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- [00:00]
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Professor Rod Phillips
welcome to the New
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New Books Network Announcer
Books Network
- [01:34]
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 Professor Rod Phillips about a book he's just written with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2026 titled A History. Very short title. Lots of things for us to get into, right? This is a long period of time. Cats are a huge part of so many people's everyday lives. There's all sorts of intriguing stories here, so we're going to be touching on, I think, a lot of different places and times, right? Ancient Egypt, the Catholic Church, a whole bunch of other things too. And there's still going to be even more details, I'm sure we're not going to be able to cover, but I think we're going to have quite a fun conversation. So, Rod, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:20]
Professor Rod Phillips
Miranda, thanks for inviting me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:29]
Professor Rod Phillips
Yeah, well, I'VE been teaching for quite a long time, and I've started off as a specialist in the history of the family, the history of marriage and divorce, actually. And then I moved from that about 25 years ago to the history of wine and the history of alcohol generally. And I always had in mind that when I retired, I would write a book on the history of cats. I just happen I have to love cats. Cats haven't always been a part of my life because I moved around the world a lot, but I always thought that I would write a history of cats because as far as I knew, there wasn't one. And then when Covid struck, I found I couldn't get to my archives. I do most of my research in Europe and I'm based in Canada. I couldn't get to the archives. And so I thought, well, I'll have a look at cats, see if I can do anything with that in advance of retirement. And I ended up writing the book. So I started in 2021, I think, and it came out just in 2026 this year.
- [03:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a fun kind of idea to have percolating in the back of your mind for a while and to then actually get to do it. It must be so exciting and to be able to cover so many different parts of history and kind of ideas. As I mentioned in the introduction, we're not going to be able to cover all of it, but there's a ton here for us to get into. So I think the first place I want us to go to is actually not a moment, necessarily one moment in history, but it's kind of a big picture idea that threads throughout lots of different times and places you explore in the book, which is kind of what exactly is cat's relationships with humans? Are they domesticated? What does domestication mean? I mean, this comes up in so many different times. You cover. Why does it keep coming up? What does it actually mean?
- [04:15]
Professor Rod Phillips
Well, it keeps coming up because cats sort of occupy this really ambiguous space with humans, at least they have historically, and they still do. I think if we go back to the, you know, to the first time that cats and. And humans encountered one another, as far as we can tell. So back about 12,000 years, probably when humans began to settle down into, you know, fixed settlements and began to practice what we now know as agriculture, they began to grow grain, among other things. I mean, grain was the basis of the human diet, and they began to store grain. So you had to store grain between harvests? Well, they kept. They kept the grain as best they could, but obviously it attracted rodents and other vermin. And as it attracted rodents, the rodents attracted wild cats. Now we're talking about the Middle east, where all of this happened for the first time. And so the wild cats that were attracted to grain stores were Middle Eastern wildcats. Now, wildcats are a species that are scattered around the world. There are wildcats in Europe, Asia, Africa. And this particular subspecies of wildcat, the Middle east of wildcat, was attracted to grain stores, and over time, it established a sort of relationship with humans, you know, what we call a common sort of relationship. So the cats found food supplies, found their own food supplies, and the rodents that were eating the grain, and so they were effectively protecting the food supplies of humans. So there was a, you know, a mutually beneficial relationship here between the wild cats and, and humans. And over time, as the wildcats spent more time with humans, they evolved into, into cats, what we call cats. So the cats are, are smaller than wildcats, but, I mean, not much smaller. They have, you know, some, some different physical characteristics, but they look largely like tabby cats in the wild. And they're, and they're still there. You can, you can, you can see them. There's a nice picture in my book. And they became cats. So they, they modified their, their appearance a little bit, their, their, their physiology, their, probably their behavior to, to some extent in the, in the new environment amount around humans. But so we have, you know, for some point, I don't know, maybe around 5,000 before the common era, we have the emergence of cats. But their primary function as far as people were concerned, was to deal with rodents or deal with vermin that were attacking food supplies. And that really defined their relationship with humans for thousands of years, as far as we can tell. So in that sense, this is the fundamental relationship between humans and cats historically. And to this extent, cats weren't thought of as lovely creatures, as lovable creatures, as creatures to cuddle and to pamper. They were just animals that were useful. They come into your house, leave your house, deal with the rodents as best they could, help you out in that respect. But, you know, there was no, no need for humans to establish any kind of relationship with cats, either individually or, or, or, or generally. And I think that's what, that's what has really conditioned the relationship of, of cats and humans over time. Of