Ebook: The Curious Cat

"Early in 1978, as one of the harshest winters ever known in that part of the country was promising to turn into a North Devon spring, a small team of people began work in a barn and a hut not far from the Atlantic coast. They were preparing for a year during which they would study and film the behaviour of four cats, who would be allowed to roam free in the countryside. The project ended a year later. The ‘end product’, as far as most people were concerned, was a film called “The Curious Cat’, which was shown on BBC2 in the series The World About Us.
It all began as an idea from Peter Crawford, a producer with the BBC Natural History Unit. For some years Peter, a cat enthusiast, had cherished the notion of filming the behaviour of ordinary cats; for him the private lives of these familiar animals held as much fascination as the exotic wildlife more often featured on the television screen.

...The central question for everyone concerned the sociability of cats. Is the cat the solitary animal that features in our literature and folklore, or are there circumstances in which several cats will collaborate? In either case, what are the implications for our understanding of the cat family in general and of the position of the cat among carnivorous mammals? The Devon study was of short duration, the number of cats involved was very small, and predictably the results were tantalisingly inconclusive. Yet aspects of cat behaviour were observed by the scientists that had never been observed in this way before, and they were recorded on film for the first time. Despite its modest scale, the project broke new ground,and served as a focal point for new thinking about the nature of the cat.
The film proved highly popular, but there is a limit to the story any film can tell. In this book, as we tell the story again, we are able to expand, to include the material that could not be included in the film, and to relate what was seen to what we know already about cats and other animals. This is a book about cats, then, but especially it is a book about Tom, Smudge, Pickle, Domino and a very special kitten. In the course of the story we witness most of the events that are important in the life of a cat: mating, the birth of kittens, the ‘education’ of the kittens as they learn to fend for themselves, hunting, feeding, sleeping, sickness, injury and death. Our farm cats experienced all of these during that one short year. We look, too, at the way a scientific study of animal behaviour is organised and conducted, and at the equipment that is used, and we consider, briefly, the way this film was made. The film ended with the winter of 1978-79, but the project has continued back at Oxford University, and has flourished into a long-term study of animal behaviour."