Hugh Wirth - Living With Cats: A commonsense guide

I had grown up with all the tales about black cats and witches and doing the devils work, and when Charcoal, my first black cat, came to live with me I could see superstition turning into reality before my eyes. He was a jet-black Cornish Rex, with a soft, tightly curled coat. His eyes intrigued me. He would spend hours peering down his nose at me through those hooded yellow eyes, and he used to narrow them to the point where they were little more than slits. Looking at him, I used to wonder what on earth was going on inside that brain. I began to understand why some people believed the cat to be an ethereal spirit, possessed by Lucifer.

Besides being devilish in appearance, he behaved like a fiend. Hed go out and bash cats up. He was a boss cat, and street bully, and quite determined to install himself at the top of the local feline pecking order. He would go out in the morning to do his patrol and make sure that the other cats were in their place. If any of the local cats failed to come round to his way of thinking, he would go and sort them out.

At one time or another he had a row with all the neighbourhood cats. Hed come home covered with bites and scratches, and Id know hed been on patrol. Having asserted himself around the area, he would then revert to being a home cat. He never fought at night, because he was locked up.

I desexed him when he was five months old, but it didnt stop the fighting, which was over territory. By the time he was a year old hed become king of the neighbourhood, and the number of fights dropped off, but that didnt mean he wouldnt fight if he had to. He was never scared to take on another cat.

Charcoal was my fourth cat, and by then Id come to understand the secretive, independent ways of cats, and why they tend to polarise opinion within the community. While 30 per cent of people adore them, 70 per cent cant abide them. Males account for a large part of that 70 per cent, and what many of them cant stomach is the fact that, unlike dogs, who can be moulded to the desires of humans, cats will never be. They have never been as completely domesticated as dogs, who are totally dependent on humans.

Dogs were bred for a certain purpose, like hunting or rounding up sheep, but cats were never bred for anything other than companionship and decoration. They are the only domestic animal that human beings have never seemed to fully control. Their attitude appears to be that human beings were made to be their servants. The cat has only to indicate it wants this, or that, and we race to do it. If the cat doesnt want to do what you want it to do, it will simply give you a glare and, with a flick of its tail, go on its merry way.

Im a teeny bit persuaded that something does possess cats. For a start, they choose us, rather than the other way round. Often they will arrive on your doorstep, and if you dont come up to scratch, the cat will simply decamp. Dogs never do that; they accept you totally. Cats do exactly as they please. The dog waits for the human boss dog to organise the day, but the cat sets its own schedule.

When I was growing up, my father represented the views of the typical Australian male cat-hater. He never explained why he disliked cats. He was probably taught to dislike them by his father. Most cat-haters are the same: they have never taken the time to work out why they hate cats they just do. It is a historically learned prejudice stretching back to medieval times.

Cats were originally domesticated by the Egyptians from the African or Arabian wildcat as early as 4000 BC. The Egyptians regarded them as sacred animals, and causing death or injury to a cat was a punishable offence.

Domestic cats, which were much valued as mousers and rat-catchers, had spread through Europe by the time of the Roman Empire. The persecution of the animal was sparked by the Catholic Church, and from 1233, when Pope Gregory IX declared that heretics worshipped the devil in the form of a black tom cat, cats were systematically burned and destroyed in the name of the Church.

In France and Belgium there were public cat sacrifices, many of which persisted until the early 19th century. As part of the mid-summer festival in Paris and other French cities, cats were confined in baskets and thrown onto bonfires. The Ash Wednesday ritual in the Belgian town of Ypres involved throwing live cats from the city hall belfry, in symbolic renunciation of the devil.

The cat was thus hunted almost to extinction, and the persecution reached its height during the great witch trials in northern Europe and America in the 17th century. Not only were cats seen as the witches accomplices, witches were also commonly suspected of being able to turn into cats whenever they desired. According to Scottish legend, in the town of Thurso local witches tormented one man by setting a swarm of cats onto him. He chased one of these with his sword, slicing off one of its legs, only to discover to his horror that he had cut off the leg of a woman.

The Catholic Church, dominated by a patriarchal male leadership, sometimes seemed to confuse the identity of the cat devil and the woman temptress. Right through my school days at Melbournes Xavier College, the impression created by male Catholic teaching was that females brought about males downfall, just as Eve had brought about Adams downfall in the Garden of Eden. While Xavier boys of 1954 were taught the social graces of association with women, we were also taught the inherited slyness and evil of women. If you werent careful, women would drag you into the devils pit.

The European tradition, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, commonly featured the link between women and cats in its language. Cats were seen as symbols of fertility and promiscuity, and feline imagery, often derogatory, was often used to describe women.

Female body parts were even named after the cat. From the early 1400s a prostitute was referred to as a cat; the vagina became known as the pussy. Womens behaviour was commonly described in cat terms; for example, they could be slinky, or they might draw their claws. Queen, the term that describes a female cat, is often now used to describe homosexual men, and queening, the act of having kittens, is similarly used to describe homosexual behaviour.

Cats are the animals that draw the battle lines between the sexes. Male friends and clients have frequently told me that cats are bloody manipulators, like women. Its all part of the prejudice, and an acknowledgement by some men that women and cats seem to go together. My dictionary of Australian words and phrases refers to a cat as a spiteful, bitchy, malicious woman. Some men think they cant understand cats, just like they think they cant understand women Ive heard men say of cats, Its hard to work out whats going on in their minds.

Promiscuity associated with cats is not limited to the female. The tom cat has come to symbolise an image of uncontrolled male testosterone. It has entered our language to describe young men who tom cat around at night, caterwauling and engaging in random sexual activity. Where the female dog, known as a slut in old English, acquired a reputation for sexual promiscuity, it was the male cat, or tom, which became known for rowdy loose living.

The tom cat is a fascinating physical study of testosterone in action. At puberty (around five to seven months of age), the testosterone produced by the cats testicles causes a thickening of the animals jowls and neck, giving it a kind of armour for self-defence in cat fights, which are often over territory. Unlike desexed cats, which will generally reach a time-sharing agreement over the use of territory, tom cats defy all rules. They cross all borders of a carefully ordered society, spraying urine, fighting, having random sex, and creating chaos.