to let us hear them at all.
Cats also have unique anatomical gifts that help them
zero in on their next meal.
The outside of their ear has an amazing amount of muscles in it
so they can turn their ear all the way around.
That allows the cat to really hone in on where the mice are,
rats are, where they're communicating,
and hence they're going to capture them for their meals.
This makes cats rodent terminators, unstoppable killers.
The pull to the easy pickings of the first human settlements
teeming with rodents would have been irresistible.
And you'd be forgiven for thinking that cats still like
to show off this prowess 10,000 years later.
She brings us gifts.
Maybe once a month we have a mouse appear in the house.
It is a bit disgusting.
We get leaves.
Oh, they brought a leaf in and Rita brought a piece of stale toast in
once from the back garden.
So lots of people think that their pet cat brings them gifts
in the form of small rodents or birds,
but, actual fact, the cat doesn't believe it is a gift.
The cat will often bring home the prey that it has caught because
the home represents the core territory to the cat,
the place that it feels safe.
But 10,000 years ago, this would have been very effective PR,
proving to our ancestors that cats protected valuable food resources.
This was a creature you'd want to have hanging around.
Maybe you set out some food for a cat to keep it around your house.
You might have done that because you thought it was eating mice
and keeping your grain stores clean.
So, the domestic cat split around 10,000 years ago in the Near East.
But how much have they changed from their wild ancestors?
The wildcat in the wild feeds only on meat,
they're obligate carnivores or hypercarnivores.
So they can only process proteins,
they're metabolically incapable of digesting carbohydrates.
House cats are different.
While wildcats only eat meat, their domesticated cousins have
evolved the ability to digest some plant matter.
The domestic cat, for thousands of years now,
has been living off of scraps,
not just scraps of meat but also scraps of grains and vegetables.
And the result of that is
that domestic cats have a slightly longer intestinal length
than their wild ancestor.
And Darwin hypothesised that this is because the cats are trying
to squeeze as much nutrients out of this poor food as they can.
This irresistible combination of rodents
and edible human refuse could explain why the wildcat
decided to come in from the wild and live with humans.
Wildcats genetically predisposed to find humans less scary
would have hung around the settlements.
Anything that has to do with aggression or boldness
are probably genes that are involved
with the actual domestication process,
because those had to change between the wild progenitor
and the domestic cat in order for the cat to cohabitate with humans.
Breeding between these animals would have positively selected genes
that allowed them to live more closely with humans.
Certainly, there have been some genes that have changed
between an African wildcat and the domestic cat itself,
because we know the behaviours are different.
Behavioural genes, which are genes that are involved with our brain
and our neurology, those are genes that have evolved a little bit
to make a domestic cat more docile, more friendly with humans.
Geneticists have found 13 genes that have changed in the domestic cat
compared to its wild ancestor.
Genes like DCC, and GRIA 1,
which are associated with making cats friendlier
and less afraid of people.
We may never know who initiated first contact
but it's safe to assume that cats determined
the terms of the relationship.
So it's not a stretch to say that we didn't domesticate the cat,
the cat domesticated itself.
Genetics has confirmed
that domestic cats originated in the Fertile Crescent
but it's also reveals something genuinely surprising -
one country had more influence on the genes of modern cats
than any other,
and it was a long way from Turkey.
Egypt.
Professor Salima Ikram is an expert in all things Egyptian,
including their obsession with cats.
The ancient Egyptians really loved animals but they also revered them.
Cats were perhaps the most popular and the most highly venerated
because of their utilitarian as well as metaphysical values.
In Egypt, 4,000 years ago, the first images of cats start appearing,
wall carvings and paintings of cats living with humans.
Egyptians especially valued the cat's killer instincts.
Ancient texts tell us that not only did cats kill rodents
but they also killed snakes.
So, of course, the Egyptians loved this
because they were much safer as a result.
Imagine if you're a mother and your child is crawling around
and then a snake approaches and your pet cat kills it.
Also, for them, the idea that a cat was killing a snake meant that
the sun god, Ra, was killing the evil snake, Apophis.
So, it was sort of doing double duty.
This mystic battle playing out in homes across Egypt
would have done wonders for the cat's PR.
