mto what infallible and ruthless predator. Equipped by mother nature with retractable claws and sharp teeth, hypersensitive whiskers, and binocular and night vision, the cat no longer looks like him. Engaged in imitating children’s screams or in a comatose state on the sofa, he is a full-fledged member of the family, with very human vices and virtues. And he could be fully domesticated within fifty years. How marked the direction is demonstrated by an article de Le Monde with a rather eloquent title: «Le chat est-il un humain comme les autres?». (Is the cat a human being like the others?). In fact, the feline seems to have stood ie fully integrated into the family. And have even embodied, like no one, some central values of the post Covid-19 and post-metoo era.
The cat embodies the key values of the post-Covid and post-Metoo society
For example? «Cats have made their own the key values of our time: like the respect for the body and for the territory, the tendency to spend a lot of time at home and even teleworking,” writes the vet Claude Beata in La Folie des chats (Odile Jacob, 2022). Book which, among other things, debunks the thesis of the absolute independence of the cat: the feline can suffer on a psychic level, more than we can expect.
Mathieu Rebeaud, doctor of biochemistry in Lausanne, Switzerland, observes instead that in recent years more and more interesting discoveries have been made about cats, “such as the fact that they know how to recognize their master’s voice or that certain meows imitate the same frequency as that of children, which is why most specialists agree that the cat «has changed behavior».
Wild to whom? He is increasingly domestic
Only about ten years ago the English biologist, John Bradshaw (in the book cat sense) wrote that cats behave with human beings as they would behave in nature with a bigger feline. In short, the cat was still considered relatively wild, led to reproduce real feline behavior in the domestic environment. A warning, therefore, to the owner who considered himself “mother” of his cat. But the path towards domestication has long been marked, even if cats, unlike dogs, have never been bred for a specific function other than pleasant appearance.
Once upon a time there was the romantic, elusive and irregular cat
As historian Eric Baratay recalls, whoever loved the cat, in the past, loved the animal at the antipodes of the dog, faithful supporter of the order. The cat was the elusive, the anarchic, the irregular. «The romantics were the first to establish the link between feline and marginality. Their role model was the stray cat. On which characters like Baudelaire or Colette projected their own marginality». Today, on the other hand, man demands from the cat that he be a real companion, that he interacts with him, that he plays and responds to his requests, to the point that “breeders today come to select the temperaments that satisfy these needs”.
Kristyn Vitale, in a study published by the journal Behavioral Processes in 2021, showed that cats can indeed be domesticated. Fundamental that the “reward” of domestication is worth it: that is, not food but social rewards. Works? Here it is, for better or for worse.
We are turning the cat into a dog, or a cat-dog
Such is the commitment that, according to Baratay, in fifty years the cat will have undergone a genetic mutation, as the dog did before, and will be completely “family”. In short, how Baratay already told in 2018 on Liberation, we are transforming the cat into a 21st century dog, into a cat-dog. We ask of cats today what we asked of companion dogs a century ago, and more. So we take them around on a leash and witness phenomena that were only dogs, such as anxiety crises. But for some reason, cats may be able to resemble us even more, and better, than dogs.
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