The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World - Softcover

Abigail Tucker was the first ever staff writer for Smithsonian magazine, where she remains a contributor. She previously wrote for The Baltimore Sun. Her work has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. The first word of both of her daughters was “cat.” She is the author of The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World.

The Lion in the Living Room Chapter 1

CATACOMBS

BUBBLING AWAY on Wilshire Boulevard in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, the La Brea Tar Pits look like pools of toxic black taffy. California colonists once harvested tar here to waterproof their roofs, but today these asphalt seeps are far more precious to paleontologists studying Ice Age wildlife. All kinds of fantastic animals mired themselves in the sticky death traps: Columbian mammoths with pretzeled tusks, extinct camels, errant eagles.

But most famous of all are the La Brea cats.

At least seven types of prehistoric feline inhabited Beverly Hills 11,000 years ago and earlier: close relatives of modern bobcats and mountain lions but also several vanished species. More than 2,000 skeletons of Smilodon populator—the biggest and scariest of the saber-tooth cats—have been recovered from the 23-acre excavation site, making it the largest such trove on the planet.

It’s late morning. The asphalt is softening as the day warms and the air smells like melting pavement. Ugly black bubbles popping on the tar pits’ surface make it look as though a monster is breathing just beneath. My eyes water a bit from the fumes and, plunging a stick into the goo, I find that I can’t pull it out.

“You only need an inch or two to immobilize a horse,” says John Harris, chief curator of the museum here. “A giant sloth would get stuck like a fly on flypaper.” There’s a touch of pride in his voice.

The only way to get the asphalt off your skin is to massage it with mineral oil or butter, as a few local fraternity pranksters have learned the hard way. Given time enough, the tar even seeps into bone, preserving the remains of the giant animals that died in agony here so well that pit specimens aren’t even truly turned-to-stone fossils. Drilling into a preserved saber-tooth rib produces the same smell you get at the dentist’s office: burning collagen. It smells alive.

In the murk of the tar pits, I’m searching for clues to the primordial human-feline relationship. Human patronage of cats, which seems so intuitive to us, is in reality a quite recent and radical arrangement. Though we’ve shared the earth for millions of years, the cat family and mankind have never gotten along before, much less gotten cozy on the couch. Our competing needs for meat and space make us natural enemies. Far from sharing food, humans and felines have spent most of our long mutual history snatching each other’s meals and masticating each other’s mangled remains—though to be perfectly honest, mostly they ate us.

It was cats like the La Brea saber-tooths, colossal cheetahs, and giant cave lions—and later their modern-day heirs—that dominated the untamed planet. Our prehistoric forebears shared habitats with these sorts of behemoths in parts of the Americas, and in Africa we tangled with various species of saber-tooths for millions of years. So powerful was the ancient feline influence that cats may have helped make us human in the first place.

In a storage room, Harris shows off the milk teeth of a Smilodon kitten. They are almost four inches long.

“How did they nurse?” I ask.

“Very carefully,” he answers.

The adult upper canine teeth are eight inches; their shape reminds me of a reaper’s blade. I run my finger along the serrated inner curve and get the chills. Scientists still don’t know much about these animals—researchers once made a steel model of saber-tooth jaws in an effort to figure out how in the world they chewed, and “we only recently learned to tell male from female,” Harris admits—but it’s safe to say they would have been absolutely terrifying. Weighing about 400 pounds, they likely used their burly forelimbs to wrestle down mastodons before stabbing their saber teeth through the thick skin of the prey animals’ necks.

Then my eyes stray to a nearby skeleton of an American lion, which stood a head taller than the saber-tooths and probably weighed about 800 pounds enfleshed.

So this is what our ancestors were up against.

The sheer awesomeness of such predators, and the grisly legacy of our interactions with them, make it especially remarkable that today people are on the cusp of wiping the cat family off the face of the earth. Most modern cat species, big and small, are now in grave decline, losing ground to humans daily.

With one exception, that is. Harris marches me out to an ongoing pit excavation near one of the oozing seeps not far from the museum’s door. As two women in tar-smudged T-shirts chip away at a Smilodon femur, there’s a sudden brownish blur around my ankles, and up hops Bob, a tailless female house cat with a potbelly and a proprietary air. The giggling excavators tell me how they rescued her from the traffic accident in which she forfeited her tail and then nursed her back to health. “No more surprise mice,” one woman says, patting Bob’s amputated rump.

