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- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
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Dr. Jerry Moore
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Jerry Moore about his book titled Cat A History, published by Thames and Hodson in 2025. Now, this book is going to take us on a whole journey, all sorts of places, times, helping answer what seems like a really simple question. And in fact, it is a pretty simple question to ask. Turns out a complicated and fascinating one to answer. And the question is how did we go from hunting cats and in fact being hunted by cats to keeping them as cuddly pets in our homes, which is probably where we think about them more today. But as this book helps us understand that was not inevitable. And so that makes for a really interesting investigation in the book and I think for an interesting conversation here too today. So, Geri, thank you so much for joining me.
- [02:33]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:45]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Right. Well, I'm an archaeologist and I have done most of my archaeological research in Peru and Mexico as well as here in the Western United States. I'm based in Long Beach, California, which is part of the greater Los Angeles area. And I'm recently retired as professor emeritus from Cal State University, Dominguez Hills. And so my training as an archaeologist, you know, necessarily, my eye looks to the past, right? But the thing that is part of my training as an archaeologist is that I'm an anthropological archaeologist, which I use that term to distinguish me from, for example, classical archaeologists or archaeologists who are involved in art history. I see my archaeology as an anthropology of the past. And one of the great quotes that I always used to keep that clear in mind is from the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, who wrote that anthropology affords me intellectual satisfaction as a form of history linking up at opposite ends with world history and my own personal history. It thus reveals the rationale common to both. And if you take that idea about the way that an anthropological archeology allows us or encourages us to look at connections between our experience in the modern times and the experiences that past peoples have had, that really frames the approach that I took to trying to understand cats. I mean, it started off literally one evening sitting in my chair in the living room with a cat on my stomach, and I looked down and I thought, how the heck did this happen? I mean, how did this come to be? You know? And, you know, I don't think of myself as a particularly emotional person. I guess, like most of us, I'm delusional. But I just started thinking. I said, well, how is it that this transformation of. From wild predators to, quote, domesticated pets, how did that take place in human history? And so that goal of trying to connect my experience with the experience of others in other places, in other times is really what motivated this book.
- [05:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I love it when projects start from what seems like a really simple question, and. And then you start investigating, and it's like, oh, this isn't a blog post. This isn't an article. This is a whole book, right? There's so many things to get into. So I wonder if we can pick up on sort of one of the threads of the question I asked at the introduction, right? How did we go from hunting and being hunted by cats to keeping them as pets? We sort of know where the end goal is there. But if we go quite far back in time, it's not even just a question of, like, at some point, there were early humans going about their own business and there were cats going about their own business. You show in the book that we can go pretty far back and actually see quite a lot of interaction, even if it's not the kind we have now. So can you help us understand how cats were involved with early humans and even maybe shaped human evolution?
- [06:15]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Yes. Yeah, that's a really important question you've just raised. Our first interactions with cats was where they were predators and we were prey. And by this I mean our first primate hominid ancestors almost certainly had to deal with and respond to predation by large cats. There have been studies of patterns of predation on modern primates, and the major categories of predators on modern primates are cats, raptors, whether they be hawks or eagles, and snakes. And the relationship or the interaction between primates and cats, whether they be leopards or cheetahs or lions or mountain lions here in the Americas, that really informs us a great deal about, or at least it gives us a model or several models of how our ancient hominid ancestors would have had to deal with predation by cats. And there's some really fascinating studies by wildlife biologists of modern primate and their reactions to predators. And one of the things that comes out of it is that, for instance, there are these great studies of African, modern African primates that show that they use different kinds of warning cries for different kinds of predators, with one cry for watch out, an eagle is attacking, or another cry for watch out, there's a snake slithering through the bush, or watch out, here comes a cat. And the thing about that that's so fascinating is that not only are those cries distinct, they're not like a generic, watch out, something dangerous is happening. They're distinct in tone and identify the kind of predator that's coming. And with that, those primates engage in different kinds of behavior, whether they run up to, into the trees to get away from a snake, or they run down from the tree to get away from a, a hawk or an eagle. You realize that the relationships or the interactions between predators and prey are extremely important in trying to understand how we humans eventually evolved. And a great deal of that had to do with the way in which we interacted with, ideally avoided being eaten by large cats in the course of human history. Human evolutionary history, yeah, that's definitely a.
