February 27, 1989

Konrad Lorenz (November 7, 1903 to February 27, 1989) was an Austrian zoologist. He was the one who noticed that if you kiss on a baby goose, you will become a goose yourself. That does not mean you are goose-stepping of course. Or at least that is what the Nobel committee decided when he was awarded (shared) the prize for physiology or medicine in 1973.

So we can rely on his observations on cats as explicated by Tim Weed of National Geographic:

'In reality domestic cats (felis catus) are fearsome predators, smaller first cousins to pumas, panthers, and saber-toothed tigers. According to a National Geographic DNA study, it’s likely that cats were drawn to farming communities in the Fertile Crescent 8000 years ago. They struck up a mutually beneficial relationship with our human ancestors, controlling rodents in exchange for food, and spread from southwest Asia into Europe as early as 4400 B.C. The process of domestication, according to evolutionary geneticists, hardly changed felis catus at all. In the words of the late Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, “The cat is a wild animal that inhabits the homes of humans.”

'If you watch cats carefully, you begin to appreciate the nuances of what Lorenz is saying. In cities like Havana where many cats live in a feral state they gather in prides, stalking the shadows at night like the bloodthirsty hunters they are, or lounging like miniature lions in the shade of a banyan. Lorenz wrote about a cave in Africa where researchers found the remains of multiple early hominids. Each skeleton had two evenly spaced holes at the base of the skull, a telltale signature of feline efficiency. It seems likely, in fact, that our entire species evolved under constant threat of predation by nocturnal feline hunters. For Lorenz this explains, among other things, why we’re still afraid of the dark.'

Definitely interesting.