The cat became so important to Egyptians
that they turned it into a goddess.
The cult of Bastet, the cat goddess, had always been popular in Egypt
but it really came to prominence 3,000 years ago, about 500-600 BC.
Bastet, the daughter of Ra, would often take the form of a cat.
Bastet was very much about self-indulgence and beauty and love,
and fertility, which was very important.
Unfortunately for cats,
being worshipped as a goddess had a very nasty downside.
We're about to go into the tomb of Raia, who is a New Kingdom official.
It's a really ancient tomb
and it's not been open to the public for ages.
Wow.
Nice.
They lived about 3,500 years ago,
just at the beginning of the time of Tutankhamun.
But that's not the most interesting thing for me about this tomb.
For me, the most exciting thing is actually
that it was reused to bury cats in.
This tomb is packed with cat mummies.
The downside of being worshipped as a goddess was that it led to
industrial levels of cat sacrifice.
Pilgrims would buy these cats to give a blood sacrifice
and, so, for the cat goddess Bastet, you would offer up a cat,
which would then be killed, and because it was her titulary animal,
it would attract her attention in the afterlife.
The demand for sacrificial cats became so great,
Egyptians were breeding hundreds of thousands of them.
People were breeding these animals specifically for sacrifice,
so we think that there might have been catteries scattered all over
the country where purpose-bred cats were being given to the temples
for the priest to sacrifice.
This breeding programme was so intensive,
it may have changed the physical appearance of some cats.
Here, this really sweet little paw,
is part of the foreleg of the cat.
But what's extraordinary is that you can still see
some of the fur here,
and it's a ginger kitty.
A lot of the cats in paintings are ginger cats.
They were favoured
because they brought out the idea of the sun god, Ra.
And you can see this colour here.
Seeing a ginger cat today isn't unusual,
but 4,000 years ago, before the Egyptian breeding programme,
nearly every cat in the world looked like this tabby.
The original coat pattern was the tabby cat,
that's where our wildcat came from,
and it's because that coat pattern is so important in the wild
for being camouflaged.
Ginger colouring isn't good for camouflage.
These cats would have struggled to survive in the wild
but in the catteries of Egypt, there was no need for camouflage.
In the wild, these new coat colour patterns wouldn't be tolerated,
they don't provide any advantage.
But when you're around humans, they become selected by humans
because they're odd and different, it's called novelty selection.
So when we see these odd colourations showing up
in a species, that is a clear sign of domestication.
The ginger mutation may not have occurred first in Egypt
but it was certainly established and protected there.
So, if it wasn't for the Egyptians, we may not have ginger cats at all.
And the intensive Egyptian breeding programme didn't just change
the way cats looked, it changed their behaviour as well.
It's absolutely changing the cat's personality,
making it more domesticated
by putting these cats into large groups.
After generations of selecting for cats
that go from a solitary animal to being a group species now,
you're probably changing the cat's behaviour
to be a less stressed animal,
a more bold and loving animal with humans.
So, Egyptians produced cats that were more attractive to humans.
This could explain why the DNA of Egyptian cats makes up
so much of a modern cat's DNA, compared with cats from elsewhere.
For any given species, not all lineages are going to survive,
so, for the domestic cat,
the Egyptian lineage of cats really dominated and was more popular,
and so probably outcompeted the other different lineages
that were from different places of the world.
GENERAL MARKET DIN
But how did cats bred in Egypt spread out across the whole world?
The same way many invading forces did at the time - by boat.
Egypt was a major trading hub of the ancient world.
Precious metals, gems and timber came in,
grain from the fertile Nile went out and much of that trade went by sea.
Because the trade ships were filled with grain primarily there were
so many rats about, that, of course, cats were really welcome
because they not only protected the grain but they also protected
the sailors from being bitten and also their own food.
So, cats were really stars on these boats.
Cats began travelling the known world on ships.
For thousands of years, Egyptian, then Roman,
then Viking ships transported cats across the world.
Vikings in particular seem to have favoured an unusual colour mutation
in their cats that originated in Egypt.
You can almost map where Vikings were
by looking at the gene frequency of orange in Europe.
