How Cats Tamed Us

(purring)

I've always been a cat person.

I've had cats since I was a little child.

(upbeat keyboard music)

I'd say that our obsession with them

is reaching a crescendo.

Mom.

[Woman] What, you hungry?

You want some num nums?

Yeah.

[Abigail] We cohabitate with cats

in this really intense way,

we know more about them, we wonder more,

and that just feeds this love that we have.

I think it's fair to say that we are obsessed

and they are not.

(meowing)

Humans never really decided hey,

we're gonna domesticate cats,

cats domesticated themselves.

It started off just that cats were scavengers

in our first settlements.

The most fearless survived

and had more babies and ate more meat.

They became what we consider domesticated animals today.

Humans have gotten tame dogs and pigs, say,

by breeding the friendliest animals with each other

and getting more and more malleable animals.

The interesting thing about cats though

is that they undertook these changes on their own.

The way some scientists think about it is

that they went through the process of artificial selection

but they did it naturally.

Cats are these amazing, adaptable, high-performance hunters

that can survive anywhere from arctic islands

to Hawaiian volcanoes,

but humans also have a weakness for these animals.

(purring)

Cats have infant features that we're attracted to:

large round heads and large eyes and big looking cheeks.

They weigh about maybe eight pounds or so,

just the size of a human newborn,

and they have a cry that can resemble the wail of a baby.

In nature, these cats are very quiet animals.

They hardly ever meow.

It's when they realize how susceptible we are

to what they say, that's when they start to speak.

I think you can see our relationship with cats

as a series of cat controlled takeovers.

In Egypt, the first cat-obsessed society,

all of these funerary frescoes and statues,

and kind of worshiping them at a certain point.

From there, cats got our ships and wherever we went,

they went too.

The Vikings took a liking to orange cats,

and you can trace the pathways of the Vikings

by looking to see where there are lots of orange cats.

The global population of house cats is difficult to tally

but scientists think something like half a billion,

maybe even a billion.

There's countries in South America where the population

of pet cats might be growing by a million cats per year.

No matter what we do, we're never gonna get control

over these animals or make any but the smallest dent

on the global cat population.

They took over our bodies in terms of this very mysterious

cat parasite, toxoplasmosis gondii

that they've spread to one in three people on the planet.

Scientists are looking at

how that might alter human behavior.

Some people think that toxoplasmosis may be one

of the causes underlying schizophrenia.

There are interesting studies in rats that suggest

that rats infested with toxoplasmosis

lose their fear of cats.

The favorite newspaper phrase is fatal feline attraction

because then if you lose your fear of the smell of cats,

you're more likely to be eaten.

Some people have speculated that if I have this parasite,

maybe I'm becoming attracted to cats as well.

To me what's the most interesting is that we, as humans,

have to build this narrative where we're like okay,

I actually have a physical disease that is making me

obsessed with my cat, and it may be true.

Of course they've taken over our modern homes,

apartment buildings, and last of all,

taken over the Internet.

(funky keyboard music)

People, for a long time, have tried very hard

to capture images of cats.

I think that there are particular features of felines

that play really well online,

that sudden jump, pounce, ambush behavior

is just good for that 10 second clip

of something crazy happening.

It's like okay, my cat freaked out and jumped

on a vacuum or away from a cucumber.

There's the fact that we love to look at cat faces

and the fact that they look so human to us

but are blank in a way that human faces aren't.

It's open for captioning.

It can reflect whatever we want it to say.

Only two percent of the cats on the planet are purebred

or pedigreed cats.

However, as there are more and more cats on the planet,

more and more weird mutations crop up.

I visited these very nice veterinarians

who were breeding this kind of cat called the Lykoi

or werewolf cat, which favors a mutation

for partial hairlessness and looks a little bit

like a werewolf.

Another interesting trend that's been going on

in cat breeding is the mixing of domestic cats

with other small cats like the Asian leopard cat.

Often these cats have a temperament

to match their wild looks.

A lot of them end up, sadly, in shelters

and even big cat shelters.

I think our obsession with cats shows

how much we can connect still with animals

and how much we want to give and can give.

Mom!

Mommy!

[Abigail] At the same time, I think

that the way we see them

as little fur dolls basically or these Internet stars

speaks to our nature of humans

to pretend that these animals are doing our bidding

when actually they have wormed their way into every niche

on the planet practically

and run roughshod over us in a lot of ways.

When you look down at your cat,

don't say oh there's a fur baby,

say oh, there's a hyper carnivore.

I think that will only increase your appreciation

for cats to know the journey that they've undergone

and the odds that they beat to come and sit on your lap.

(relaxing piano music)