Ebook: The Behaviour of the Domestic Cat

Describing feline behavior from both a mechanistic and functional approach, this textbook provides an accessible overview of this fascinating subject. The book begins by addressing physiological, developmental and psychological aspects, with chapters on domestication, the development of the senses, learning, communication and feeding behavior. The authors then build on this foundation to discuss social behavior, hunting and predation, cat-human interactions and welfare. Fully updated throughout, this new edition also includes two new chapters on behavioral disorders due to pathologies and from misdirected natural behavior.

"This book brings together many disparate studies of the behaviour of F. catus,
and attempts to marry together the more mechanistic approach (how do patterns
of behaviour come about?) with the functional (what are those patterns for, and
how do they benefit the animal?). It may seem unusual to ask functional
questions about the behaviour of a domestic animal, but although for many
individual cats both feeding and breeding are largely controlled by man, many
others live much more independently and are not only subject to natural
selection but, through their predatory behaviour, are themselves a selection
pressure on other species. This book therefore covers cats across all their current
lifestyles, from neutered pet to fully independent (‘feral’).
Unlike the domestic dog, which has seen a resurgence in research interest
over the past decade, several aspects of the cat’s behaviour have received
relatively little attention since the publication of the first edition of this book in
1992. These include the cat’s sensory and learning abilities and its repertoire of
visual signals. However, major advances have been made in several areas,
including cat welfare, social behaviour and domestication, and especially in our
understanding and treatment of behavioural disorders, coverage of which has
been expanded from one chapter to two.
From a biological perspective, it is often useful to compare one species’
behaviour with that of related species, in this case doubly so, since hybrids
between the domestic cat and other small felids are beginning to appear as pets.
The first chapter deals with these issues, including the genetic relationship
between the domestic cat and the rest of its family, the Felidae, and the basis for
its domestication. The next two chapters attempt to describe the world in thecat’s own terms: what it can see, hear, smell and feel, and how it can bring all
this incoming information together so that its surroundings make sense. This is
worth establishing at the outset, because their perception of the world, while
overlapping with ours, also provides them with information that is not directly
accessible to us, especially that provided by the cat’s olfactory apparatus.
Furthermore, cat intelligence has been portrayed in many ways, from the early
behaviourists’ picture of a near-automaton to the anthropomorphic
sentimentalization of the popular literature; Chapter 3 redresses the balance in
favour of modern scientific thinking. Subsequent chapters deal with more
specialized aspects of cat behaviour, such as reproduction, development,
communication, hunting and feeding. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 are based around a
common theme, that of the cat’s social abilities. The complex social interactions
between cats, many of which we do not yet fully understand, have forced
biologists to reinterpret not only the cat’s relationship with its conspecifics but
also the bond with its owner, and considerations of its welfare.
The concluding chapters, building on those that precede them, lay out our
current understanding of ‘behaviour problems’ in cats, divided into those which
are essentially normal behaviours for cats but which owners find undesirable
(Chapter 11) and those caused or influenced by pathological or physiological
factors (Chapter 12)."