Vikings clearly couldn't get enough of their orange Egyptian cats.
It was probably true in Viking society,
as it is true in most other early seafaring societies,
that having a cat on board a ship was good luck,
and it could be that the Viking selected orange cats
to bring on their boats for some reason that we don't know.
Egyptian cat genes had conquered the known world.
But it seems not everyone was happy about that
because by the Middle Ages in Europe cats weren't being worshipped,
they were being persecuted.
Mainly, thanks to this man - Pope Gregory IX.
This 13th century Pope produced a papal anti-cat edict.
It accused cats of being in league with Satan.
And because what the Pope said was the Word of God, God hated cats.
The solution to this Satanic cat menace was simple
and straightforward -
kill them all.
In late medieval Europe,
there were festivals formed around the torturing and killing of cats.
And, of course, when tortured,
they made, to sadists, a very satisfying amount of racket.
CATS HISS AND YOWL
So what was it about these relatively harmless furry creatures
that was so alarming to medieval society?
Cats are creepy creatures to a lot of human beings.
There's always this tension between an animal that actually
shouldn't be in your home, as a predator and quite menacing,
and yet is affectionate and cuddly, and purry and furry and warm.
Another reason medieval people could have found cats disturbing
was because of their eyes.
The domestic cat has evolved from a nocturnal hunter,
and therefore it needs to be able to see really well in low light levels.
And one of the ways that they do this is
they have a pupil that they can open up really wide
to let as much light in as possible.
After light enters the eye and hits the photoreceptors in the retina,
it is reflected back by a membrane called the tapetum lucidum,
so the light hits the photoreceptors again.
These adaptations give a cat
six times greater night-vision acuity than a human.
But an unfortunate side-effect is that this membrane makes cats' eyes
appear to glow in the dark -
not ideal in the age of witchcraft and superstition.
We are a diurnal species,
we're suited to daylight, we can't see in the dark.
The night for us is disempowering, scary and positively dangerous,
whereas, to a cat, it is simply a natural environment.
Isn't it, Moses?
Another problem medieval Europeans may have had with cats
is what they did with those eyes.
They stare.
And the great thing about staring in traditional societies
is it's something which people don't do to each other
because it's menacing.
And in particular, in theory, socially,
you don't look straight at superiors.
The ability to eyeball somebody with a complete lack of respect
or compunction is reserved for the police, magistrates, lords, royalty.
So for mere animals to treat any human beings the same way
is deeply disturbing to a traditional society.
But sometimes a cat's supernatural powers seem to have genuine
and terrifying consequences that reinforced those superstitions.
In the presence of a cat,
the person would be seized by an inability to breathe
and would choke, would swell up and feel hot
and, in some cases, a lethal effect on individual humans.
Modern science has shown that this dark feline power really does exist,
even if it's got nothing to do with the devil.
As Aslan, a three-year-old Siberian long-haired cat,
and his owner Ashley can demonstrate.
He's super fluffy so I'm constantly defluffing things,
I don't want big fur balls anywhere.
He's just like a big teddy bear.
And this is Heather, the other part of the demonstration.
She doesn't own a cat.
Oh, gosh. Hi.
I think the encounter will be quite uncomfortable.
Having a reaction is not that nice, it could be pretty unpleasant.
Yeah, I can sort of feel it almost instantly, actually.
Nowadays, about 10% of the population are allergic,
causing symptoms such as coughing and sneezing.
There is definitely hair in the air.
Erm...
Just something I can feel in the back of my throat.
It's actually not the cat's fur that Heather is having a reaction to,
it's the cat's saliva.
We're allergic to a specific allergen that cats produce
in their saliva, in their sebaceous glands,
and it's distributed in their fur and their skin.
Unfortunately for Heather,
cats spend 40% of the day grooming themselves,
so cat hair is covered in this allergen.
So, my eyes are getting quite sore and quite itchy.
The allergic reaction is caused by the body's immune system
producing antibodies to counteract the allergen.
It's these antibodies that actually cause the itching
and expulsion of fluids.
You might have a person that might start sneezing,
they may start feeling their throat close up.
An allergic reaction is our body's immune system
being sensitised to something,
so we have an inflammatory response.
