A Cat Called Birmingham by Chris Pascoe

Author:Chris Pascoe
Format: mobi
Published: 2009-10-24T11:40:36+00:00

I've always been fascinated by the concept of a fully evolved domestic cat civilisation. It took around sixty million years for a strain of the very basic miacis to evolve into the sophisticated felis lybica, or African wildcat, from which all of our domestic cats descend. So where will cats be in another sixty million years, or another two hundred million years?

I once wrote a fantasy/comedy book that involved advanced extra-terrestrial feline astronauts descending upon a sleepy, predominantly inebriated, English village, and needed to consider exactly what the motivations and ambitions of a feline world would be.

For the sake of fun, the cats were bi-pedal, had mastered space travel and were primarily here because they'd exhausted their stocks of small and helpless creatures.

What struck me in the writing of the book, however, was this: could a cat society ever have the drive to become a technological and industrial civilisation, given what we know of their basic character traits at this moment in time?

Probably not. They wouldn't be awake long enough. A cat sleeps for about twenty hours a day, leaving four hours for work, play, eating, etc. We sleep about eight of every twenty-four hours, leaving sixteen hours for work and play.

So, we are awake around 5,840 hours per year, a cat for only 1,460 hours. Over the course of a hundred years, we have 438,000 more waking hours than a cat, meaning that, per century, a human being is awake fifty years longer than a cat. Over the course of a millennium of potential progress, a cat would be snoring for 833 years out of a thousand. That really doesn't leave much time

to get things done, but maybe they'd just get things done on a slower timescale.

So let's assume that they could do it, it would just take a heck of a lot longer. Who'd be in charge? They don't seem too fond of taking orders, do they? Or being trained in any way. They just want to swan along and do things their own way. Rules are pointless. Any instruction not to do a particular thing is taken purely as an added incentive to do it.

Perhaps they could work on a kind of reverse psychology basis, ordering the workforce not to get the next shipment out on time under any circumstances. But, in all truth, you'd never get them to stay at work all day anyway, no matter how comfortable you made it for them. A cat will stay on a cushion all day, until it realises that's where you'd like it to sleep. Then the cushion's off limits. Supervisors could try ordering the workforce not to turn up for work, and then keep telling them to go home all day, but surely a ploy of that nature would soon be sussed out.

I really can't see cats forming a society in which they have to take orders from anyone, so I assume they'd be a race of entrepreneurs. But even then, if a customer tried to buy an

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