course, we don't know how, how cats thought about this. Cats obviously thought that, you know, being around humans was quite good because humans and their food supplies attracted rodents. And, you know, rodents were good to eat. So, you know, there was, they were attracted not to humans, but to what humans inadvertently provided for them in terms of food supplies. But as far as humans were concerned, you know, cats were very marginal. You know, they, they, they came into your house, they left your house, they came in for certain purposes, but, you know, they had. There was no permanent ongoing relationship. So they were quite. They were quite marginal, unlike dogs. See, one of the things about cats and the history of cats is always this comparison with dogs. So dogs also entered the human orbit thousands of years ago, long before cats. But dogs were thought of as useful. Not just happened to be useful like cats, but dogs were trained. So they were trained to herd, they were trained to hunt, they were trained to guard, and they were valued as possessions, whereas cats, as we see, were not possessions. They were just there on the margins. So over time, people began to look at cats and dogs and see that there were quite big differences between them and between the way that they related to humans and the way that humans related to them. And one of the problems when we talk about domestication is that we think of dogs as being highly domesticated, because in a sense, humans. We can see that humans have, in a sense, domesticated them. You know, they've been brought into the. Into the. Into human society. They've been trained, they've been, you know, brought into work situations. They hunt, they guard, they herd animals and that kind of thing. Whereas, Whereas cats were not. And so, you know, when we think of domestication, we think of dogs as being, you know, the alpha. The alpha domesticated animal. This is, this is the. The main example of domestication that we look at. And then when you look at cats, you can see, well, they don't quite, you know, they fail. They're just not as domesticated. They, you know, you. It's more difficult to train them. I mean, you can train cats, but they're more difficult to train. And they just have this way of behaving which is less attached to humans. Unlike dogs, which, you know, attach themselves very strongly to humans, they're very affiliative to humans. Cats, cats are wired differently, and they're not. So, you know, the big debate about domestication, which has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years, not so much using the word domestication, but. But you find, you know, in the Middle Ages, people say that, you know, you know, cats, cats are wild, you know, whereas dogs are not dogs. Dogs are part of human society, but cats are essentially still wild. And then, you know, later in the 1600s or 1700s, you know, people talk about, you know, cats Being, you know, in human society, but not part of human society, and being really unable to be part of human society, unlike dogs. So you get this notion even today among scientists, specialists in domestication, many of whom will say that cats are not domesticated or that they're only semi domesticated, but it's always in comparison with dogs. And you know, I think it's not only sort of unfair to cats, but it's sort of not even a useful way of thinking about domestication to compare one animal with another like that. Because, you know, if, if there were no dogs, we would think that cats were very domesticated. I mean, here they are, look, they're in your house, they sleep on your bed, they, they curl up on, on a rug. They, you know, you feed them, you give them water and they hang around you sometimes, but not all the time. We would think that was very, very, very domesticated kind of animal if there were no dogs. So it's, it's the comparison with dogs which really gets in the way of thinking of cats as, as domesticated. So it's a kind of a long way of, a long way of getting, getting to the point that to my mind, you know, domestication is such a complicated, a complicated concept. I mean, we domesticate all kinds of animals like, like cattle, for example, but you know, we, we pen them, we keep them in, we keep them in, in pens. We don't let them, we don't let them stray. So it's kind of coercive domestication. Whereas, you know, cats and dogs, it's a. More of a voluntary domestication on the part of the animal. So you let your dog out, it'll come back to you. Let your cat out, it'll come back home and, and so on. So this is something that's more, more voluntary for cats and dogs. But at the same time there is this notion that cats, cats are simply not as domesticated. And I think it's a, you know, it just comes from this comparison with dogs, which I think is sort of a, a misleading way of thinking about domestic, about domestication. But it, you know, there we are. I mean, you know, there are people who, who, who, who don't like cats partly because they can't be controlled the same way as dogs. Can I mention sort of towards the end of the book that Walt Disney has very few cats in his movies and cartoons, partly because he didn't like cats and he's quoted as saying, I don't like cats because you can't tell them what to do. And I think that this whole idea that cats are ungovernable, uncontrollable, know, we have this phrase like herding cats that, you know, this notion that cats are somehow beyond our control and that that's a bad thing leads a lot of people to think that they are, in fact, you know, not really. Not really good animals, not good pets, and certainly not as good as dogs.
- [14:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, we will try to avoid too many comparisons then, with dogs to focus on cats kind of in their own right. But I'd like to move from people who maybe don't like cats as much to some people who really, really do. Because the ancient Egyptians, it is not just kind of a meme today on the Internet to say that ancient Egyptians like cats. They really do. If you go back and look at the sources the way you've done. So why were cats so important in this particular place in time?
