I have roughly equal affection for cats and dogs, which puts me in a distinct minority among people of my acquaintance; most are quite partisan as to their allegiances. I have a cat sitting on my lap as I write this. His name is Sylvester, because he looks so much like the luckless Looney Toons character with the black tuxedo coat who is perpetually tormented by an extremely neotenic bird, named Tweetie. Sylvester also shares some of the cartoon character’s haplessness; he is ungraceful, if not downright clumsy; once, while soundly sleeping, he actually fell off the top of the couch onto my prone chest, then, in terror, leaped over to an adjacent couch but misjudged and crashed ignominiously on the hardwood floor, from which he strenuously but unsuccessfully sought to gain traction for rapid egress, as if it were an ice surface, then upon finally getting his legs, he bumped into a cedar chest. (He left me, as a memento, two sets of superficial gouges on my chest and adrenalin boost.) Sylvester has other issues as well, including a morbid fear of doorbells and the people who subsequently appear.  When the doorbell rings he makes a dash for the underside of our bed.

His sister, Smoke—a gray tuxedo—in stark contrast, is as graceful and athletic a creature I have ever known. She could do a complete summersault when she was six months old, and can rest on her hind legs like a meerkat. She is a gray blur when chasing a laser pointer up and down stairs. Sylvester can only watch until she tires. Smoke is also much more “well-adjusted”. She loves strangers, sidles up, tail high and shivering seductively or plopping on her back for a belly-rub. When we first brought them home as kittens, Smoke exited the carrier immediately and started exploring; Sylvester wouldn’t budge. We finally had to dump him out after an hour. When we moved, Smoke mostly took it in stride; Sylvester was a wreck for weeks. If it weren’t for Smoke’s calming influence it would have been much longer. For Sylvester is exceedingly fond of his sister and, for the most part, vice versa. When they were respectively spayed and neutered, Smoke and Sylvester were placed in the same “recovery cage”, primarily for Sylvester’s sake. When Smoke had an emergency medical procedure to extract yarn from her intestine, Sylvester was in distress during her absence, incessantly calling for her. They often sleep in a ball so tightly bound that it is difficult to discern their outlines. Their relationship has greatly altered my prior notions of cat sociality. The solitariness of cats is vastly exaggerated.

Sylvester and Smoke were also instructive with respect to a behavioral syndrome that plays an important role in the domestication process, a personality dimension in cats, humans and many other vertebrates, from goldfish to pigs, called the shyness-boldness continuum. Sylvester is on the shy end, Smoke on the bold end. Since they shared a womb, and have spent all but one day of their life together indoors, it is tempting to attribute all of their personality differences to their genes. But Smoke and Sylvester had a rich and formative, albeit brief existence before we adopted them at 10 weeks of age, which undoubtedly influenced their personalities¹. 

The shared experiences of Smoke and Sylvester as much human-handled kittens, and then as coddled indoor cats, also no doubt contributed greatly to their temperament, and particularly their reaction to humans. If Smoke had been born feral, she would not be as human-friendly as she is today. And that is true of Sylvester as well; in the big scheme, he is not that shy.

Our neighbor, Lise, was part of an innovative program—called trap-neuter-release–to deal with feral and semi-feral cats, which abound in this city and elsewhere around the globe. These cats are provisioned, then captured, spayed or neutered, and return to the empty lots or abandoned buildings from which they came. This method actually better controls—and more humanely– the feral cat population than simple removal. Prior to her move to New York City, Lise worked with feral cats on the Island of Saint Thomas in the Caribbean. She adopted three of them.

Though they too vary in their shyness, compared to these three formerly feral cats, Sylvester is quite bold. One of them, also a black tuxedo, called Baby, I have only glimpsed ocassinally. The difference between Sylvester and Baby is largely due to the different environments in which they grew up. Around humans, the boldest feral cat is shyer than the shyest home-reared one. This even applies to feral cats adopted soon after weaning. As with canines, there is a window of socialization, and in cats it seems to close earlier and more firmly than in dogs. 

There is an interesting trend among the three feral cats related to the age at which they were adopted. One of them, Pablo, was abandoned at between 4 and 6 weeks of age, which is prior to normal weaning. Though still shyer than Sylvester, he is by far the boldest of the three feral adoptees. Lucy, who was adopted at about 12 weeks of age, which is two to four weeks after cats are usually weaned, is much shyer, and Baby, adopted at a slightly older age, is shyer still. Early human handling, especially during the pre-weaning period, is crucial to a cat’s later reaction to humans.

I use the term, feral, loosely, here, for the cats with which Lise has dealt in both St. Lucia and NYC, are probably relatively recent arrivals to the street; many are second or third generation descendants of abandoned cats and were provisioned to varying degrees prior to Lise’s arrival on the scene. Truly feral cats must secure all of their calories unaided (consciously) by benevolent humans, and have bred for many generations under these conditions. It is difficult to determine how many truly feral cats exist in New York City; perhaps a relative few. You are more likely to find them in more rural settings. We would expect a truly feral cat adopted at the same age as Baby, to be even less given to human interaction. But even these truly feral cats would seem “friendly” compared to the wild ancestors of all truly feral cats, semi-feral cats like Baby, and pampered house cats like Smoke and Sylvester. Because of genetic psychological alterations wrought by the domestication process, even the most feral cats are more human-friendly than true wildcats raised under the same conditions.The domestication of cats, though, has been much less pronounced than that of dogs. Even Sylvester more closely resembles his wild ancestors, both physically and psychologically, than the most wolf-like dog breeds resemble wild wolves. As such, cat and dog domestications contrast in interesting ways. Yet there are important features common to both. Both the differences and similarities in the domestication of dogs and cats have a lot to do with the prior evolutionary history of wolves and wild cats respectively.