- [09:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Different perspective than the cute, cuddly ones on our stomachs now. So definitely useful to have that in the conversation. I was struck, however, by something that seemed really similar across a huge space of time covered in the book. I mean, we've just talked about something that's obviously very different. But as much as there was clearly a time where cats were a lot more scary to humans than perhaps they Are now, we were still sort of entranced by them or intrigued by them. I mean, we call them, for example, charismatic species today. Obviously not just cats, but the big cats, lions, tigers. Like, we like them, we like seeing pictures of them. We put them at the forefront of our campaigns. And that's not just a modern thing. Right, right.
- [10:02]
Dr. Jerry Moore
In fact, the continuities, the continuities between past and present are really marked when it comes to these charismatic animals. And just to make sure our listeners understand when we're using the term charismatic in the way that wildlife biologists have introduced it into the literature, and what they're talking about are the kinds of animals that we would regularly see depicted either in the logos for wildlife conservation groups like World Wildlife Fund, or in Disney films or etc. And there's been a great deal of research about which animals are, quote, charismatic. And I think it's as. What I remember from the top of my head is, of the top 10 most charismatic living animals that were identified in these studies, the top four of the top ten were cats, lions, leopards, tigers, cheetahs, et cetera. You know, koala bears are cute and everything, but they didn't even make it into the top 20. So there's something interesting about that, because the same animals that are considered by modern populations, and again, these are studies that are done internationally in multiple cultural traditions, but the species that are seen as being charismatic today are in many ways the same species that show up in Upper Paleolithic cave art in places that I talk about in the book, like Chauvet Cave in France. France as well as elsewhere, Pleistocene hunters and gatherers. And the artists among them were not just drawing every single kind of animal that they saw in the forest or that even that they ate. They were choosing particular animals to depict. And those animals largely correspond to the same sorts of animals that we would identify as being charismatic species today. And top of the list in that are large cats.
- [12:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This was such a fascinating continuity to better understand across history, especially given the change in terms of becoming, you know, being prey to start off with. So we've clearly got kind of two sort of competing ideas already floating around, really going back to the concept that kind of cats being pets is not necessarily as inevitable as we might assume. In fact, in what kinds of circumstances do we end up with cats going from hunting us to being our pets?
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Dr. Jerry Moore
Well, one thing that helps is when they get smaller. That's obvious. And I'm not suggesting that it's a really good idea to keep lions and tigers as personal pets. I'm not suggesting that at all. And in fact, in the UK that's just against the law. In the United States, we have these hodgepodge of laws at the local level that allow for large animals to be privately owned in certain states. In fact, one of the things that's really a surprise is that if a person from the US Wanted to go see tigers in something like the wild, they could save on the airfare to India and just go to Houston, Texas, because the areas around Houston have these jurisdictions where it's possible to go out and view tigers on wildlife ranches. So that's part of it. But then the transformation, it seems, from those ferocious but charismatic and large wild cats to the smaller cats that we're more familiar with, that really seems to be associated with two different things, one of which is the development of more settled communities dependent on agriculture, and particularly grain agricultures, which requires seeds and crops to be stored and that those storage areas attract pests. Now, the interesting thing about that is that there's several portion areas of the world where those conditions exist. So, for example, obviously, and I'm going to talk about it some more, the Near East, Middle east is one. But also in Mesoamerica we have people are relying on maize, corn and storing their seeds, and there are rodents that get into that stuff, but there are no domesticated cats as such that are native to the Americas. So on one hand, part of the answer is that you have large quantities of stored food, but the other, and the really fascinating thing is that a particular pest, the brown house mouse, moves out of the Himalayas and expands across Eurasia. And it's that combination of grain stored, stored grains and these pests that seems to create an environment by which otherwise wild cats would become part of a domesticated landscape. Now, I have to say, when I was writing this book, this matter of these brown mice, so it was kind of an academic interest for me, but I live here in Southern California, and recently, and I mean, as of this morning, I have been battling with both mice and rats that are coming into my kitchen. And we are currently catless. And I've got to get a cat soon or else I'm going to go crazy because of the infestations of these rodents. I deeply empathize with people in the ancient near east when they were really happy to see wild cats begin to hunt in this partially human created, but partially naturally created environment of storerooms and houses where pests were making human life miserable, but created an opportunity for the domestication of cats.