It's in my sinuses now.
I feel bunged up and my eyes are really sore and itchy.
And my throat... SHE CLEARS THROAT
..just has this constant little tickle.
In extreme circumstances,
anaphylactic shock from cat allergies can kill.
So, it's not entirely surprising that in Middle Age Europe
the cat became the victim of human intolerances,
from both the religious system and the immune system.
Luckily for cats, not everyone in the Middle Ages hated them,
although they had a pretty strange way of showing it.
Here we are. Oh, gosh.
Well, this is the room where we found everything.
My husband had been taking wallpaper off
and as he took the wallpaper off, it sort of collapsed a bit
and that's when he started to find all the surprises.
Here we are.
Oh, my goodness.
Buried deep in the walls were the skeletal remains of a dead cat.
Have you got a name for her? We do, we call her Poor Pussy.
But why was the poor cat buried in the walls in the first place?
There was a tremendous fear of evil spirits in Tudor and Stuart England.
It had actually got worse because of the Protestant Reformation
which removed a lot of the magic of the old Church,
like holy water or blessed crosses or blessed candles
that could be brought to protect houses.
So to fill the gap, there's a new emphasis on special symbols.
And cats are particularly well favoured
because they can get anywhere in a house and they're agile.
The transference of logic seems to be that a cat is there to protect
a house against vermin during life by taking out mice and rats
and, therefore, the same animal should be equally potent after death
by taking out evil spirits.
When news of the mummified cat was reported in the local press,
home owner Lisa received a worrying phone call.
The people who phoned us said
we mustn't let the cat out of the house
and when we asked why, they said that they had given their cat away,
and within weeks of doing so, their house burnt down.
This is their mummified cat?
Their mummified cat, they gave it away
and then their house burnt down. Gosh.
So, I'm not letting my cat go anywhere, apart from here.
That's entirely reasonable.
Well, she's still doing her job, isn't she?
Yes, she is still on duty. She's still on duty. Put her back.
By the end of the Middle Ages,
domestic cats had colonised most of the planet.
They'd started to diverge further and further
from their Near East origins.
One of the most famous and striking of these new cats was the Siamese.
Siamese cats are very interesting
because they're sort of a natural breed that occurred in Thailand.
The Siamese evolved in a different direction
from its Egyptian ancestors,
losing the tabby colouration completely
and opting for something totally unique.
So this beautiful girl has got a classic Siamese coat colour
with the browner ears and nose and tail and feet.
That's the result of a thermo-sensitive mutation
in a tyrosinase gene
that inhibits the production of melanin on these cats.
And so, the warm parts of her body lose the colour
and the cooler parts keep it.
The DNA of the Siamese show they separated
from the Mediterranean breed centuries ago
and evolved independently on the other side of the world.
It's not believed that anybody set out to breed these cats,
what happened is a mutation occurred
and it stayed in this very small isolated population in Thailand.
And from there, it drifted into fixation
in a certain number of cats.
This process is called genetic drift.
It occurs when a particular mutation becomes accidentally dominant
in an isolated population
that doesn't mix much with the rest of the world.
If a mutation occurs in a small population,
it's got a very good chance of drifting to fixation,
which means that 100% of the cats in that population
will then have that mutation.
The Siamese is an extremely unusual breed
because its looks result from a natural genetic process.
Most cats in the world arose by more artificial means,
a sudden and huge expansion of cat breeding.
During the late 1800s and into the 1900s and on,
cats had become a status symbol.
Europeans realised that there were different varieties of cats
from all around the world.
They then incorporated that into their breeding programmes.
People started selecting cats because they had unique varieties.
The Angora cat came from the Near East,
the Abyssinian came from Ethiopia,
the Manx cat, which had no tail, came from the Isle of Man.
Breeding, both on purpose and by accident,
has given cat owners an astonishing level of choice.
So you might think that after 10,000 years
and all this effort we've bred out their wild side.
CAT HISSES Apparently not.
These are feral cats.
CATS HISS
They're not wild animals, despite how it may look,
these cats, or their close relatives,
were once normal house pets.
Take a domestic cat out of the home and they can turn a lot less loving.