- [14:41]
Professor Rod Phillips
Yeah, well, it's a bit of a puzzle really. I mean, I think, first of all, cats were important in ancient Egypt because they, they. They did the work of. Of keeping vermin at bay. And in Egypt, that meant not only keeping mice and rats at bay, but also snakes. And if you look at wall paintings from, you know, you know, from 3,000 years ago, you can see, you know, there are many images of. Of cats killing snakes as well as cats and cats and. And rodents of various, of various kinds. So I think, you know, fundamentally there's the. There's a sense that cats have value because they are useful to people. But then we see many images in Egyptian wall paintings and so on. We see many images of cats in domestic situations, quite often sitting under a chair, particularly a chair occupied by a woman. Chairs occupied by men are more likely to have dogs sitting under them, you know, which leads to a theme which I'm sure we'll pick up later, which is the dissociation of cats and women. But there just seems to be, you know, some evidence that some cats were kept as pets. We know from the evidence of Greeks who visited Egypt that they were quite surprised to see cats living in houses. They were surprised to see how. How highly the Egyptians valued cats. That, you know, when a cat died, you know, there would be a great deal of wailing and so on. So, you know, cats were just. Were highly valued. But at the same time, you know, the Egyptians valued many, many animals and creatures of various kinds. I mean, ibises and crocodiles and cattle and so on. So, you know, cats, cats stand out if you're looking for cats. But if you're not looking for cats, you'll see cats are there among many other creatures that are highly valued. And people will often say about Egypt, well, they worship cats or they made cats into gods, but that's not true. There was one goddess who took the form of a cat. Sometimes she had the head of a cat and a human body. Sometimes she was just a cat with kittens. But, you know, a lot of the Egyptian deities were took the forms of falcons or alligators or bulls and so on. So, you know, again, cats are there and they're highly valued, but so are many other animals. And I think, you know, people are drawn to the Egyptian example when looking at the history of cats because there's so much evidence. Up until Egypt, up until around the third, the second century, before the common era, there's not really much in the way of representations of cats. And then all of a sudden in Egypt you get the multicolored images of cats in domestic scenes and that kind of thing. And it looks as if Egypt is sort of the origin story of cats. That Egyptian society is the first society that embraced cats in a very positive way. And that may be true, but, but we don't know, it could be just the effect of the aesthetics and the, you know, the, the wall paintings, the murals, the, the tomb paintings and so on that, that seem to show cats much more prominently than anything before that.
- [18:27]
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- [18:31]
Professor Rod Phillips
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- [19:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, of course, we don't know what hasn't survived, so that's definitely helpful to keep in mind. The thing, though, that I want to pick up from what you just described there, though, is the ancient Greeks being surprised because they also have rats. They also would like, kind of have functional needs for cats, but as you just mentioned, like, they are not also having gods and goddesses taking on the aspect of a cat and having all sorts of images and iconography that include cats. So why were the ancient Greeks and then you'd also discuss the ancient Romans kind of less interested in cats?
- [20:25]
Professor Rod Phillips
Yeah, I think, yeah. I call the bit on the chapter on Greece of Rome. I call it the ambiguity of cats. And I almost think I should have called it something called the Banality of Cats. Because when you look at, when you look at Greek and Roman sources, you can see that they're quite positive about cats because they do the job of killing rodents and protecting grain supplies. So they're positive about that. But then you can say, well, that's just true. Generally, if we look at history, people recognize that cats are useful from that point of view. But there's, but, you know, they don't have the cats. Cats are just not nearly as prominent when you look at. At Greek and Roman culture as, as they were in, in Egypt. And again, I don't know whether this is just a. It's a function of the, of the aesthetic that, you know, they, they, they appear more that they're, they're drawn more into domestic scenes in Egypt, but there's really not that much in the way of cats in Greek and Roman art. I mean, you find cats appear in mosaics from time to time in Rome and in Greece. They appear in some statues from time to time. Although, as I point out, many of the statues that are thought of as statues of cats turn out not to be cats. They turn out to be dogs and, and other. Other. Other creatures. So they're just, they're just not there. And I mean, you're right that they had rats, that they had mice, that they had grain, that they, that they needed to have cats. And my sense is that there were cats. But, but it's generally true, and this is not just, not just true of, of ancient Greece and Rome. It's generally true that artists that chroniclers, people who kept the records that we have today, whether they're, you know, Written records or images, people who kept the records overlooked cats. We know that cats were there, and yet they're not there in the record. You know, the same is true. It's true of the Bible. I mean, cats are not mentioned in the Bible. But we know that there were cats in the Holy Land 2,000 years ago. We know that they were there in Egypt, and we know that they were there in the Middle East. So they were certainly there. And you know, what we think of as the Holy Land, but they're not in the Bible. I mean, of all the animals that went two by two into the Ark, there were no cats, apparently. Although, you know, Muslim sources actually do point out that cats were created while the Ark was afloat, but it's not. But in the Christian Bible, there's nothing there. And there's a kind of, you know, cats are kind of a blind spot, which is something I. Something I really discovered when I was writing the book. As I said, you know, I started writing the book because I couldn't get to France to do the work on the history of wine that I was writing. But there is no place to go to. There's no archive to go to to look for evidence of cats. You know, all the archives I've been to in the last many decades, nothing. Nothing on cats specifically. I mean, you find cats mentioned very, very rarely. I found two mentions of cats in, in actual archives in front. But I mean, they are, they are. They're there. They're on the landscape. They're there in large numbers, as far as we can tell, but they're simply, simply not recorded. You know, they just fly or whatever they do under the radar.
