Why Humans Are Obsessed with Cats | Annals of Obsession | The New Yorker

[Music] I've always been a cat person I've had cats since I was a little child I'd say that our obsession with them is reaching a crescendo mom what you hungry it was some numbness yeah we cohabitate with cats in this really intense way we know more about them we wonder more and that just feeds this we have I think it's fair to say that we are obsessed and they are not humans never really decided hey we're gonna domesticate cats cats domesticated themselves it started off just that cats were scavengers in our first settlements the most fearless have survived and had more babies in ate more meat and they became what we consider domesticated animals today humans have gotten tamed dogs and pigs say by reading the friendliest animals with each other and getting more and more malleable animals the interesting thing about cats though is that they undertook these changes on their own the way some scientists think about it is that they went through the process of artificial selection but they did it naturally cats are these amazing adaptable high-performance hunters that can survive anywhere from Arctic islands to Hawaiian volcanoes but humans also have a weakness for these animals cats have infants features that were attracted to large round heads and large eyes and sort of big looking cheeks they weigh about maybe eight pounds or so just the size of a human newborn and they have a cry that can sort of resemble the wail of a baby in nature these cats are very quiet animals they hardly ever me out it's when they realize how susceptible we are what they say that's when they start to speak I think you can see our relationship with cats as a series of cat controlled takeovers in Egypt sort of the first cat obsessed Society all of these funerary Fresco's and statues and kind of worshipping them at a certain point from there cats got on our ships and wherever we went they went to the Vikings took a liking to orange cats and you can trace the pathways of the Vikings by looking to see where there are lots of orange cats the global population of house cats is difficult to tally but scientists think something like half a billion maybe even a billion there's countries in South America where the population of pet cats might be growing by a million cats per Year's Day no matter what we do we're never gonna get control over these animals or make any but the smallest dent on the global cat population they took over our bodies in terms of this very mysterious cat parasite toxoplasmosis Gandhi that they've spread to one and three people on the planet and scientists are sort of looking at how that might alter human behavior some people think that toxoplasmosis may be one of the causes underlying schizophrenia there are interesting studies and rats that suggest that rats infested with toxoplasmosis lose their fear of cats the favorite newspaper phrase this fatal feline attraction because then if you lose your fear of the smell of cats you're more likely to be eaten and some people have speculated that you know hey if I have this parasite you know maybe I'm becoming attracted to cats as well to me what's the most interesting is that we as humans have to build this narrative where we're like okay I actually have a physical disease that is making me obsessed with my cat and it may be true of course they've taken over our modern homes apartment buildings and last of all taken over the internet people for a long time have tried very hard to capture images of cats I think that there are sort of particular features of felines that play really well online that sudden jump sort of pounce ambush behavior that's just good for that 10-second clip of something crazy happening okay my cat freaked out and you know jumped on a vacuum or away from a cucumber there's the fact that we love to look at cat faces and the fact that they look so human to us but are blank in a way that human faces aren't it's open for captioning it can reflect whatever we want it to say only 2% of the cats on the planet are purebred or pedigreed cats however as there are more and more cats on the planet more and more sort of weird mutations crop up and I visited these very nice veterinarians who were breeding this kind of cat called the like oi or werewolf cat which favors a mutation for partial hairlessness and looks a little bit like a werewolf another interesting trend that's been going on in cat breeding is the mixing of domestic cats with other small cats like the Asian Leopard Cat and often these cats have a temperament to match their wild looks and a lot of them end up badly in shelters and even big cat shelters I think our obsession with cats shows how much we can connect still with animals and how much we want to give and can't give money at the same time I think that the way we see them is sort of little fur dolls basically are these internet stars kind of speaks to our nature of humans to sort of pretend that these animals are doing our bidding when actually they have wormed their way into every niche on the planet practically and run roughshod over us in a lot of ways you know when you look down at your cat don't say oh there's a fur baby say oh there's the hyper carnivore and I think that that will only increase your appreciation for cats to sort of know the journey that they've undergone and the odds that they beat to come and sit on your lap [Music] you

Channel: The New Yorker

Views: 1,058,096

Rating: 4.8750448 out of 5

Keywords: biology, cat, cat history, cat obsessions, cat science, cat video, cat videos, cats, cats internet, cats meowing, cats vs, history of cats, house cats, how cats work, internet cats, kitten, kitty, lions in the living room, new yorker cats, new yorker obsessions, obsessed, obsessed with cats, obsessions, science, science behind cats, science of cats, the new yorker, why cats, why we love cats

Id: 8ZgjNeXXTjU

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 27 2018