The iconic Larry and the other cats who rule the world

Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, “capo cacciatore di topi dell’ufficio di gabinetto”, already, Larry the cat was considered the most stable institutional figure in the United Kingdom, given that since his arrival at Downing Street in 2011, there have been no fewer than seven prime ministers and two monarchs. “Larry provides the public with an indispensable and non-partisan sense of continuity,” Philip Howell, a professor at the University of Cambridge, told The Guardian. He has now definitively demonstrated that he is the one in charge at the Prime Minister’s residence, given that the new head of government, Andy Burnham, has decided not to bring the dog he had at his home in Manchester with him, so as not to upset him. There was the precedent set by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, who had moved into Downing Street – one with a Jack Russell and the other with a Labrador retriever. But both had been traumatised by the cat. “A hooligan,” Johnson had described him in particular, explaining that the dog had been attacked when he tried to get near Larry’s food, and that, given that Larry himself had “the build of a sumo wrestler and the claws of a velociraptor”, from then on he had tried to avoid those parts of the residence “where he might come across Catzilla”.

Chief Mouser’s prestige is obviously boosted by the press, given that journalists and photographers who spend hours waiting for the arrival of a foreign leader, a speech or government statements – if they use that downtime to photograph and film the cat – not only pass the time whilst waiting, but also rack up record view counts. And CNN has already shown that to ‘interview’ Larry, all you need to do is lure him to the microphone with a piece of cat food. Particularly epic are the photos of him decked out in a bow tie featuring the Union Jack during the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Larry Bridges – as he is called, in a nod to London Bridge – even has an unofficial profile on X with over 900,000 followers, which pretends to be written by him. As well as his photos and videos, there are tongue-in-cheek comments on the disasters caused by the humans he lives with – namely, the prime ministers. And recently, he has even started criticising Trump. But even before social media existed, fourteen centuries ago, Muhammad was so fond of his cat Muezza that, on one occasion when she had fallen asleep under his robe and he had to leave, he cut off the sleeve rather than disturb her. Legend has it that, ever since Muhammad stroked Muezza’s back, cats have acquired the ability to always land on their feet. A further twelve centuries before Muhammad, the Great King of Persia, Cambyses, conquered Egypt in 525 BC simply by placing a cat in the arms of every soldier in his army during the Battle of Pelusium. Rather than risk harming what they regarded as a sacred animal, the men of the Pharaoh’s army chose to surrender without a fight.

“The cat is the only animal that has managed to domesticate man” is Marcel Mauss’s famous quip, which Robert Delort quotes at the start of the chapter on cats in his classic work “Man and Animals from the Stone Age to the Present Day”. But he immediately adds: “On the other hand, the cat is by no means domesticated: despite the close proximity in which it lives with its owner, it remains a tamed wild animal.” In reality, this has not been without its difficult periods: the sacred cat of ancient Egypt was often viewed as demonic during the Middle Ages, until it underwent a general re-evaluation as a destroyer of disease-carrying rats, which came about following the Black Death. The black cat, therefore, brings bad luck, but Puss in Boots protects his master, albeit using rather unorthodox methods. From the 19th century onwards, the cat became a cherished companion, just as its usefulness as a protector of crops and against disease became less important. In the age of computers, feline psychologists explain, it has now learnt to lie on the keyboard, to vie with its owner for what appears to be an insidious rival for affection. But the very latest studies highlight the paradox. The peak in attention paid to cats coincides, in fact, with an increasingly extreme and radical form of animal rights activism, which seeks to spare animals any possible harm, even indirect harm. But imposing a vegan diet on cats, they warn, would in fact constitute a form of cruelty to animals. And another study confirms that cats are, however, one of the most notorious causes of species extinction around.

“A philosophical, well-mannered, calm animal, attached to its own habits, a lover of order and cleanliness, and one that does not bestow its affection recklessly: it wishes to be your friend if you are worthy of it, but it does not wish to be your slave,” warned Théophile Gautier. “In its tenderness, it retains its free will and will never do anything for you that it considers unreasonable; but once it has given itself entirely to you, what absolute trust, what loyalty of affection!” “That independent and almost ungrateful nature, which prevents him from forming bonds with anyone, and the indifference with which he moves from drawing rooms to rooftops,” struck Chateaubriand. “You stroke him and he purrs, but what he feels is physical pleasure and not, like the dog, the naive satisfaction of loving and being faithful to a master who thanks him with kicks. The cat lives alone; it has no need for company; it obeys only when it feels like it.” “Through its silence, it radiates a quality of life that is balanced and full of warmth,” explained the great folklorist André Varagnac.