- [16:44]
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- [17:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Don't chew on that, Max.
- [17:29]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Cooper loves that chew too.
- [17:31]
Commercial Narrator
Oh, now he's into Cooper's food. Wow, he is loving it.
- [17:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
What do you feed Cooper?
- [17:37]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula. He never leaves a crumb.
- [17:40]
Commercial Narrator
I love it because it's made with.
- [17:42]
Dr. Jerry Moore
High quality protein, nutrient rich fruits and veggies, and wholesome whole grains.
- [17:46]
Commercial Narrator
Looks like we're switching to blue Blue.
- [17:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Buffalo foods are made with the superior.
- [17:50]
Commercial Narrator
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- [17:52]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can your dog food say that? Visit feedbluefood.com to learn more. I mean, things always happen for more than one reason, right? This is obviously another instance of that, but interesting to see kind of the ways in which something so long ago can nevertheless fit, feel incredibly familiar. Are there any other ways that cats in the ancient world might seem familiar to those of us who have cats now?
- [18:16]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Certainly. I mean, one of the things, of course, is the veneration of cats. And this takes place independently in multiple cultural traditions in different parts of the world. And so it points to something along the lines of a universal appreciation of those animals. As far as we know, there's no direct connection between the veneration of cats and lions along the Nile and the veneration of jaguars throughout much of the Americas, literally from Mesoamerica all the way to South America, but at the same time, whereas there's no historical connection between those cases. And those cases, by the way, are long and complex. I don't mean to oversimplify, but there's something that's strikingly recognizable in the veneration of cats. Whether it's in ancient Egypt or in ancient Mesoamerica or the Andes. We understand it in a way that I think that other parts of those cultural traditions may be less Legible to us.
- [19:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. Obviously not everything's going to be the same over time. One aspect I wonder if we can talk a bit more about is pet cemeteries. I know a thing now. In fact, I've interviewed some books about it kind of more recently. But often the context is sort of assumed to be relatively modern, that pets are a relatively modern thing anyway. But you're telling us something different. So were there ancient pet cemeteries?
- [19:56]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Oh, yes. The most notable ones are the ones along the Nile river where mummified cats are being interred as offerings in the thousands. But we have examples of perhaps not quite as numerous examples of intentional pet burials that go all the way back to about in excess of 10,000 years ago on the island of Cyprus, where archaeologists have uncovered the burial of a young man thought to be in his early 20s. And nearby, in a parallel grave, was a cat, intentionally buried. Completely complete. It was. The skeleton was intact and with a small collar around its neck. And that's interpreted as being burying the pet with the owner who had passed away. Now, the thing about pet cemeteries, again, they differ quite a bit between the thousands of mummified animals buried, not only cats, but other animals buried along the Nile and the pet cemeteries that. That we have in the United States, where, again, we have this confusing welter of different kinds of laws governing this. But for the most part in the States, it's relatively rare to allow a human and an animal to be buried in the same grave or in the same cemetery. They usually have to be either in separate zones of a cemetery or in separate cemeteries. Completely separate cemeteries. So we call all of these things cemeteries, but they suggest different sorts of attitudes and regulations about the ways in which humans and animals, including cats, not only interacted while they were alive, but were able to interact while they were dead.
- [22:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely a helpful kind of similarity and difference there to draw. And you're right, the hodgepodge of American laws comes up a number of times in the book. But in fact, the thing I'd most like to pull from that answer is you mentioned mummies. And if we're talking about ancient Egypt, we kind of have to talk a bit more about the mummies because we've got cat mummies. But are they actually mummies of cats?
