Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (33 page)

9
. Although our tame domestic cats were probably created by breeding from their African ancestors, they can interbreed successfully with the European wildcat. As things stand, the domestic cat can even produce offspring by the North American lynx. Finally, there is even a possibility that there are no limits at all to mating between small cats (of the genus
Felis
). According to the textbooks, the cross-breeding of wild and domestic cats ought to produce infertile hybrids, but some of these bastard cats have obviously retained the ability to reproduce. There are some strange hybrids in the depths of northern European forests, and it would be surprising if the domestic cat did not have a few drops of wild European blood in its veins. That transfusion very probably occurred in the ancient forests of European folklore; it cannot yet be proved for certain, but at some point new forensic techniques such as genetic fingerprinting will give us a definite answer. So far as today's domestic cat is concerned, a fling with a wildcat can take a nasty turn; foresters have seen such wildcats turn to scratching furies at the sight of a decadent domestic pet.

10
. The belief that cats have an amazing and indeed paranormal ability to find their way home is so deeply rooted that it periodically surfaces in the media, embroidered with ever new episodes. Almost every week you can hear of some Puss in Boots who accidentally fetches up in a strange and distant place but finds his way home with dreamlike certainty. Americans, with their taste for the road movie, have versions in which the trip is country-wide, from coast to coast. Examined closely, the tale has two different variants which should be distinguished from each other. The conventional variety, whereby the cat finds its way home from some strange place, can be explained in principle without calling on any psi factor. The cat may have an acoustic picture of the sounds of home at the back of its head, and finds its way by that map. Or it may take a fix from the position of the sun, as travellers in former times used to. Perhaps cats, like whales, may even have a magnetic sense which allows them to navigate as if by a compass.

However, there are cases suggesting some paranormal force at work, stories in which a cat has been left behind but follows its master long distances to a new and hitherto entirely unknown home. This variant cannot be explained by even the most remarkable achievements of the senses, and is often called psi-trailing and regarded as an extra-sensory talent. Some decades ago the American parapsychologist J.B. Rhine collected and analysed all documented cases. The biggest sensation was a cat belonging to a New York veterinary surgeon who moved from New York to California. Several months later the cat, who had been left behind in New York, turned up energetically demanding entry to his new home and made straight for his favourite place in a comfortable armchair.

We can make what we like of such mysterious journeys. Desmond Morris, the British cat expert, thinks it is pointless and leads nowhere to look for parapsychological explanations of the marvels and mysteries of nature, thus stifling the curiosity of the inquiring mind. Ever since the times of the Ancient Egyptians, however, the cat has presented mankind with mysteries which are peculiar to itself and will put the abilities of any two-legged medium in the shade.

11
. Although the eyes of the cat are among the greatest masterpieces created by the 'Blind Watchmaker' - evolution - those amazing organs are not much good at perceiving colour. As with primates (including humans), they face forward, and display their aesthetic beauty in some of mankind's oldest painted records. They are very large in relation to skull size and therefore absorb a great deal of light. In addition, the back of the eye is covered by the reflective tapetum, which throws back the 'used' rays of light. This amplifier of the residual light makes the cat's reflective eyes powerful tools for night vision, and military commanders have tried to make use of them in nocturnal warfare.

The light-sensitive layer of the eyes, the retina, consists of two kinds of photocells, rods and cones. The rods, which are far more numerous than the cones, react very sensitively to differences between light and dark, and are situated mainly in the outer area of the retina. The cones, responsible for colour perception and close-up vision, function only in daylight and are concentrated in the centre of the retina, in humans a circular pit or fovea. The feline fovea, containing only a few cones, is a horizontal line. Cats thus have very sharp eyes for spotting mice who happen to wander across their field of vision, but it would be hard for them to see the letters of newsprint properly, and they have difficulty in adjusting their lenses to the macro-area which shows close-up detail. Cats are therefore sometimes disorientated if the object of their interest is right in front of their faces.

Because of the small number of colour cones in cats' eyes, it was thought for a long time that they could see the world only in black and white. However, it was then shown that they can be trained, rather laboriously, to distinguish between certain primary colours. In time they can tell red, blue and white apart. On the whole, however, colour is not very important to them: all mice are grey at night anyway. But American zoologists have recently discovered that the domestic cat has a latent ability to see in colour at birth. The Spanish wildcat, which like many other archaic relations of our domestic cat hunts its prey in the bright midday sun, has about twice as many cones in its pupil and is thus fully able to perceive colour. When it is born the domestic cat, whose forebears at some point took to seeking food by night near human settlements, has just the same kind of colour-perceptive fovea. The ability to see colour, however, is soon eradicated by genetic programming. Probably this ghost of an ability in the cat's eye still exists only because it could be useful at some point if the cat were ever to revert to its old life-style.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Akif Pirin
ç
ci

Pirinçci was born on the 29th April 1959 in Istanbul. He began to write fiction at a young age, and published his first novel
Tränen sind immer das Ende
(literally meaning "tears always are the end") in 1980, at the age of 21. His next literary work, published in 1989, was the novel
Felidae
, a work of crime fiction with cats as the main protagonists. The novel has been translated into 17 languages and became an international bestseller. Due to the enormous success of the novel, Pirinçci expanded his concept of "
cat crime fiction
" and published several sequels to
Felidae
, out of which only one, namely
Felidae II
, has been translated into English. An animated movie based on
Felidae
, the script of which had been co-written by Pirinçci, has been produced in Germany in 1994, and was also dubbed in English. Pirinçci has published several other novels which were not set in the fictional reality of the
Felidae
series. He had a big success with his fantastic thriller "The Door" which was made into a german moving picture and will be remade by Hollywood.

Pirinçci currently lives in Bonn, the former capital of the Federal Republic of Germany.

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