- [24:24]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
But as you said, they are there in the landscape. So if we move kind of forward in time, we've talked about sort of the Mediterranean area, right? Ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Egypt. How and why do cats become widely dispersed throughout Europe more broadly as we get into the medieval period?
- [24:40]
Professor Rod Phillips
My sense is that cats became. Cats became part of. Of agricultural knowledge. So, you know, people began to, you know, gave up their hunting and gathering peripatetic existences and began to settle into. Into. Set into settlements. Then they began to practice agriculture, so began to, well, domesticate plants, grain, grapevines, and, and. And various various other things, and they began to practice agriculture. Now, one of the things about agriculture is that it provides a surplus of product and that in some cases, especially with grain, it's possible to store the stuff over between harvests. And as I said, cats became important as a way of dealing with the Rodents that were attracted to the grain. But in so doing, the cats actually became part of, part of the, so the, the, the whole picture, the agricultural picture is not just a matter of producing goods, but a matter of preserving goods, of conserving goods. And cats were very useful in preserving grain because, I mean, if you think of, you know, mice and rats getting it, getting into grain, I mean, they're not only, you know, so many mice and rats attracted to the grain, they then reproduce. They not only eat grain, but they, they foul the grain with urine and feces. So, you know, cats are really, really important for the preservation of grain. And so they became part of the, of, of agriculture in the, in the bigger picture. And my, my sense is that as agriculture spread, as, as the technology and knowledge of agriculture spread, cats, cats went with it. And, and the agriculture, the knowledge of agriculture spread from the Middle east out to the eastern Mediterranean and then to Egypt and then up to Greece and Rome and then through the Greek and the Roman empires into Europe more generally. The cats went with them. And we know that cats were taken on board ships quite often because that was a way of the ship's cat, more than one probably were absolutely vital in keeping down the number of rats and mice on these ships. Not just because rats and mice weren't desirable, but because they ate the food supplies on ships as well. So my sense is that cats then moved with agriculture and then were taken by Romans and by Greeks on their ships throughout Europe. So that by the Middle Ages we know that cats were, was spread throughout Europe. And we know this from, you know, excavations, medieval excavations where we have, you know, the bones of, the bones of cats among the bones of dogs and other animals in human settlements.
- [27:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay. So continuing to kind of find a lot of practical uses for cats, even if kind of not all societies are as interested in them as the ancient Egyptians. I mean, you mentioned the Greeks and Romans being like, yeah, okay, useful, but not like loving them.
- [27:51]
Professor Rod Phillips
Right.
- [27:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
On the other end of the spectrum, it really seems like the Catholic Church is not ambiguous about cats. They don't seem to like cats really quite a lot. So why, how and when do we get an anti cat Catholic Church?
