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Pet Cats. General information on the cat as a pet for owners and potential cat owners.
The Cat as a Household Pet
Only the student of history can fully appreciate the importance of cats. If we could know really the history of the civilizations of the world, we should undoubtedly find that cats have played an important part in it. Wherever pioneers have planted their crops, there have followed rats and mice in plenty to reap their harvest ; there fore, no part of their household belongings was prized more by our forefathers than the domestic cat. Indeed, the cat is still a great factor in keeping in check rats and mice. Our government appropriates money every year to support cats in the postoffices and other public buildings ; and now in Pittsburg our national government is attempting to develop a strain of cats that can endure life in cold storage ware houses. Thus we can see that the story of Dick Whittington reveals to us, better than most written histories, the .value of a cat in a country overrun with vermin. In Dick Whittington's time a cat was indeed worth its weight in gold.
There are in general, two kinds of cats, the long haired or Persians and the short-haired which includes our common household puss.
Formerly the Angoras were supposed to be distinct from the Persians, but now they are regarded as indistinguishable. The Persian varieties are deter mined by color. They are the Blacks, the Blues, the Brown Tabbies, the Oranges and Creams, the Silvers, the Tortoise-shells, and the Whites.
The short-haired cats show many varieties in the matter of color, and some in form. They are the Blacks, the Russian Blues, which are not tinged with slate, but are intensely blue, the Creams, and Oranges, the Dutch-marked, being white with black or blue or cream or orange, the Tabbies, the Tortoise-shells and the Whites. The Siamese is pure cream or fawn with seal-brown face, ears, legs and tail, and has bright blue eyes. Manx and Japanese cats have no tails.
In an ancient Egyptian picture, a cat with a black stripe on the heels is represented as catching birds for its master. At Sakkara and Benihassan in Egypt are cemeteries of cat mummies, which show how much these creatures were prized thousands of years before the Christian Era.
Thus puss has been made the companion of man for so many centuries that we do not know what she was like in her original wild condition. Possibly she, like the dog,has several species, in different countries, as ancestors. However, there are plenty of wild cats still living in many parts of the world, and we can judge by studying them what the wild habits of our domestic pets naturally were.
The cat can run rapidly for a short distance, but she is not a natural runner like the dog; instead, she is fitted with strong hind legs which enable her to leap far. She does not get her prey by chasing it; she lies in ambush behind some object, or stretched along a limb, not too high from the ground, and there waits for some unsuspecting creature to pass; then she gathers herself tensely and leaps upon her victim stunning it with the blow, and seizes it in her sharp carved claws, and her sharp tushes.
The Iong, strong, supple body of a cat, covered with soft, sleek fur, is graceful and sinuous in its motions; her step is stealthy, for her claws are re tracted above her toe-pads, and make no noise ; when hunting she assumes a slinking gait; her eyes are fitted for seeing in daylight or in semi-darkness; the pupils are contracted to mere vertical slits during the day, but at night they expand over almost the entire eye. At the back of the eye is a reflecting surface which catches such dim light as there is, and by reflecting it, enables the cat to use it twice. The cat's nose is moist, and her sense of smell is excellent, but not so keen as that of the dog. However, she has a very keen sense of hearing. Her whiskers are of great use to her; these long hairs about the face are connected at their roots with sensory nerves, so that when moving in the dark, if one of them touches an object, pussy at once receives warning.
Puss has a wide range of expression in her voice and gestures. She can mew questioningly, cozily, affectionately or entreat ingly ; she can squall when hurt, and emit heart-rending mews when she is lonely, and growl when you interfere with her food. She can purr, which is a very soothing noise indeed; but when she sings for the entertainment of her lover, or howls defiance at her enemy, she wails in a manner that sends chills down the spine of the listener. She can also "spit," a performance most expressive of defiance or contempt. When angry, she switches her tail threateningly; when feeling pleasant and companionable she carries her tail upright ; and when frightened, the hairs of the tail stand out, making it three times its natural size.
The cat is a night -prowler by nature, for it is then she most easily finds her prey. She is especially a hunter of mice and rats, which are also night-prowlers; although these creatures form a natural part of her food, yet she gets so many internal parasites from them, that sometimes her health is thus greatly injured. "Mice make a cat poor," say the farmer people, a true observation because of the many worms which have their early stages in mice, and their later stages in the intestines of the cat.
Cats should, when young, be taught to leave birds alone. A little attention in training the kitten will later save the life of many a bird. As soon as the kitten is old enough to begin to notice birds, it should be switched every time it even looks at one. A few days of this kind of treatment is usually sufficient to teach the lesson, for the kitten is no fool. If she persists in catching birds, take the bird from her that she has just killed, put some red pepper upon it, and let her have it again. If this is done once, it will usually make her afraid to touch any bird thereafter.
Leaving cats at summer cottages during the winter ought to be-considered a criminal offense. The poor cats suffer from the unaccustomed rigors of winter, and by starvation they are forced to climb trees in search of birds. Many thousands of our beneficial song birds are thus sacrificed every year because of the wicked thoughtlessness of people who desert their cats and thus render them wild in their habits.
An intelligent cat may be taught many things, and each of us who loves our puss may have an interesting story to tell of the achievements of our especial pet. When I was a baby of five months, I was adopted by a cat, a handsome black and white creature called 'Jenny." A cruel woods-cat had come to the barn and killed Jenny's first litter of kittens, and she was a lonely and disconsolate little mother, mourning for her children. She seemed to comprehend that I, although larger than she, was an infant. She tried to give me milk from her own breasts, and later brought me half -killed mice and placed them entic ingly near my hands in my cradle when I was put to sleep on the piazza. Whenever I cried she came to me and tried to comfort me, during the first nine years of my life, which was as long as she lived. Even now I can remember how great a comfort she was to me when naughtiness was the cause of my weeping, and when therefore I felt that the whole world except Jenny was against me. Jenny opened all of the doors in the old farm house from the thumb piece side. She leaped up and thrust one front leg through the handle, thus supporting her weight while she pressed down on the thumb-piece with the other front foot. I remember our guests were greatly astonished at seeing her come thus swinging into the room on the door. Jenny was very polite, and always thanked us with a mew when we opened the door to let her in or out.
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