Fotografía de autor
2+ Obras 440 Miembros 24 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Abigail Tucker's work has been featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, a yearly anthology. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World, named a Best Science Book of 2016 by Library Journal and Forbes, mostrar más now translated into thirteen languages. A correspondent for Smithsonian magazine, she lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband and four (equally amazing) children. mostrar menos

Obras de Abigail Tucker

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The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (2011) — Contribuidor — 287 copias

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Conocimiento común

Género
female
Nacionalidad
USA
Agente
Scott Waxman
Biografía breve
Abigail Tucker is a correspondent for Smithsonian magazine, where she has covered a wide range of topics from vampire anthropology to bioluminescent marine life to the archaeology of ancient beer. Her work has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series and recognized by the National Academy of Sciences. [from The Lion in the Living Room (2016)]

Miembros

Reseñas

I picked up this book because I have recently merged my solo feline with my husband’s solo feline, and it has been an uneasy process at best, so I was hoping to gain some insights. What I have learned is that the partnership between humans and cats is highly unlikely, as cats are naturally disinclined to hang out with any other animals, including humans, and have thrived for hundreds of years even when we have done our best to get rid of them. In fact, in trying to discover what mistakes my husband and I made while integrating our pets, I learned that even owning a cat, keeping this apex predator trapped inside our house, deprived of its natural instincts to hunt and bask in independence, while being constantly subjected to sensory irritants (not to mention company), is the peak of selfish cruelty. Cats have been solitary beasts since they evolved on the planet, and with the exception of their size, their bodies, instincts and manners have hardly changed in all that time. For some reason humans became fascinated with them and decided we needed to shack up with them, but it is not a particularly suitable match. This book contains tons of information about cats and our relationship with them. Were my questions answered? Unfortunately, some of them were, but the fact is that I have been a cat owner for nearly 50 years, and that’s not about to change.… (más)
 
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karenchase | 22 reseñas más. | Jun 14, 2023 |
This should have been a better book; Tucker is a self professed, life long lover of cats, and I understand her need to be objective about the subject matter - I applaud it, even. But just about all of this book felt like an apology, or an over-correction of bias. Or both.

The Introduction professes the text to be an overview of the history of cats as domesticated animals and their intersection with culture and pop culture. It mostly succeeds, but really, just barely. I think her motivation underneath it all is to point out that cats are cats and cats do what cats do, but humans are, at the end of the day, at the heart of the destruction that cats get blamed for. After all, without human interference and transportation, house cats would still be a wild animal confined to the region around Turkey. Unfortunately, if that's the message she intended, she was a little too subtle about it.

There were highlights; I loved that she pointed out that cats are the only domesticated animal that chooses to be domesticated and the only domesticated animal that can successfully return to the wild. When people say cats are independent, I don't perhaps think they realise just how independent they truly are. I admire them for that.

Otherwise, I mostly just argued with the text as I read it, and all in all I found The Inner Life of Cats: The Science and Secrets of Our Mysterious Feline Companions by Thomas McNamee to be a superior text all the way around. I learned a lot from that book, and it left me with a lot to think about. This one, I was just mostly happy to have finished.
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murderbydeath | 22 reseñas más. | Jun 2, 2022 |
This came across my attention in a "recommended" list and, as I live in a house with five cats for now and am always curious about these little carnivores, ... I set aside time to read it. A tad academic in presentation, it is unfortunately packaged for the mildly curious because it bears the sin of no citations in the text. Oh, there are notes in the back, but they are the type led by the sentence fragment indicator with no other links to - or more importantly, in - the text (I will allow that in the etext, the notes do hyperlink back to the text, but that does no one any good while reading the book!. Useless unless you want to go back and read the book again, from the back, and even then, useless. (It takes nothing in this modern age of digital composition and printing to include a tiny superscript. And it doesn’t “interrupt the flow”. Rant off.)

Some of this I knew, and some was an eye-opener, such as the pervasiveness of Toxoplasma, an organism that can only multiply in cat intestines, yet has been found in humpback whale brains! One researcher tested cat DNA from all over the world
The project took nearly ten years but the results were worth the wait: from blue-blooded Persians to mangy strays, from Manhattan’s street-smart alley cats to the ferals of the New Zealand forest, it turns out that all house cats come not from a genetic mash-up of many feline species but only from Felis silvestris. More astonishingly, they are descended solely from the lybica subspecies, the Near Eastern type native to southern Turkey, Iraq, and Israel, where it still lives today.
And that cats and mice/rats are not the cartoon enemies, as researcher Jamie Childs learned, showing the author night photographs "In one image, “the bulwark of Western society’s defense” pointedly ignores “mankind’s greatest natural enemy” scurrying just a few inches away. Kittens and adult rats stand close enough to touch." He said "I never saw a cat kill a rat." Cats follow rats because rats know where the trash is and cats will scavenge.