- [28:06]
Professor Rod Phillips
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, for the first, you know, thousand years of Christianity, the first thousand years of the Church, they seem to treat cats as, as fairly neutral. I mean, you know, they're no different from dogs in the sense that are different from, you know, other, other animals that, that might be around. I mean, animals are, are given certain kinds of moral characteristics. I mean, you know, rats and mice are thought to be. Are thought to be dirty animals, you know, but, but they're vermin, and so they, they're, you know, they, you don't want them around because they, they eat the grain. Dogs are thought to be scavengers and not really very admirable. Certain, certain birds are thought to be quite admirable. Cats, you know, cats are not even there. They're not really given any sort of, you know, attributed any moral characteristics at all when they're mentioned. But when they are mentioned, as in bestiaries or discussions of animals, it's a pretty neutral kind of thing. They, they point to the usefulness of cats in catching mice, but they don't say that they are, you know, they're not bad. They're not bad animals. They're not good animals. They're not virtuous. They're not. They're not evil. They're just. They're just animals with a. With a function. But all this changes sometime around the. Around the 12th century, sometime in the 1100s. It all changes. And we don't know why, but it seems to start off with a belief that certain heresies, certain heretical cults worship cats. And it sort of plays on the. Plays on the idea that, you know, cats are outsiders. You know, they're. They're, you know, they're not part of human society. They're not, they're not central to human society. They live on the margins. They come and go. They have certain functions. But, but they're, but they're essentially, essentially outside is living. Living on the margins of human society. And so, you know, this, this notion that heretics would then worship cats seems to, you know, place, you know, cats in that. In that realm of being the outsider, the unorthodox, and to some extent, the unacceptable, obviously, because heresies were unacceptable to the church. So we get this in the 1100s, this idea that certain heresies or certain heretics, groups of heretics, actually worship cats. And there's a belief that people, particularly black cats, were worshiped, that in their meetings the heretics would kiss the anus of a cat. I mean, obviously this only aggravates the whole relationship between heretics and cats, but there it is. And so we get this idea that cats are the friends of heretics, therefore hostile to the church, therefore the church should be hostile to cats. Now, I don't think that applied to all cats, because what we see is not only do cats become associated with heretics, they also become associated with magic, with magicians. And then later with witches. So cats are then associated with all of these sort of occult, you know, unacceptable activities. And it all plays into this notion of, you know, cats is the outsider. Cats is, you know, living. Living outside acceptable boundaries and certainly outside acceptable spiritual boundaries. And so, you know, this notion of the cat as the outsider, the cats as the other, if you like, helps to, you know, is accentuated or reinforced by the church thinking of cats as associated with, you know, with magic, heresy and witchcraft. But as I say, it's not all cats. I mean, you know, cats generically weren't thought of as evil because cats were necessary. Cats were needed. You had to have cats to keep, to keep rodents at bay. So, I mean, you have this. You have this sort of disconnect between the church, on the one hand, thinking of cats as essentially evil, as associates of the devil and so on. And yet, you know, people allowing cats into their houses to, to deal with, to deal with rodents. Now you get, you know, you get some attempts to sort of bridge the, bridge the gap here. People talk about cats playing with, with mice the way the devil plays with, with people's souls because, you know, they look at, they look at cats and, you know, when a cat catches a mouse, you know, it doesn't just kill it instantly. It appears to play with it, let it run away and then pounce on it and then finally kill it. And this, you know, this becomes a metaphor for the way that the devil played with people's souls before actually seizing them and taking control of them. So it's, you know, it's a complicated. It's a complicated picture. But what you do see quite clearly is this, this notion of, that the church began to regard cats as, as. As problematic and to. Was to associate them with, with some of the, some of the most unacceptable practices.
- [33:34]
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- [33:51]
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- [34:24]
Professor Rod Phillips
Well, yeah, I'm hot.
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- [34:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And there's some pretty clear long term impact to this. I mean, you specified black cats and witches. We still have that cultural trope today which is many, many centuries after what you're describing. What are some of the other kind of short or long term impacts that, this dislike of cats that the church has. What are some of the other ones?
- [35:10]
Professor Rod Phillips
You know, I think it's, I think it's, I mean, what you say is absolutely right, Miranda. It's, it's, it's, it does have long term consequences. And we know we still associate black cats as being unlucky. I mean, even if people don't believe it, I mean it's, you know, we know, we know it as a, as a thing. And if you look at Halloween, you often see images of black cats and so on. You can often see too that, you know, it's been, it's been used in advertising. I mean, this whole idea of black cats as being dangerous and so on. I work in the history of alcohol as well as other things. And when you look at absinthe, you know, the, that drink that became very popular in late 19th century France was finally banned in the early 20th century in many places because it was thought to be a dangerous, a dangerous drink, not just because it was alcoholic. It was believed to be hallucinogenic as well. And if you look at, look at advertisements for, for absinthe, you know, in the 1920s, 30s and so on, they often feature cats and quite often black cats as well. You know, black cat apparently sipping absinthe or looking at a bottle of absinthe, you can see that, you know, black cats or cats generally were thought of as dangerous in the same way that absinthe was thought of as dangerous. So, you know, this notion that was first propagated by the church, by the Christian church really had very long term consequences. And you know, the, this notion that cats were dangerous and outsiders and so on long outlived the sort of the religious, the religious justifications for it at the time. So even in the 1800s, 1900s and so on until today, you know, we no longer think of cats as as dangerous because they're heretical or associated with witchcraft. Although people might think that still we no longer think of them as dangerous in religious terms. We think of them just as dangerous in cultural terms.
