Sand cats come back to Israel

A rather sweeter piece of news: In Israeli zoo, newborn kittens bring sand cats back from extinction.

Mazal tov! A breed of cat that was extinct in Israel has found new life at Ramat Gan Safari Park. Rotem, a sand cat from Germany, and Sela, from Poland, are the proud purring parents of four little kittens – two boys and two girls – who were born in Israel earlier this month. 

According to Keren Or, Zoological Information Coordinator at the Ramat Gan Safari Park, the "sand cat is an extinct species in Israel, although in the world it's not extinct, it's nearly threatened." In an interview with Reuters, Or added that "here in Israel, it has been extinct because it was pushed away from the sand by other mammals." 

Sand cats are true desert cats that have a high mortality rate among newborns in captivity, according to Reuters. But these kittens are doing fine so far.

Their ears are so big! In comparison, a photo of my cat Zachary.

Jerusalem street cats

Two Jerusalem cats at 12 Elazar ha-Modai St.

 Because so many people make their way to this blog when they are searching for cats online, I decided to put "Jerusalem street cats" into Google, and discovered that this blog in fact is the first hit. There were some other interesting sites after it - one a Facebook page whose goal is protect the neglected street cats of Jerusalem. Another was an article on the cats of Jerusalem by Basem Raad in the Jerusalem Quarterly, published by the Institute of Jerusalem Studies. While the article makes a number of questionable assertions, it is also an affecting, humane meditation on the street cats and how they are mistreated by people. He writes:

Something similar happens with cats and people in the old streets of Jerusalem. Jerusalem cats stand apart; they are and are not like other cats. What is striking is the absolute non-pet nature of their existence and the feline grace some of them can exhibit, even under conditions of hardship. I am speaking of the many street cats, not the ones owned by west Jerusalem Israelis who have come from the West and imported that pet culture (and sometimes the pets themselves) with them, or the few cats kept by “aristocratic” Palestinian families in east Jerusalem who generally keep their pets locked up inside. That kind of culture comes with luxury. The “non-pets” are the many feral cats on the streets, mostly on the east side of the city or within the confines of the Old City walls.

It is actually not true that feral cats are mostly on the eastern side of the city - there are many street cats in West Jerusalem as well, and they are generally subjected to the same sad fate as the east Jerusalem and Old City street cats that he writes about.

The author argues also that the English name "cat" probably comes from North African and Asiatic roots, which I suppose is possible, but the Oxford English Dictionary's entry on the etymology of the word does not mention such an origin.

Etymology:  The Middle English and modern cat corresponds at once to Old English cat and Old Northern French cat. The name is common European of unknown origin: found in Latin and Greek in 1–4th cent., and in the modern languages generally, as far back as their records go. Byzantine Greek had κάττα (in Cæsarius c350) and later κάττος, as familiar terms = αἴλουρος; modern Greek has γάτα from Italian. Latin had catta in Martial a100, and in the Old Latin Bible version (‘Itala’), where it renders αἴλουρος. Palladius, ? c350, has catus, elsewhere scanned cātus (Lewis and Short), and probably in both cases properly cattus. From cattus, catta, came all the Romanic forms, Italian gatto, Spanish gato, Portuguese gato, Catalan gat, Provencal cat, Old Northern French cat, French chat, with corresponding feminines gatta, gata, cata, cate, chate, chatte. The Germanic forms recorded are Old English cat, catt, Old Norse kött-r ( < kattuz) masculine, genitive kattar (Swedish katt, Danish kat); also Old English catte ? feminine, West Germanic *katta (Middle Low German katte, Middle Dutch katte, kat, Dutch kat, also Swedish katta), Old High German chazzâ (Middle High German, modern German katze) feminine; Old High German had also chataro, Middle High German katero, kater, modern German and Dutch kater, he-cat. The Germanic types of these would be *kattuz (masculine), *kattôn- (feminine), *kat(a)zon- masculine; but as no form of the word is preserved in Gothic, it is not certain that it goes back to the Germanic period. It was at least West Germanic c400–450. It is also in Celtic: Old Irish cat (masculine), Gaelic cat com., Welsh and Cornish cath (feminine), Breton kaz, Vannes kac'h m. Also in Slavonic, with type kot-: Old Slavonic kot'ka (feminine), Bulgarian kotka, Slovene kot (masculine), Russian kot (masculine), kotchka, koshka (feminine), Polish kot (koczur m.), Bohemian kot (masculine), kotka (feminine), Sorbian kotka; also Lithuanian kate; Finnish katti.

On the other hand, the Arabic word for "cat" does seem very similar to the Indo-European. From Wiki Answers:

A male cat = qitt قطّ
A female cat = qitta قطّة
Cats = qitat قطط

The Hebrew word for "cat" is unrelated - it is חתול or חתולה - hatul (masc.) or hatulah (fem.).