Which is stranger, I wonder: the fact that Beverly Hills is a graveyard for giant local lions, or that a tiny, unassuming feline stowaway originally from the Middle East thrives here today?

But in fact, the house cat’s rise is the flip side of the lion’s ruin. The story of the cat family’s ongoing downfall helps explain what organisms like Bob and Cheetoh and all of our beloved house cats really are: fully loaded feline predators, like lynx or jaguars or any other kind of cat, but also extreme biological outliers.

Absent human civilization, the Greater Los Angeles area could still be a prime habitat for the native cats that survived the Ice Age. A few straggling mountain lions continue to haunt the Santa Monica Mountains, though the population is hopelessly isolated and inbred and the rare kittens often end up as highway roadkill. A mountain lion known as P-22 was recently photographed loitering in the hills beneath the Hollywood sign, and gazing out over the glowing city at night.

But it’s Bob who rules the tar pits now.



The La Brea saber-tooths and giant lions died out around the end of the last Ice Age for unknown reasons. But we can piece together the narrative of why most of the surviving wild cats—even the smaller species, some of which look very much like our beloved house pets—are in dire trouble today. The story begins where so many of our ancestors ended: inside the mouth of a cat.

The cat family is part of the mammalian order Carnivora, the “flesh devourers.” All carnivores, from wolves to hyenas, eat flesh as part of their diet, and why wouldn’t they? Meat is a precious resource, full of fat and protein and wonderfully easy to digest. But it’s also hard to come by, and so most animals, including almost all of those classified as carnivores, pad their diets with other food groups. In the bear family, for instance, black bears chomp acorns and tubers with plant-crushing molars that wouldn’t look out of place in the mouth of a cow; pandas famously subsist on bamboo; and even the big-fanged polar bear occasionally munches on berries.

Not cats. From the two-pound rusty-spotted cat to the 600-pound Siberian tiger, all three dozen or so cat species are what biologists call hypercarnivores. They eat pretty much nothing but meat. The plant-chewing molars of cats have shrunk to a vestigial size, like something a child would leave for the tooth fairy, and the rest of their teeth are extremely tall and sharp, a mix of steak knives and scissors. (The difference between a cat’s teeth and a bear’s is like the Alps versus the Appalachians.) Though called canines, the killing teeth at the front of the mouth are actually larger in cats than in dogs, which should come as no surprise: cats require three times as much protein in their diets as dogs, and kittens need four times as much. Dogs can even get by on a vegan diet, but cats can’t synthesize key fatty acids on their own—they must get them from other animals’ bodies.

The singular purpose of a cat’s teeth—butchery—explains why all cat maws look alike, even to biologists. The jaws of an insect-sucking sun bear look nothing like a grizzly’s, but sometimes even experts can’t tell a lion’s from a tiger’s because they are designed for exactly the same job.

So it goes for the rest of cats’ bodies. There are tremendous, almost comic differences in body size—some cats are 14 inches long from tip to tail, and some are 14 feet—but very few differences in form. “The important thing about big cats and small cats is not that they are different but that they are the same,” Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes in The Tribe of the Tiger, her history of the feline family. House cats and tigers, she says, are “the alpha and omega of their kind.” Sure, tigers have stripes, lions have manes, and pumas have eight nipples while margays have two. But the blueprint endures: long legs, powerful forelimbs, flexible spine, a tail (sometimes up to half the length of the body) for balance, and short guts for digesting meat and meat alone. Cats are armed with retractable claws, sentient whiskers, and ears that rotate for uncanny directional hearing and the broadest possible auditory range. With eyes located at the front of the face, they possess excellent binocular and night vision. Cat skulls are domed and their faces round and short with powerfully anchored jaw muscles, a design that maxes out bite force at the front of the mouth.

Whether the prey is bunny rabbit or water buffalo, almost all cats (with the notable exception of ultraspeedy cheetahs) hunt in the same way: stalk, ambush, tackle, and enjoy. Even lazy Cheetoh hunts like this, plump rear wiggling in anticipation as he pounces on a hapless shoelace. Cats are largely visual predators and depend on surprise, delivering the killing bite by sliding their canines between neck vertebrae like (as the animal behaviorist Paul Leyhausen puts it) “a key in a lock.” Cats can get the best of animals up to three times their size, and their ambitions don’t always stop there: as a child, I used to watch one of our Siamese stalk deer, crouching on boulders above the oblivious herd.