Feral cats are very different from domestic cats
and so they typically will start up with fight or flight
when people come into play.
All right, all right.
US cities like Atlanta have a serious problem with feral cats.
We don't want to euthanize a cat because you know what happens
when you remove cats from the outdoor environment?
Is that new cats come in.
So we actually maintain a stable population
so we don't add more cats into that area.
So veterinarians like Dr Ashley Randall
work on programmes to try and control the situation.
Neutering and spaying is really, really important
when it comes to feral populations,
especially if we're trying to control the numbers.
Any time a population gets really, really high,
you run the risk for disease and that's for people and for pets.
Helping Dr Randall with Atlanta's feral cat problem
are Lizzy and Kasia from the Pets for Life programme.
We are out today doing some cat trapping,
for what's called TNR - trap, neuter, release.
A female cat
will have kittens every two months
and she will be impregnable right after she delivers.
So pretty much, you can assume, that every female cat in the wild
out here is pregnant at all times.
Lizzy and Kasia are tracking a feral cat active in the area
so they've left a series of traps filled with food.
It looks like somebody's in there. Yeah.
Hi, there.
See what we've got. Hi. Looks like the right one.
We're going to take you to the vet. Let's get him in the van. OK.
On average, they catch 15 cats a week.
CAT MEOWS It's OK, buddy.
Every single one receives a welcome health check, vaccinations,
and a possibly less welcome neutering.
Of course you get some that are a little feral
but they're more receptive, like our patient today,
and then some of them you can't touch at all.
So when they come in in traps, they literally are trying to lunge
out of the trap or get out of the trap just to get away from people.
OK, so his heart sounds good.
And his gums are nice and pink. Very good, big guy.
All right, so we are going to put him on his side
and then we are going to give him his sedative.
All right.
All we're doing is taking away the reproductive organs.
So we are taking away organs that they can live without very easily.
For males, they are up within about 20 minutes of that procedure
so he is going to go back outside and live out his life.
All right, big boy.
The whole procedure takes less than ten minutes.
And a few hours later, the cat is released back onto the streets.
It's OK, buddy, we're home.
The reason we trap, neuter and return feral cats
versus keeping them and adopting them out is they're truly not happy
to live inside with people.
This way. Pss, pss, pss.
The vet said he was pretty healthy, surgery went well.
So he might be a little drowsy this evening
and then he'll be back to full energy tomorrow,
ready to take on the world.
There you go.
So, domestication may only be skin deep
and cats are essentially still wild animals.
But if the difference between a feral cat
and your kitty are so shallow,
what causes such a profound difference in their behaviour?
Essentially, they're all the same species,
they're all the domestic cat genetically,
but it really depends on the level of socialisation
that the cats have experienced
at a very limited period when there are a small kitten,
between the ages of two and seven weeks.
Maggie Roberts is chief vet at Cats Protection UK
and she's trying to make sure abandoned kittens don't go feral
in the first place.
Hey, little one.
If they have significant positive contact with humans
during that period, they will see people as positive
and therefore will react positively.
With feral cats, usually, they've not had that contact
with people at that really crucial socialisation period
and so they're very fearful of people.
Generally, they want to steer clear because they see us as threatening.
The difference between a feral cat and a domestic cat
is defined in the first few weeks of their lives.
We start at about two weeks of age
and go on until they're usually about eight weeks of age,
and we do a lot of little bits of contact with them.
We also want to expose them to the sort of sights
and sounds of a domestic environment...
RECORDING OF BABY CRYING
RECORDING OF WOOD BEING SAWN
..so that they can learn that these things are not threatening,
because they're in a safe environment when they hear them.
RECORDING OF KNOCKING
Once they get to about eight weeks,
the things they've not been exposed to, they will see those as a threat.
So the more we can do for them while they're in with us,
then the better pets they will be.
Maggie teaches her kittens to tolerate our world.
But does she believe cats are ever truly domesticated?
The thing I think that lots of us love about cats
is that they haven't lost that wild side of their nature,
they still want to hunt, they still want to explore
and also that we can't control them.
Cats are all about themselves
and that comes back to their sort of evolution and how they survive.
So I would say, yeah, they're partially domesticated
but they still have that wild heart.
