Felis Catus: A Touch of the Wild

Felis catus. She is the only domesticated animal among the family felidae, believed to have first domesticated themselves around 7500 BCE in the Near East. First attracted to human settlements by the rodent populations gathered around our ancient ancestors' grain stores, cats have settled comfortably into their role as some of humans' oldest companions.

My cat Juno, photographed above, came into my life eight years ago. I had just moved into my own place for the first time, an antique craftsman bungalow I shared with three other college students. Having grown up with a succession of cats, always getting fussed at by my dad for bringing another stray home, the last thing on my mind in the fall of 2013 was adopting another one.

I don't know who shared Juno's picture from Georgia's Floyd County Animal Control to my social media feed, but when I saw that she was on the kill list, a list of all the animals to be euthanized the very next day, something moved in my heart and I knew I needed to give her a home. I shared the photo of her, just a tiny kitten against the concrete shelter wall, with my boyfriend and he fell in love, too. He pawned a wristwatch for the gas money to drive up to Floyd County from our city and paid the $35 adoption fee to bring her home.

She has been my very best cat. She has lived with me in four states. When I married that same boyfriend three years after we adopted her, hers was the whiskered face we came home to. Full of personality, she has never met a stranger and everyone who visits remarks on her friendliness.

In her middle age, approaching her golden years, she is quite the cuddler. She has slept in the bed with me since she was a baby, but these days she will also jump up into my lap and purr for hours. I work from home and during the quiet of the day, while the rest of the family is out, she is my constant companion, often lounging in a patch of sunshine on my desk while I write.

Occasionally, I still see the wild feline in her come out. When a cardinal lands on a branch outside the window, when a rabbit hops through the backyard, her pupils narrow, her tail twitches, and she forgets me entirely for a few moments as all of her instincts tell her to do that which brought her ancestors and mine together in the first place: hunt. Or, as pictured above, she remembers her sisal scratching post and her instincts remind her that she must neglect her patch in the sunshine to sharpen those which enable her to kill: claws.

But more often than not, we get along in the domestic hum of household life. I scratch between her ears, she warms my feet in the cold of winter's night. I scoop her litterbox, she delights me with acrobatics and antics. I talk to her in English, she unfailingly meows back. We may not speak the same language, Juno and I, but we have a primal understanding that traverses the boundaries of language and species, an abiding friendship that will always bind felis catus and homo sapiens together through the eons.

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I took this shot with the camera on my iPhone 11 Pro in spring of 2019 as my cat used her scratching post in a dark room in our home. I took several shots in quick succession and happened to catch this one of her looking at me. I love the way her pupils are narrowed and how I can see so many details of her pattern and unique markings. The photo has not been edited or retouched.

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Many thanks to Hamish Alexander for educating fellow writers about ethical animal photography and photograph captioning norms in his article "Truth in Captioning" - I learned something new and it helped me caption my photo accurately!

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