"The International Union for Conservation of Nature ranks house cats as one of the world’s 100 worst invasive species, an unusually glamorous addition to the icky litany of advancing fungi, mollusks, shrubs, and other brainless, aimless beings." (I wonder where Homo sapiens ranks...) The author says that once cats are entrenched in an ecosystem, they are almost impossible to dislodge. It took from 1977 to 1991 for scientists and professional hunters (who continued for two years after to be sure) to eradicate cats from the Maron Island, and
Likewise, the hard-won victory over the house cats of tiny San Nicolas Island, off the coast of California, was a “monumental achievement ” for the United States Navy, according to the commanding officer overseeing the missile-testing base there. It took years of planning, 18 months of trapping, and $3 million to expel the cats, which were hunting an endemic deer mouse and a federally protected species of night lizard. The cat stalkers had to be careful not to disturb Native American archaeological sites and to use special radio channels so they didn’t accidentally trigger naval munitions. Meanwhile, the battle-tested cats employed guerrilla tactics, eluding dogs and custom-built computerized traps and spurning “felid-attracting phonics,” aka digitally recorded meows. Finally, a professional bobcat hunter finished the job.
I was there on San Nic a few times in the late 1990s. There weren’t that many cats then (and the Island fox was still quite endangered) but this doesn’t surprise me. In New Zealand, Gareth Morgan says “Every animal has its place in this world, but this one is so protected that it’s proliferated to an extreme extent.”

Thoughts on humans as prey,
Our [current] 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
[Well actually…. latest research indicates bipedal hominids originated outside, then migrated to, Africa, which casts doubts on the whole tree to plains theory]
[...]
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.
Curious hypotheses.

On the Trap-Neuter-Release efforts
“Cats are reproductive machines,” says the Tufts University veterinarian Robert McCarthy. “All you need is males and females around. I pulled every paper. There is zero—zero—data that TNR works. It just doesn’t work at the level that it needs to work. If you have 100 cats and you neuter 30 of them, it’s not like the problem is 30 percent better. It’s nothing. You didn’t make any progress. It’s zero percent better.”
I know from experience with a much smaller pest. I spent three hours back in 2013 snaring 300 of the 1000 or so gambusia in my pond and it dawned on me that all I had left was 700 smarter and faster fish. Miss a few cats and you've probably Darwined the same.

On that Toxoplamosa parasite, it seems to have a beneficial effect for the predator cat:

From the perspective of a parasite transmitted via cat poop, this inbred terror of cat pee would be “a huge obstacle in transmission,” says Joanne Webster, who led the Oxford study. “We wanted to see if the parasite could dampen down that effect.” What they observed was more than a dampening—the parasite seemed to completely mute the rats’ fear instinct. The infected rodents no longer avoided cat urine. “It actually made them attracted,” Webster says.[...]The finding, which has since been replicated in many other labs, jibed with scientists’ growing interest in the so-called manipulation hypothesis.
And not just cat prey; other infected animals (example given, Monterey Bay sea otters) are more likely to fall prey to larger predators. And the human effects?
Even in people with healthy immune systems, researchers are now picking up correlations between the parasite and a laundry list of ailments: Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, obesity, brain cancer (an especially contested association), migraines, depression, bipolar disorder, infertility, heightened aggression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. A University of Chicago study recently noted a connection to road rage incidents.
Yes, correlations are not causation, but if you can't find any other reasonable cause...?

I made a lot of other notes... if you have cats, you might want to read this. (I rather liked the clever clever chapter titles, too.)
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Razinha | 22 reseñas más. | Nov 4, 2021 |
I thought that this was a very uneven book. She discusses wild cats, but in this review I will be discussing house cats. There are a lot of interesting things in it such as the very widely spread Toxoplasmosis infections. and the problem of trying to defend wildlife against cats, as if they didn't have enough problems with humans. I was interested to read that Tucker attributes bird extinctions on Guam to cats. In The Island of the Colorblind, by Oliver Sacks, the bird extinctions were attributed to another invasive species, brown snakes. Tucker grew up in a cat-loving family, and she has her own cat, Cheetoh, so it is interesting and admirable to she can bring the amount of skepticism to the subject that she does.

Tucker also tries to get us to accept some hard facts. There isn't enough room for all the cats in the world, and us, come to that, and wild species. This is something that a lot of of self-proclaimed animals lovers like Becky Robinson of Alley Cat Allies and philosopher Christine M. Korsgaard who wrote Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals don't care to acknowledge. Apparently they feel that it is not right for us to kill off invasive species that we have introduced, but it's alright to allow numerous species to be wiped out by them. Thus we are guilty, but not supposed to do anything to reverse the harm that we have done. Yes, feral cats want to live, but so do the mice, voles, birds, and whatever goes into their hypercarnivore food.