It seems that even after 10,000 years of cohabitation
cats are still essentially wild animals,
wild animals that now live with us.
This essential wildness may explain in part why cats are not trainable
in the way dogs are.
Dogs want to please their owners.
They are what is known as hyper social.
Cats...
Not so much.
It's a lot more difficult to train a cat compared to a dog
because dogs were specifically selected for their trainability,
whereas cats have shorter attention spans,
and people also really don't spend a lot of time training cats.
But just because they aren't as cooperative as dogs
doesn't mean that they aren't smart or trainable,
you just have to make it worth their while.
Meet Samantha Martin.
This is Meowy Manor.
Samantha is the manager of a travelling troupe
or more accurately, pride of performing cats.
Most of the training happens in here.
Cats are brilliant.
People really underestimate the brilliance of a cat.
Like training them, they get to use their brain,
they have to figure out what it is that I want from them.
Hup!
To train her cats, Samantha uses a method calls operant conditioning,
also known as clicker training.
This is the target stick so he was trained to jump up to wherever
I pointed the target stick.
And once he had all four paws up on the barrel, I just click and treat.
The clicker acts as a bridge or a marker to let the cat know
that they've just then a behaviour that's going to give them a reward.
Because it's tough to give the reward
at the moment that they're doing the trick, the click means
you're going to get a treat for what you just did at that moment.
You got it, you got it.
Once the behaviour is learned,
I no longer need the target stick or the clicker,
just the prop itself.
And they know what to do with the prop.
So that's the finish treat.
The question is - are the cats training to please their owner
or are they just there for the food?
The right motivation for a lot of cats is not to please us.
If you want to train a cat,
the great big motivator is going to be food.
Food is a primary enforcer,
it's something that they can't live without,
so most cats can be trained to work for that food.
Compared to dogs, there hasn't been much research into cat cognition
and intelligence,
but cats are clearly clever.
When they choose to be.
APPLAUSE
The Acro-Cats play to full houses as they tour across the USA.
Audiences crammed with envious cat owners
wondering why their pet won't do this.
Science says reward with food and they just might.
So, where next for our wild feline friends?
Well, some people have plans to completely reinvent the cat.
All domestic cats, up until the last 20 years,
have been purely Felis silvestris.
Humans have very interestingly now hybridised the domestic cat
with a completely different species.
Anthony Hutcherson has been breeding one such hybrid - the Bengal cat.
Bengals come from a cross between domestic cats
and a wildcat species called the Asian leopard cat.
Personality wise, they are a little different from other cats.
They're pretty active and interested and intelligent.
So if you just want a cat to sit on your lap,
this is not the cat for you.
TANNOY SOUNDS IN BACKGROUND
The difference between a domestic cat and an Asian leopard cat
is about six million years of evolutionary time.
That's on the same range
as the difference between a human and chimpanzee.
With such a huge evolutionary difference,
can these new hybrid cats still share our homes?
The challenge lies in getting those physical traits
that attract your eye
and have excited humanity since the beginning of time
without those traits you don't want on the inside -
getting scared easily, peeing in the corners,
needing to eat a lot of raw bloody meat.
The Bengal is not the only exotic breed
trying to inject a wild look into cats.
The Chausie is a cross between a domestic cat
and another non-Felis silvestris - the jungle cat.
And a Savannah is a cross between a domestic cat and a serval,
a cat that broke away from the wildcat's line
over 8.5 million years ago.
I think these cats are both the future and the past
of domestic cats.
They represent the thing that people love and want
as a bit of the wild in their house,
which is kind of the oldest reason people love cats anyway.
10,000 years ago,
our first feline furry house guests moved in.
Since then, they've travelled the world,
been feared by popes and worshipped like gods.
They've hijacked human instincts for their benefit,
learned to read us like a book but kept their own feelings under wraps.
They can even entertain us...
..as long as we make it worth their while.
And though they've gone through subtle genetic changes,
their wild nature has endured despite our best efforts.
They've leveraged some of those traits
to become the ultimate consumer pet,
bringing a little bit of the wild into millions of homes.
And what do cats make of all this?
As usual,
they're not saying.