'The anti-pet of bourgeois life’: why the world needs big cat energy

Whether by striking workers, poets or Pussy Riot, our feline friends have long been used as a symbol of resistance – radical by nature, they refuse to be tamed

Kathryn Hughes
Sat 13 Apr 2024 06.00 EDT

In the 60 years since Julie Andrews sang about the cheering possibilities of whiskers on kittens, the fetishisation of the feline form has only grown stronger. Earlier this year, Somerset House even opened a Hello Kitty cafe as part of its Cute exhibition. By way of balance there is, of course, a jokey online culture about the unspeakable evilness of cats. These are the ones who deliberately sabotage your printer, or post video diaries commenting on the futility of your dating life. But beyond this binary, there is a more nuanced narrative of the cat as a figure that makes a virtue out of complexity and ambivalence. So perhaps we would do better to think of the cat as dissident, oblique, even radical.

Rudyard Kipling caught this attitude best in his Just So Stories of 1902, a series of whimsical origin myths. In The Cat That Walked By Himself, Kipling tells how Wild Dog was the first animal to venture into the cave of stone age humans, attracted by the smell of roast mutton. The dog becomes a couple’s “First Friend”, a devoted and useful hunting companion and security guard who is happy to submit to the collar of domestic servitude. Wild Cow and Wild Horse soon follow suit, eager to labour in return for plenty of hay. Finally comes Wild Cat, who stalks up to the entrance of the dwelling and proceeds to lay down his terms. “I am not a friend, and I am not a servant. I am the Cat who walks by himself, and I wish to come into your cave.”

Over time the cat warms up sufficiently to develop a transactional relationship with the humans: in return for milk, he will keep the cave free of rodents and occasionally play with the baby. The bond, though, remains contingent and fragile. Kipling ends by telling us that “when the moon gets up and night comes”, the cat goes out to roam the woods or the roofs, “walking by his wild lone”. Whether he will return is anyone’s guess. Behind the whimsy, Kipling was responding to the new understanding of deep time that the publication of On the Origin of Species had revealed in 1859. According to Charles Darwin, rough-and-ready selective breeding over millennia had done wonders to turn generic animal stock into specialist proto-breeds – soft-mouthed dogs to retrieve game and sausage-shaped ones to go down holes, broad shouldered horses to plough the fields and elegant hunters to carry a gentleman over hill and dale. Cats, by contrast, had stubbornly resisted attempts to be bred into usefulness (otherwise today we would have cats the size of Labradors or the shape of Dachshunds sauntering along the street).

In terms of genetic engineering, Darwin regarded the cat as a lost cause: “Although so much valued by women and children, we rarely see a distinct breed long kept up.” He hinted, too, at the reason. The fact was that the cat’s riotous sex life marked it out as an incorrigible disruptor of bourgeois norms. A female cat will scream from the rooftops to let the neighbourhood know that she is in season and keen to hook up with as many toms as possible. When the kittens arrive just over two months later, they will have different fathers, which explains why littermates are often strikingly different colours. The cat, explained the French naturalist Alphonse Toussenel, is “essentially antipathetic to marriage”.

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