Cats!

I'm tired of politics, it's time for some cat pictures. The orange cat is Zachary, and the grey, black, and white one is Winkle.

Zachary

 

 

Winkle

Small plane flying above

5 Nisan - five days since the new moon.

A jet rushing to the east.

Winkle peering between the fence boards.

Happy eighth day of Hanukkah! חג אורים שמח!

Enough with the serious business - here are some photos of my Hanukkah candles tonight (first two photos). The third is a close-up photo of one of the rooms on a shelf I created with my childhood dollhouse furniture - the cat crouched to strike is a new acquisition. And the fourth is my very own cat, Zachary, looking up at me as I sit in front of the computer.

Sacred cats in Copenhagen

I just spent the day visiting museums in Copenhagen, including the ruins underneath the Christansborg castle, the Jewish museum, and the National Museum. At the last museum, I headed up to the third floor to see the Egyptian and classical galleries, and found some attractive displays. There were some charming little cat statues in one of the Egyptian galleries, dedicated to the goddess Bastet.

Sekhmet, sun and war goddess, from ca. 1403-1365, Luxor, Egypt

These two images are the enormous head and foot of a lion found at Hama, Syria - they guarded the royal citadel (ca. 900-720 BCE).

Street cats in Jerusalem

When I first got here in June I arrived just in time for Hebrew Book Week (שבוע הספר). I went off with a friend to the book fair at Gan ha-Pa'amon and bought a few books, including on on the development of the Old City of Jerusalem during the 19th century (Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century: The Old City, published by Yad Izhak Ben Zvi Institute in 1984). Another one is called חתולי הרחוב שלי ("My Street Cats") by Raphaella Bilski (published by Carmel, 2007). It's about her adventures with Jerusalem street cats over the last 14 years. She is a professor of government at the Hebrew University, focusing on politicaly philosophy.

This is a very sweet book, which reveals quite a bit about the author as well as the cats she writes about. She writes about the first cat who came to her garden - Kitsoshi, about how families of cats established themselves in her garden and in the cat pergola which she set up for them, about the friendship between cats (including two female cats who raised their kittens together), about the trauma when her neighbors become angry with her because she had so many cats in the garden and she has to send some of them away, about the territories of cats, about how the mothers train their kittens to be good hunters, etc. In the back of the book she gives several cat genealogies, including one for Kitzoshi. She gets very involved in the life of the cats, worries about them, raises abandoned kittens by hand, cries when they die - she is truly a fine cat lady and expresses well the untoward affection that some of us develop for cats.

Elms in the Yard, a Jerusalem blog, frequently posts photos of Jerusalem cats.

To the left is a photo I took in 2004 of a street cat in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.

More on cats

A friend just stopped by and told me about one of her projects while she's here in Jerusalem - she's photographing one cat a day and sending the picture to her daughter back home in the U.S. I told her about my interest in cat ancestry and the link between domestic cats and wildcats from the Middle East, which made me go back and look again at the New York Times article from 2007 that first piqued my interest in this question. The Times website provides a link to the article in Science from which the information was taken. Amidst the technique discussion of genetics, which I was not able to follow very well, there were some little poetic gems that expressed the conclusions of the article in more understandable language.

The domestic cat may be the world's most numerous pet, yet little is certain of the cat's origin. Archaeological remains and anthropological clues suggest that, unlike species domesticated for agriculture (e.g., cow, pig, and sheep) or transport (horse and donkey), the cat probably began its association with humans as a commensal, feeding on the rodent pests that infested the grain stores of the first farmers. The earliest evidence of cat-human association involves their co-occurrence in Cyprus deposits determined to be 9500 years old. Domestic cats are generally considered to have descended from the Old World wildcats, but they differ from these hypothesized progenitors in behavior, tameness, and coat color diversity....

These 15 individuals [Middle Eastern wildcats] had concordant mtDNA and STR phylogenies identical to those of domestic cats and were collected in remote deserts of Israel, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia. These data suggest that these Near Eastern wildcats may represent the ancestral founder population of domestic cats, supporting a domestication origin in the Near East....

The domestication of wild species to complement human civilization stands as one of the more successful "biological experiments" ever undertaken. For cats, the process began more than 9000 years ago when the earliest farmers of the Fertile Crescent domesticated grains and cereals as well as livestock. In parallel, the endemic wildcats of the region may have adapted by both regulating the rodents in the grain stores and abandoning their aggressive wild-born behaviors. The archaeological imprints left in the genomes of living cats here weigh into inferences about the timing, steps, and provenance of domestication—a dynamic exercise depicted in art, in history, and in human cultural development since recorded evidence began.

Much more pleasant to contemplate than humans rioting!