One day, about ten thousand years ago, some wild cats from Africa approached a farming village. It was a suspicious place for them, even dangerous because sometimes humans used sticks to keep the animals away from their enclosures. However, near the huts there were holes in which the grain was stored. It was well protected, but not enough to keep away the rats that infested the area. For those cats the opportunity to feast on rodents was too tempting and they set themselves up in ambush near the cereal holes. Human beings saw them, but instead of chasing them away, they let them be. In fact, at the end they also placed a bowl with some fish as if to thank the cats for their work. Those ancient cats no longer moved far from the village.
This is probably how the relationship between humans and cats began , a relationship initially based on mutual convenience, and then becoming a real relationship based on cuddles, purring, rubbing and meowing .
A millennia-long journey, made up of knowledge and also adaptation mainly on the part of our feline which is told to us by Sarah Brown in the volume " All the secrets of the cat" (Aboca, 2023, pp. 314, also e-book).
The result of more than thirty years of studies on the social behavior of cats, the book is not the usual handbook made up of curiosities, anecdotes and various banalities . Conversely, it wants to tell us how from shy and solitary felines, descended from North African wild cats, cats have managed to insinuate themselves into our hearts by convincing us to keep them warm, fed and cuddled. But how did they do it? It's simple: they learned to talk to us!
As Sarah Brown writes: «Cats have accomplished a formidable feat in learning to communicate with each other and with humans to best cope in a world like ours: anthropocentric, crowded and hypersocial. They have managed to tune into a very different language, the human one, and have modified their limited communicative repertoire to adapt to ours, capture our attention and make us understand what they want. Cats understand us much better than most people realize, and much better than we understand them."
Based on her own research and discoveries, but also on the work of other scientists, the author delves into the hitherto unexplored secrets of feline communication . It shows us how cats have enriched their original language, based on smells, with new signals and sounds better suited to life with humans and other cats. Explore in detail the different forms of communication: vocalisations, tail signals, smells, rubbing and ear movements. The meow, for example, is rarely used among adult cats and is actually a feline invention for conversing with people. In short, All the secrets of the cat is a text that opens new horizons to anyone of us who owns a cat or more than one. But it is also a book capable of revealing to us the complexity of the animal world with which we habitually live and which we too often imagine in our own image and likeness, on the model of the animals in Disney films.
A rich and exhaustive volume that Sarah Brown closes with a fascinating question : «Has cat-human communication reached the peak of its evolution? It seems unlikely, given cats' talent for adapting to our world." Should we then have to deal with chatty cats in the future?