- [37:24]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really interesting to see, kind of just how far back that particular idea goes and where it comes from. So thank you for helping us understand that piece of medieval relationship with cats. Now, I did say I was going to avoid us doing lots of dog and cat comparisons, but you do it in the book sometimes. So following your read, can we move to the early modern period? Looking at Europe, this is one moment where you discuss the position of cats being kind of complicated. And this might be a good place to do that comparison with dogs to understand that complication.
- [37:59]
Professor Rod Phillips
Right?
- [38:00]
KFC Advertiser
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- [38:01]
Professor Rod Phillips
I think one of the long term associations with cats is women. You know, we often say about dogs, we say that a dog is a man's best friend. And I think, you know, when you say it's man's best friend, a lot of people will think, oh, by, by man you just mean generic man, meaning men and women. You know, dog is a human's best friend. But I think we should actually see dog as a man's best friend in quite literal terms because men and dogs are associated historically and cats and women are associated historically. And I mentioned earlier that when you look at, even when you look at Egyptian representations, you can see cats are sitting under chairs occupied by women. Dogs tend to sit under chairs occupied by men. I mean, not, not 100% of the time, but this is nearly all of the time. So when you get into the later middle ages and into the early modern period, you know, up until, well, actually later than that too, right up until the 20th century, you can see that, you know, people be, or men in particular began to associate cats with, with women in particular. And again, it's not because it's not for the same reasons that the church associated cats with heresy and, and witchcraft and so on. It's because men began to associate the character of cats with the character, with what they perceived as the character of women. So, you know, women were considered to be untrustworthy, duplicitous, deceitful, scheming, selfish and promiscuous. This is, you know, partly why women had to be controlled. It's why, you know, so many laws, so many, so many customs, regulations in which men controlled their daughters, their wives, their sisters, you know, any women that they could, that they could possibly control what we generally call the patriarchy. So that's, you know, women, women are thought that way. But cats were thought to be exactly the same because, you know, cats couldn't be controlled the way that dogs could be. So cats became kind of a, you know, analogous to women or a metaphor for women. You know, cats could be controlled just like women. They were deceitful. They never, they never really made it clear what they wanted and what they liked. It was always, it was often said, you know, when a cat was sleeping or appeared to be sleeping, it was actually scheming as to, as to what it was going to do next. A cat appeared. People would say, a cat appears to be friendly to humans. It'll come, it'll rub up against your legs, it will purr, but at the same time, it's a wild cat. So it's, you know, it's, its outer demeanor is hiding it's inner truth. You know, what is essential to the cat is that it's wild. You know, cats are deceitful, they're selfish. They're always looking for the most comfortable place to sit, the warmest place to sit. Cats are promiscuous. This is a long standing trope is that cats are promiscuous. They, they say, you know, a female cat would just mate with any other cat that it can and will mate with, you know, one, one male cat after another. And again, there was this, this whole fear that women were also promiscuous, that, you know, if you turned your back, then your wife or your, your daughter, you know, was going off to go to, to sleep, sleep with the first man that they could find. And so you needed all of these regulations and laws to, to, to control their, their sexuality. So there's this, you know, this broad based metaphor of cats and women. And it's there, it's there in Chaucer. You know, Chaucer talks about it. And it's there right through to the 19th, through the, into the 19th century when cats become specifically associated with prostitutes in many parts of, many parts of Europe. And people say, well, you know, just not only cats similar to women, but they're specifically similar to prostitutes. You know, they sleep all day and they're up at night. You know, they're forever grooming themselves. They're forever, you know, making themselves pleasant to men and to humans, but inside, you know, basically they're promiscuous, promiscuous animals. So it's a very complicated analogy though. There's this analogy between cats, cats and women. It operates on, you know, on many, many, many levels. I mean, even, you know, in the 19th century, during the the campaigns for women's suffrage, you find that anti suffrage people portray suff, you know, women who are campaigning for the vote. They, they, they portray them as cats and, you know, wild cats, you know, trying to, trying to, you know, break down conventions and, and so on. So it's, you know, it's. It continues, it continues even to today. I mean, here you have the, the American vice president, J.D. vance, you know, talking about, you know, childless cat ladies, you know, this association of. Of. Of women and cats and this whole idea that, you know, women are so wedded to cats, I mean, almost literally wedded to cats, almost that, you know, wedded to cats, that they would rather. They would rather have a cat than have children. So this whole year of the whole idea of the childless cat lady comes into play. So this association of women and cats is, you know, long standing back from the Middle Ages right through to the present. And it comes in, you know, various intensities from time to time. But it's a tricky one to unpack in many ways. But I think that, you know, the basic principle is very, very solid.