- [22:44]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Yes. I mean, one of the things that the ancient Egyptian practice of mummification, which is well known for ancient rulers and others, it is extremely. It's a very enduring part of Egyptian practice. In fact, some of the earliest known predynastic mummies in Egypt, or actually a mummified hippo, believe it or not. And the Egyptians mummified not only cats, but ibises and macaques and all sorts of animals. And some of the burial sites, like those associated with Sakura and Speos Artemedos, are. There are thousands and thousands of these burials. And in fact, one of the most surprising things I learned while I was doing the research for this book was it's. It's thought that mummies were the most commonly made artifact in ancient Egypt. Now, when you consider that mummies would have been more numerous than. Than plates or bowls or coffee cups or their ancient Egyptian equivalents, that's a really striking piece of comparison.
- [24:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is really quite incredibly striking. Picking up, though, on something else that does happen with these hodgepodge of US laws today, but can be compared with ways in which it did or did not happen in the past. The big cats that are still used or captured and used for kind of specific purposes, obviously an individual pet may be a questionable idea, even if it's legal in some places. Zoos, it sounds like, still are a thing in some parts of the us. How were they used in ancient societies? Why would an ancient, I don't know, ruler want to capture a tiger and transport it to a particular court or temple?
- [24:57]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Right. Well, of course, that's an important question, and to some extent one that can't really be answered beyond some rather broad generalities. So, for example, we know that cats, cheetahs and others are used in some royal courts as hunting animals in the Near East. Conversely, we know from the ancient Aztec world that the emperor Moctezuma had a zoo in which not only were cats and other wild animals put on display, but different humans were put on display as well, folks who were albino and things like that. So between, on the one hand, we may have cats that are on display, captive cats on display, but they're going to be different based on the cultural traditions that surround them and by the different sorts of people who are in control of the access and of acquisition and display of those animals. So we can say that they're charismatic, but that charisma is going to intersect with different cultural traditions in different ways.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Is there maybe an example you could tell us about to illustrate?
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Dr. Jerry Moore
Yeah. So, for example, if we go to a modern circus and see a lion taming at, we are engaged by both the tricks, quote unquote, that the animal will engage in, but also the threat of disaster that is part of the enthrallment that the lion tamer Brings about, in contrast to that, we have here in the United States a number of privately owned wildlife farms that have been increasingly put under regulation at the federal level as well as its state. And one of the things that, if you read the laws about them, one of the things that is most prominent in the regulations is just how close people are allowed to get to the cats. In particular, the laws are extremely detailed about what, whether or not people are allowed to pet the cats. Now presumably they only mean pet, you know, small cubs and things like that. But that's one of the things that made this whole research project and writing the book Cattails so fascinating are these complex and almost constantly shifting sets of parallel and, and parallels and distinctions that we see when we look at the interaction between humans and cats and cats and humans.
- [28:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I can imagine kind of finding all these pieces and then putting them together would have been an endlessly sort of intriguing process with lots of surprises. And of course, you've already mentioned a few of them. Were there any other particular surprises that you remember coming across as you did all of this work?
- [28:39]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Yeah, I was, I was really surprised about the first that as I just mentioned, the emphasis on regulating how modern peoples can pet cats, wild cats. And then the other thing that was really fascinating was to look at the literature on the role of cats in, in seagoing vessels and seafaring vessels, which is just fascinating and extremely ancient. So I already mentioned the 10,000 year old site in Cyprus. The people who inhabited Cyprus at that time had to get there by ship and so they brought those cats with them and we have cats on all the way to modern vessels. One of the great stories that I write about is from an Islamic text that telling the story of Noah and the ark. And the animals come to Noah and they say, okay, Noah, you've got to kill off these mice. They're eating up all the food and we're going to starve to death. And Noah is kind of addressing this committee of outraged animals and is talking to him and saying, but I promised God that I would bring living examples of two of every kind of creature, including mice. And I can't very well kill them because that would be violating God, my promise to God. And as the story goes, Noah is scratching the muzzle of a lion as he's saying that and the lion sneezes. And when the lions, I'm sorry, that's a little bit gross. When the snot hits the deck, cats miraculously get created and they go. And they eat the mice and, and the ark animal, the Animals on the ark and Noah are saved. I would have never thought of that in a thousand years.
- [31:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I can imagine coming across that. That would be pretty surprising.