On the other hand, Tucker frequently contradicts herself, as least in part because she loves the scenario of how we have been bewitched by cats, who do nothing for us, and domesticated us. She argues that cats are worthless as rat killers, except for small rats. She admits that they may have killed mice who were attracted by granaries, but prefers to focus on their deficiencies at killing rats. She also tells us that urban cats live side by side with rats, but then tells us that rats are terrified by cat urine. I don't know about other cultures, but it seems amazing to me that westerners have mistakenly thought for thousands of years that cats kill mice and rats. This might be a matter of context -- as she mentions a number of times, cats are fairly flexible in how they get their protein. It may be that cats onboard ships, for example, who have limited choices of what to hunt, are better ratters and mousers than cats who can eat at modern garbage dumps. Jon Katz, in his book A Good Dog, tells us that his farm was troubled by rats, and got a cat who turned out to be quite good at killing them.

Getting back to Toxoplasma gondii, which reproduces only in cat guts. Having told us that cats don't eat rats and mice, Tucker argues that the disease, which causes rats to lose their fear of cats, is then returned to cat guts when the cats eat the rats. It also spreads to many other species, like human beings, through other vectors. She does bring up some very sobering facts about it - the hypothesis that it may be involved with schizophrenia, which she argues did not exist prior to 1900. It seems to be a benign, dormant infection in adults, although devastating to developing fetuses, but perhaps it is actually and subtly serious among adults as well.

Tucker also talks about how cats are solitary, and don't like other cats, and need large territories. Then she talks about cat colonies without blinking at the contradiction. According to The Domestic Cat : the Biology of its Behaviour, edited by Dennis C. Turner and Patrick Bateson, which I thought seemed much more evidenced based than this book, cats are quite flexible about their living arrangements. Their territoriality is based heavily upon the available resources. Male cats' territories may overlap with the territories of several females. Cats may share territories but still avoid one another by not being in particular areas at the same time. They may also live in matriarchal lineage colonies, with female siblings sharing nests and kitten care. If there is a very rich resource, such as a garbage dumps, different colonies will share, with each having a small territory with respect to the dump, and a larger adjacent territory. My admittedly limited experience is that when people adopt siblings from the same litter, they tend to be perfectly happy living together, and may even seem fond of one another.

Tucker spends a lot of time speculating about the reasons why cat videos are such a hit on the internet - are the relatively impassive faces of cats a sort of emoticon onto which we can past our own feelings? One thing that we should keep in mind, however, and which Tucker does mention, but doesn't always think about, is that our modern attitude toward cats developed only in the last couple of hundred years. Just because modern cat cafes remind Tucker of Egyptian festivals of Bastet, doesn't mean that this indicates something that applies in all times and places and therefore is inherent to cat-human relations. Our relationship to cats is not necessarily entirely about them, but also about the culture in which they find themselves. This also feeds into animals rights, and the belief that whatever animals we are focusing on at the time, have an absolute right to life, even when this leads to the death of other animals and the destruction of vulnerable species, as mentioned above.

The part that I found in some ways astounding, and in other ways, not so surprising, is the idea of Catification, the modern version of cat worship. There is a long-standing belief, especially in religions, that there is some inherent virtue to suffering: fasting, whipping oneself, abstaining from the usual pleasures of life, and other forms of self-denial. I can understand the use of this attitude in theology, given the Problem of Evil, but it spills over into secular life as well. Partly this is for reasons similar to its religious uses - a means of dismissing other people's sorrows, and being smug. It shows up in cat-owning, as well: "In her full-color manifesto for a feline-centric life philosophy, [. . . ] Benjamin calls on cat owners to embrace what she calls Catification [. . . which ] represents the 'maturation of us as human beings.' To learn 'the language of cats,' to sacrifice our livings spaces for their sake. 'is a symbol of our evolution.' "

Of course, Kate Benjamin is the one who owns Hauspanther.com, and stands and stands to make a lot of money selling gear to cat-owners. If people want to redo their homes entirely to suit their cats, that's their privilege, but the judgements she passes on people who don't measure up to her standards (or buy her products?) are completely out of line, in my opinion. I am not a big fan of smug belligerence. There is no human being, child, spouse, parent, boss, friend, or lover for whom I would be as self-effacing as Benjamin, et al., think we should be to cats.

Very worth reading on some subjects, but rather confused on others.
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PuddinTame | 22 reseñas más. | Jun 11, 2021 |

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