- [44:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's interesting to see how pervasive that particular trope is across time, as you mentioned. But if we focused on the 19th century, particularly for the next part of our conversation, that sounds like it's just one of the reasons that attitudes about cats were pretty negative at this point. What were the other reasons?
- [44:36]
Professor Rod Phillips
Yeah, I mean, the 19th century is very interesting and I think that's. It's sort of the. Sort of one of the most interesting parts of the book, really. I do. I actually, my chapter on the 19th century got so long, I had to break it to two chapters because I was just finding so much, so much information. But one of the things is, yes, first you have this continuity of hostility towards cats for various reasons, and also the continuity of tolerance of cats because at the same time, as people have loved and hated cats, people have tolerated cats because they serve this very useful purpose of keeping rodents at bay. So you find this through the 19th century. But what you do find the 19th century is a couple of things. First of all, you find urbanization and industrialization and the growth of very big cities, often industrial cities, and these cities attracted rodents. And descriptions of streets and industrial cities in Britain and Europe and United States, everything always mentioned the rats. You know, the rats. Rats are in the streets, but there are also cats in the streets. And the fact that there were cats in the streets and rats in the streets sort of made some people think, well, if there are rats in the streets and cats in the streets, obviously the cats aren't dealing with the rats. So if they can't deal with rats, what good are they? And so 19th century, you get this a line of thinking that actually cats, it's a myth that cats are good mousers and ratters and that cats actually can't do these things and that you're better off trying to catch rats with traps or with ferrets or with certain kinds of dogs, certain terriers and so on. And the cats are really failures at this. And if they're failures at that, then what is their point? If they're. The whole reason for allowing cats to come into your house and to live in human communities is they deal with rodents and they're not doing that, then they have no point. At the same time, there's a belief that cats were having a devastating effect on wildlife, particularly on birds. There's a great deal of interest in birds in the 19th century and a general belief that, that cats are the worst enemy of birds. And all kinds of estimates of the number of birds, number of songbirds, number of birds of various kinds, dropping by 50%, 80% over a number of decades in the 19th century. Now, these are obviously impressionistic, but it's possible that the number of birds was declining in the 19th century and very likely that cats were responsible for, for killing many birds. But also, you know, the growth of cities and, and industry and that kind of thing meant a loss of habitat for birds. And so, you know, birds were declining for a number of reasons, but still, you know, bird lovers, and there seemed to be an awful lot of them in the 19th century, middle class and upper class people, particularly bird lovers, were convinced that cats were the problem. And you find in for the first time in the 1800s, you find these calls for cats to be exterminated. And I, you know, I, I always can't help thinking that, you know, this 19th century is the, is the century of mass killing. This is when, you know, machine guns and poison gas and other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, you know, come on to come onto the scene in military terms. And here you have people actually envisaging, you know, the mass extermination of a species, notably, notably cats. So I mean, there's that. And then the 19th century is also a period of growing nationalism and also ethno nationalism, you know, the growth of anti Semitism and so on. And cats get caught up in this as well, because cats are the outsiders. They don't belong anywhere. Now remember, you know, cats come from the Middle east originally. And so they're outside the Middle East. They're always. They're always an introduced species, not necessarily a, you know, harmful species, but an introduced species. And so you do get people in the United States, you get people in Europe talking about cats as, you know, as outsiders. That should not be allowed in Europe, should not be allowed in France, should not be allowed in Germany, have no place in England, for example. And this becomes part of a nationalist discourse that focuses on cats. I mean, you do. Later in the 20th century, you find that, you know, Nazis, for example, you know, focus on cats as being an outside species. They think, they say dogs, dogs are a German animal, but cats are not a German animal. Cats come from somewhere else. They come from the East. And that, you know, one. There's one Nazi who refers to cats as the Jews of the animal world. Just to, you know, To. To make that. To make that very, very clear. But in the 19th century, so you do get this, this, this buildup of. Of animus towards cats. They're outsiders. They, they, you know, they're not good dealing at dealing with. With rodents, and they're harmful to the environment, particularly to. To birds. And this adds up to, to my mind, a really unprecedented attack on cats in the 19th century. But it's also matched by a growth of sort of more positive feelings. So there's a kind of a polarization when it comes to. When it comes to cats in the 19th century. And you find, you know, in the late 1800s, you find cat shows. You find, you know, the first. The first book that discuss cats in a, In a. In a. In a positive kind of way. People talk about the need to rehabilitate cats to restore respect for cats. That. That has been lost. And so, you know, you, you do get this polarization that sort of. That then moves into the 20th century and you still find that people are very, very polarized about cats. Something like a third of people, when polled, don't like cats, whereas the number of people who don't like dogs is probably under 5%. So cats are still pretty polarizing. And I think that really stems from the 19th century.