The modern Felidae have enjoyed worldwide success for ten million years or more, across a remarkable range of habitats. Cats are partial to the tropical forests of Asia, but the feline archetype performs in almost all climates: the snow leopard in the Himalayas, the jaguar in the Amazon, even the sand cat in the heart of the Sahara. Thousands of years ago, lions lived not just in Beverly Hills but also in Devon, England, and Peru—pretty much everywhere on earth except for Australia and Antarctica. Lions are believed to have been the most widely distributed wild land mammal ever, king of a thousand jungles plus deserts and marshes and mountain ranges in between.

What wild cats need to succeed is space. This is why, in nature, they are typically less common than other big carnivores like bears and hyenas. Even the littlest cats need comparatively huge tracts of land to harvest the necessary animal protein. A very rough rule of thumb is that 100 pounds of prey animals living in an environment can support one pound of resident carnivore. But for hypercarnivores, the stakes are even higher. These animals have no evolutionary backup plan. They must kill or die. In fact, cats quite frequently kill each other. Lions eat cheetahs, leopards eat caracals, caracals eat African wild cats. Cats even dispatch members of their own species, and this animosity—in addition to their secretive hunting style, and a given ecosystem’s inability to support large numbers of them—explains why most are solitary creatures.



Although humans devour stunning quantities of flesh these days, we are not members of the carnivore family. We are primates. Our great ape relatives don’t eat much meat, and neither did our early human-like kin, who started coming down out of the trees in Africa 6 or 7 million years ago, long after cats had settled into their spot at the tippy-top of the food chain.

Not only did we not eat meat, we generously supplied it in the form of our bodies and our babies. A host of creatures dined on us: supersize eagles, crocodiles, bus-length snakes, archaic bears, carnivorous kangaroos, and maybe jumbo otters. But even amid such fearsome company, cats were almost certainly our most formidable predators.

Humanity’s early ancestors came of age in Africa during the “heyday of cats,” according to anthropologist Robert Sussman, whose book, Man the Hunted, details our history as a prey animal. In regions where we “overlapped” with cats, he tells me, “they took advantage of us completely”—dragging us into caves, devouring us in trees, caching our eviscerated corpses in their lairs. Indeed, we might not know nearly so much about human evolution if not for big cat kills. The world’s oldest fully preserved skull representing the Homo genus, known as Skull Number 5, was recovered from caves in Dmanisi, Georgia, which likely served as a sort of picnicking ground for extinct giant cheetahs. In caves in South Africa, paleontologists endlessly puzzled over piles of hominid and other primate bones, trying to figure out the source of the carnage. Had our forefathers massacred each other? Then somebody noticed that the holes in some skulls lined up perfectly with leopard fangs.

The contemporary landscape also gives clues about the toll that cats likely took on us. Sussman and his colleague, Donna Hart, surveyed modern primate predation data and found that the cat family is still responsible for more than a third of all primate kills. (Dogs and hyenas account for just 7 percent.) One study at Kenya’s Mount Suswa lava caves showed that leopards there eat baboons and practically nothing else. Even our strongest, smartest living kin can fall prey to felines half their size: scientists have picked stubby black lowland gorilla toes out of leopard poop and chimpanzee teeth from lion feces.

Scientists are just starting to formally study our own legacy as prey, finding, for instance, that our color vision and depth perception may have first evolved as a system for detecting snakes. Experiments have shown that even very young children are better at recognizing the shapes of serpents than lizards; they also spot lions faster than antelope. Antipredation strategies persist in a host of modern human behaviors, from our tendency to go into labor in the deepest part of night (many of our predators would have hunted at dawn and dusk) to, perhaps, our appreciation of eighteenth-century landscape paintings, whose sweeping vistas give the pleasing sense that we would have seen danger coming before it ever got close. The goose bumps that I felt at La Brea, while holding a saber-tooth’s fangs, date back to a time when my body hair would have stood on end at a predator’s approach—making me appear larger and, I hope, intimidating.

Predation pressure likely also helped shape our body size and posture (tall, upright bodies allowed us to scan more distant horizons), our preference for community and social life (a glorified form of safety in numbers), and our sophisticated forms of communication. Even less exalted primate relatives like vervet monkeys...