The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the Worldby Abigail Tucker
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9781476738239
Publication Date: December 1, 2016
Pages: 241
Genre: Non-fiction, Science
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
House cats rule back alleys, deserted Antarctic islands, and our bedrooms. Clearly, they own the Internet, where a viral cat video can easily be viewed upwards of ten million times. But how did cats accomplish global domination? Unlike dogs, they offer humans no practical benefit. The truth is they are sadly incompetent rat-catchers and pose a threat to many ecosystems. Yet, we love them still.
To better understand these furry strangers in our midst, Abby Tucker travels to meet the breeders, activists, and scientists who’ve dedicated their lives to cats. She visits the labs where people sort through feline bones unearthed from the first human settlements, treks through the Floridian wilderness in search of house cats on the loose, and hangs out with Lil Bub, one of the world’s biggest feline celebrities.
Witty, intelligent, and always curious, Tucker shows how these tiny creatures have used their relationship with humans to become one of the most powerful animals on the planet. The appropriate reaction to a cuddly kitten, it seems, might not be aww but awe.
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.