- [51:24]
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Professor Rod Phillips
and like a whole community, it's a club.
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- [52:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Sam's Club.
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Professor Rod Phillips
Come join us. Sam's Club.
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- [53:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, very interesting time indeed. But perhaps to end our discussion on the book on a more optimistic note, of course there are, as you said, still people today who are less interested in cats. But those campaigns in the 19th century did not get what they wanted in terms of not having any cats. So how did cats become popular and kind of key in popular culture despite all these reasons people were against them in the 19th century? You have all sorts of examples in the book of kind of cats going global. Can we perhaps discuss that?
- [53:42]
Professor Rod Phillips
Yeah, well, well, cat. Cats. Cats. The idea cats went global is really thanks to Europeans who sort of spread cats around the world, you know, starting in the, starting in the 1500s with when Europeans started doing long, long distance voyages and they, they took cats on board their ships for, you know, to as ships cats to you know, to deal with rodents and then they either deliberately put, put cats ashore when they visited very other parts of the world, say in the Pacific Islands, for example, or the cats escaped when they pulled in. If they pulled into shore, the cats could escape and so on. So you find that, you know, sometime between the 1500s and the, you know, the 1900s, you know, cats. Cats are found just about everywhere, everywhere on the world except for Antarctica. And, you know, nearly all of the island groups have cats and every continent has cats apart from Antarctica. So they really went global. As for, you know, the more positive views of cats, so you see cats being represented in popular culture, it really, really is sort of from the, from the early 1900s, you know, one of the, One of the major contributors was, was Lewis Wayne, the, the, the English illustrator artist, you know, who, who, who spent decades of his life drawing cats. Very anthropomorphized cats, but cats in all kinds of situations that appealed to children particularly, but also to, to adults. I think of Lewis Wayne. There's a movie based on his life with cats. And I think of him of his work as a kind of cat videos of the, you know, a century before cat videos. And then you find, you know, various, various cats in popular culture, in cartoons particularly, but also in movies and musicals and that kind of thing through the, through the 20th century. I think one of the, the things about cats is that they, you know, because people do think of them as, as, as outsiders in a sense. They think of them as aloof and, and independent and detached from people. They do unexpected things. I mean, anyone who's had a cat knows that if you just put, put something strange down in a room that the cat will make a beeline to it. It's got to sniff it, it's got to look at it, stand on it. It's got to examine it. So, you know, cats are sort of predictable in that sense, but, but also they're, they're very spontaneous animals. And I think that's the spontaneity of cats that really makes them attractive for, for videos on the, on, on the Internet. So, you know, cats, Cats became popular as pets really from the 1950s, 1960s, I mean, obviously before that to some extent, but they really took off in the 1950s, 1960s. And this is reflected in popular culture as people began to appreciate the distinctiveness of cats and to appreciate that cats are not dogs, that we shouldn't expect cats to behave like dogs and that they have a way of being and a way of behaving around, around people, which is really quite distinctive and that many people find attractive.
- [57:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, well, I think on that optimistic note about lots of people enjoying cats, that's probably a good place to end our conversation about the book, but I am curious what you might be working on now that the project you've been thinking of for such a long time is out in the world. Anything on your desk at the moment you want to give us a sneak preview of, even if it has nothing to do with cats?
- [57:43]
Professor Rod Phillips
Well, I have to find a new retirement project. That's one thing. At the moment, I'm just finishing a new edition of a book on. It's a history of divorce that I published in 1988, and I'm doing a new edition. I was asked to do a new edition and I said yes. And it turned out that it's not just a new edition, it's a new book. I thought I would just have to really update. Update it. But so much has changed. Just including the way I think about. The way we think about history has meant that I just got to rewrite the book from scratch. So I'm hoping to finish that in the next month or two and get that off to the publisher for 2027 or 2020, 2028. And then the publisher of the cats book has sort of floated the idea of a book on dogs, which is both attractive and not because, I mean, you know, I mean, the first thought is, well, I just write the same book and just change the, change the word cat to dog throughout it. But, but of course, it's, it's a completely different animal with completely different relationship to humans. And it's, it's. I mean, I learned a lot about dogs as I was doing the research for cats. So I, I mean, I, I have a, I have a good start for something like that. And before the publisher mentioned it, it was something I was thinking about. So, so maybe, maybe, maybe. But first I've got to finish the divorce book, and then I'll see where I go from there.
- [59:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Fair enough. Well, while you are finishing up projects and contemplating the next one, listeners can of course read the book we've been discussing titled A History, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2026. Rod, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [59:26]
Professor Rod Phillips
Miranda, it was a real pleasure talking to you.
- [59:28]
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