- [31:08]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Yeah, amazing. And, and also, you know, finding the, the, the number of, of pet cemeteries, going back to that topic that we know of from the ancient world. We've got this Roman site on the Red Sea, Berenice, and it was a place where it was a port that was principally established so that war elephants could be imported from Africa to the Mediterranean to be incorporated into the Roman military. And so you. It's this. I haven't been there, but I've read the descriptions. It's a sandblasted, waterless port that would have probably had a pretty tough clientele of sailors, splash buccaneers as well as animal trappers. And yet they have a pet cemetery with dogs buried in one area, cats buried in another area, ibises in another region, macaques, et cetera. And you look at the kind of our perception of this kind of tough, wizened, wind blasted population of sailors and yet finding places in their heart to give what appears to be a loving burial ceremony to a missing pet, including a cat.
- [32:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. So many fun things there, so many intriguing surprises that I can only imagine you came across and was like, wow. And you know, exciting surprises. Right. But there are of course, ways in which cats might surprise us that are exciting, but maybe more still in a terrifying way to kind of go right back to where we were starting with cats being predators. Sometimes that still does come up. I mean, for example, in the book you talk about mountain lions around Los Angeles and sometimes in Los Angeles. How do we think about those sorts of proximities now when cats are more often on our stomachs?
- [33:27]
Dr. Jerry Moore
It's, it's fascinating to. I was fascinated to learn that wild cats roam in two major metropolitan areas on the planet. One of them is Mumbai, that has leopards, and the other is Los Angeles where we have Mount Leviticus lions, also sometimes called cougars. And the Los Angeles area has this really complex kind of intersection between undeveloped properties and suburban and urban environments. And they can be surprisingly close. And what we saw a few years ago was a some wildlife photographs of a mountain lion that had been named by its wildlife biologist as P22. P22 Panther 22 WHO. A stationary motion detecting camera caught this magnificent picture of the mountain lion standing in front of the massive lit Hollywood sign. So this became known as P22, the Hollywood Mountain lion, the Hollywood Cougar, and became. For a while we would read articles in the newspaper about the cougar every couple of weeks or something like that, it seems that it got involved in. It might have eaten some rat poisoning by accident or an animal that had been poisoned and then it was hit by a car and it was transported by wildlife biologists to a big cat ranch and hospital where it died, unfortunately. But it was retrieved by a group of Native American holy men, shamans and leaders and brought back to its original place in the Hollywood Hills and buried in an undisclosed location using traditional Native American burial practices. It also then was honored in a massive concert at the Hollywood bowl attended by thousands of people, and has become iconic for the area. And what I want to emphasize is that it's pretty obvious that the ways in which people in 21st century Los Angeles interacted with p22 are similar to, but also distinct from the ways in which people were interacting with large cats in the Upper Pleistocene that they depicted on the walls of Chauvet Cave and others. But what's common to both of those experiences is our awareness of the charisma of those animals, that these are creatures that we share the planet with, that we pay attention to, because they are just. And I think that that has deep roots in human prehistory and also the history and ancient history of cats.
- [36:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I think that's a lovely way to conclude our discussion about the book. Similarities across time, despite so many differences. So lots of fascinating things, of course, that. I mean, I can't keep you here for 12 hours to have you tell us everything, but I think that gives us a sense. As a final question then, is there anything you're currently working on now that Cat Tales is out in the world?
- [37:09]
Dr. Jerry Moore
You know, it has really occupied most of my additional time. I won't call it free time, but additional time for the last three years or four years. And so I'm still looking around to next projects I probably won't do, you know, like a. A follow up of Ancient Dog Tales or things like that. I think I need to have a pretty marked shift in what comes up next. And so I'm casting about for a new project, but I'll have one soon.
- [37:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, I'm sure you will. And of course, in the meantime, listeners get to read this project you've just finished. The book is titled Cat A History, published by Thames and Hudson in 2025. Jerry, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [38:06]
Dr. Jerry Moore
It was an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for inviting me. And Doug. Here we have the limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car Insurance and save hundreds of with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu. Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com.
- [38:45]
Commercial Narrator
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- [38:46]
Dr. Jerry Moore
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.