Jonathan B. Losos is the author of the book The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa. His other books include Improbable Destinies. He is an evolutionary biologist at Washington University, and he lives in St. Louis.
Q: What inspired you to write The Cat’s Meow?
A: I’ve always loved cats, but as my scientific career progressed, it never remotely occurred to me to study cats, for two reasons.
First, I wanted to go out into nature and study what animals do as they go about their day, and anyone who’s tried following a cat knows just how impossible that is. Lizards seemed like a better choice.
In addition, I was under the impression that there was no interesting research being done on domestic cats (both pets and unowned outdoor cats).
Then, about a dozen years ago, I learned that I was completely mistaken—many people were researching cats (again, domestic cats, not lions, tigers and ocelots) and using all the same cutting-edge approaches that I and my colleagues use to study lizards, eagles and elephants: GPS tracking, genome sequencing, etc.
Then I had what I humbly submit was a great idea: I’d teach a class for college freshmen called “The Science of Cats”—I’d lure them in on cats, and then teach them how we study nature, using cats as the vehicle.
The course was a great success and a lot of fun, and it occurred just as my book Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance and the Future of Evolution was published.
It wasn’t much of a leap to the idea of writing a book for the cat-interested public about where cats came from, why they do what they do, and what the future may hold—and how we know what we know.
Q: The writer David Quammen said of the book, “If you have ever lived with a feline long enough to reach an accommodation, you’ve probably asked yourself: Am I training the cat, or is the cat training me? That question is a gateway to the labyrinth of fascinating riddles explored by Jonathan Losos—himself a lifelong ailurophile as well as an eminent evolutionary biologist—in this engaging and very smart book.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I love it! And coming from David Quammen—one of the world’s great writers about nature and science—I am extremely flattered.
As for who’s training who, Quammen is absolutely correct. I learned that lesson at a young age: whenever our cats scratched the living room furniture, my father would throw them out the door. It wasn’t long before they turned this to their advantage by making a token swipe at the couch with a single claw and promptly darting to the door, where my father would promptly show up to fulfill his role.
Like father, like son: I now find my daily schedule dictated by the whims of my feline overseers (as the old saying goes, “dogs have owners, cats have staff”).
But it is a little known fact that cats are eminently trainable—after all, they’re very food-motivated. You can even train them to use the toilet (though not, sadly, to flush afterwards). Check out the Savitsky Cats to see the incredible tricks they can learn.
Q: Has writing this book changed how you see your own cats?
A: Absolutely. There were so many things I learned.
For example, I always assumed that cats meow to each other, and the fact that they meow to us means that they’re including us in their social network, treating us as honorary cats.
But, in facts, cats rarely meow to each other (other than momcats and their kittens): they communicate using plenty of other sounds, but not meows. The fact that they meow to us is a trick they evolved during domestication.
Also, their meow has become shorter and higher-pitched compared to their ancestor, the North African wildcat, making it more pleasing to our ears.
They also evolved a type of purr, called the solicitation purr, that they use when they really want something (think the sound they make when they’re winding between your legs as you open a can of wet food in the kitchen). This purr shares acoustical properties with the cry of a human infant, a sound to which we are innately sensitive.
Another fun fact: unowned outdoor female cats often mate with multiple males, which means that kittens in a litter can have different fathers, which may explain why my Winston and Jane are so different in appearance and temperament.
Q: At the end of the book, you raise the concept of bringing back the saber-tooth tiger in a smaller housecat-sized form--has anyone taken you up on this idea?
A: Not that I’m aware of. But saber-toothedness evolved at least four times in mammals—once in cats, twice in species very closely related to cats, and once in marsupials in South America (producing a species that was a dead ringer for a cat), so evolving such a trait doesn’t seem that difficult.
All kinds of breeds of cats and dogs have been produced, so it strikes me as possible that this could be done if someone really wanted to (not that I’m suggesting it!).
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A topic I originally intended to tackle in The Cat’s Meow was the impact that cats have on the environment. It’s a highly controversial issue, pitting animal welfare advocates versus conservationists, and it’s a lot more complicated than most people realize.
Moreover, there are a lot of interesting twists—coyotes, for example, keep cats out of natural areas in most of North America—as well as a lot of fascinating research: what about the possibility of the Australian quoll (sometimes called the “marsupial cat”) as an alternative felinesque pet?
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Well, I could go on for hours about all the fascinating aspects of cats. I’ll leave you with one last story: it’s long been accepted that the cat was domesticated somewhere in the Middle East, possibly as recently as 3,500 years ago.
What is clear is that they didn’t start moving out to the rest of the world until after this point, spreading north to Europe, south into Sub-Saharan Africa and East to Asia, where they first showed up in China about 2,000 years ago.
Archaeologists were shocked, then, when skeletons of cats were discovered a decade ago in village sites in Central China dating to 5,500 years ago. How could this be? It seemed to turn our understanding of cat domestication on its head.
The answer was figured out a few years later. The skeletons were not of domestic cats, but of a different feline species, the Asian leopard cat (ASL).
On the one hand, that the ASL might have been domesticated wouldn’t be all that surprising: like the North African wildcat, they can be found today in the vicinity of villages, feasting on rats and other prey in agricultural areas. So, the stage would have been set for domestication to occur.
On the other hand, contrary to the NA wildcat, which can be very friendly, the ASL cannot be tamed—it has a very unpleasant temperament, leading the New Yorker to describe it as “a foul-tempered little beast with a gorgeous spotted coat.” How domestication occurred—if it did—is a great question.
And there’s a kicker: one of the most popular breeds today—the gorgeous and affectionate Bengal—is the result of hybrid matings between ASLs and domestic cats, with the offspring crossed back to domestic cats for several generations.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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