Cats: Caressing the Tiger Page #3

for more than half a century,

as many as 80 at a time.

Puss, puss, puss. Come on.

Puss. Puss, puss, puss, puss.

A good cat is worth a lot.

She's a valuable asset to any farm.

Our cats have increased.

There's few more than

what we really need,

but what do you do?

You just let them go on.

They do keep the rats

and mice down to a limit.

I don't say they have every one,

but they do catch up

with them at the finish.

But what happens when this usually

solitary animal

lives in close quarters

with so many others?

Oxford University Professor

David Macdonald has studied

farm cats since 1978.

Why is it that people have tended

to typecast cats

as anti-social, as solitary creatures?

I think there's two reasons.

Once of them could be that the sorts

of things that cats do socially

are not the sorts of things that

classically people have had in mind

when they though

about wild animal societies.

And I think that's

because cat society is based on

a rather subtle, covert language.

And the sorts of signals

that pass between cats,

and the one I personally think

is important is this business

of rubbing where one individual rubs

its lips and its cheek against

another individual happen very quickly,

they happen very rarely, and if you're

not tuned in to looking for it,

you just don't see it.

So I think people have spent their

lives living amongst cats

and formed an impression

which hasn't taken into account

the subtlety of the relationships

that occur between the cats themselves.

It turns out that they are

living in a society.

And, therefore,

it's a bit irritating in a sense

that one hears so many people saying,

Oh, the only sociable felids,

the only sociable members of the cat

family as a large group are lions.

That having been said,

there are a lot of similarities

between these barnyard lions

that we have around here

and the lions that we are ever more

familiar with from programs

and researches about the African lions

Lions are the only wild cats

that normally live in a group,

called a pride.

At its core are the adult females,

usually related.

Researchers have discovered

that within a pride

the females look after

and nurse each other's cubs.

Here, three different females

allow the same cub to nurse.

Though a lioness gives preference to

her own cubs when they want to nurse,

at times she will allow younger

sisters or brothers, nieces, nephews,

or grandchildren to join in too.

David Macdonald was intrigued

that among farm cats the same

communal behavior occurs.

It comes and spends a bit of time...

A student, Warner Passanisi,

often follow the cats around the clock,

just as naturalists do in the wild.

...their litters together.

So we have, generally,

the females taking a turn

to suckle these kittens,

again indiscriminately.

Any kitten that is there is suckled.

Although unrelated females may

help each other in this way,

generally the behavior

only follows bloodlines.

Mothers, daughters,

and sisters cooperate most often,

but it is quite possible

that other related females

will also nurse

and care for the kittens,

much like an extended family.

Six weeks old, this kitten has begun

only recently to explore on his own.

Today, he has accidentally

become separated from his mother.

Out of hearing range, she knows

nothings of her kitten's dilemma.

A related female

hears him but does nothing.

He starts back uncertainly.

Out in the barnyard and still

no sign of his mother.

He comes upon the related female,

now nursing her own litter.

Hungry, tired, the kitten is willing

to risk hostility to get close to her.

In the end, she accepts the tiny,

distressed explorer.

Why should the females

behave this way?

Once more the behavior

of lions held the clue...

a behavior not of care and comfort,

but of savagery and death.

In this graphic film footage,

the cameraman bears horrified witness

to a systematic and vicious killing.

As three terrified cubs huddle nearby,

a male lion prepares to brutally

attack and kill one of their sisters.

When there is a

successful take-over of a pride,

the new dominant male kills

the cubs of the ousted male.

Thus, the female will

come into heat sooner,

the new male can then mate with her,

and thereby perpetuate his own genes.

The barnyard, again, was to prove

remarkably like the plains of Africa.

Macdonald recalls the events

leading to a gruesome discovery.

As I watched at the communal den with

these four sets of kittens altogether,

nine kittens in total, the scene was

really a very intimate one.

The kittens were, as you can imagine,

a chocolate box scene

in amongst straw bales.

Their nest was built in

amongst a stack of bales,

and a narrow passageway

led into the kittens.

And they were all just

piled on top of each other.

And each mother would come

and go from that den,

each suckling the

kittens indiscriminately.

On this occasion I was watching this

nest of kittens and in slunk the male.

And within just a few seconds

this commotion brought the

mothers running, but not soon enough.

Because by the time the mothers came

back and chased had been

in that communal den to start with,

six of them were slain.

So I think we've come up

with two answers,

both of them perhaps

rather surprising to why cats may

benefit individually

from living communally.

One of them is that they can

look after each other's young

by sharing the load of nursing,

and the other is that females may be

able to repel murderous males.

Thus, cooperative care by a number of

females increases the likelihood

that more kittens even orphans will be

watched over and thereby protected.

What other unexpected parallels may

exist between these barnyard lions

and their wild cousins

is yet to be discovered.

In another English village,

the image of cats as ruthless killers

was confirmed in a different way.

It began with a local teacher.

Peter Churcher has taught biology

at the Bedford School for 15 years.

Those two have started before that one.

And of course it's important

they all start at the same time,

isn't it? Right.

So back to the beginning.

A cat owner himself,

Churcher applied the discipline of

his scientific training

to explore the unseen world

of the house cat on the prowl.

Throughout England,

indeed in much of the world,

cats are let outdoors to roam

the neighborhood at will.

How much impact on wildlife,

Churcher wondered,

do cats actually have?

Unable to follow the cats,

he did the next best thing and

enlisted the help of their owners.

Well, the first thing was

to go around the village

and just find out who had cats.

And so I knocked on

everybody's door and said,

Have you got a cat and were you

willing to take part in the survey?

And surprisingly enough, virtually

everybody in the village did.

And that meant that I had something

around 78 cats to start off with,

which was a good number.

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