Vilfredo Pareto, in fact, after applying his engineering expertise to economics to make it more precise, but then devising a sociology as the logic of illogical actions – given that homo economicus presupposes a rationality which, in reality, is rarely applied by human beings – eventually became convinced that the only valid interlocutors could be cats. The 1918 diary that Settecolori has just republished, under the title “War and Propaganda: A Short Manual of Counter-Information” and edited by Alberto Mingardi, was written at Villa Angora on Lake Geneva, which Pareto had named in honour of his two cats, Mirrina and Timoteo. Unlike humans, he explained, cats do not delude themselves into justifying this or that action. For this reason, Pareto imagined conversing with them, to explain how those in power have every interest in covering up militarism and censoring anyone who dares to criticise it.

Of course, there was also Ernesto Nathan, and his memorable line “there’s no tripe for cats”, with which, once he became mayor of Rome, he scrapped the budget used to lure cats to rid the Campidoglio of rats. Puss in Boots aside, literature is full of unsavoury cats: from the one who teams up with the Fox to swindle Pinocchio, to the black cat in Edgar Allan Poe’s story who denounces the drunken wife-murderer who, after gouging out one of his eyes, accidentally buried him alongside his wife’s corpse. Behemoth is also a black cat: in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, he is the transformed form of one of the demons in Satan’s retinue, who in turn is in the guise of Woland. Even Italian proverbs and idioms do not exactly betray any particular fondness for cats. “A whore is a cat that licks you from the front and scratches you from behind”; ‘whoever is born a cat catches mice and scratches’; ‘a nasty cat to deal with’; ‘a dead cat’; ‘to act like a cat, which eats and meows’; ‘don’t trust a cat licking a spit to cook the roast’; ‘the cat goes to the lard so often that it leaves its paw print there’; “La gatta frettolosa fece i gattini ciechi”. Things fare a little better when it comes to songs. “Quarantaquattro gatti/ in fila per sei col resto di due”, went the lyrics of the song that won the Zecchino d’Oro in that fateful year of 1968, describing a group of felines who had, in turn, taken to the streets to make their demands. “They asked all the children / Who are friends to all the kittens / For one meal a day and, when the chance arose / To be allowed to sleep on the armchairs”.

“I wanted a black cat,” sang the little girl who was the song’s protagonist; a year later, the song only reached number six in the charts, but went on to enjoy overwhelming global success, particularly in a Japanese translation. Even the Land of the Rising Sun, where the cat had arrived from China in the 6th century, became a nation of extraordinary cat lovers from the 11th century onwards. “Once upon a time there was a cat / who had a black patch on her muzzle / and an old attic by the sea / with a window just a stone’s throw from the blue sky,” recalled Gino Paoli in his 1960 song, in which the feline evoked nostalgia for the past. “Maramao, perché sei morto? / pan e vin non ti mancava / l’insalata era nell’orto / e una casa avevi tu”, asked the 1939 song, a reworking of a folk song from Abruzzo, and perhaps derived from the name of Maramaldo, who killed Francesco Ferrucci. It is not only the songs featured on Zecchino d’Oro that are popular with children; the fascination of childhood could also be confirmed by comic-book characters such as Krazy Kat or Felix. But in Disney, the hero is a mouse, and Pegleg Pete is the villain. The two Siamese cats that appear in the 1955 film Lady and the Tramp are villains too. In short, to see cats in a new light in the Disney universe, we had to wait until 1970 and "The Aristocats". Not to mention a criminal like Catwoman, who is, however, fascinating at the same time.

The cat that Erwin Schrödinger made the protagonist of a famous thought experiment in 1935 – designed to illustrate the paradoxes of quantum mechanics as applied to the macroscopic world – is, after all, also an image of ambiguity, being both alive and dead at the same time. Quite simply, Delort explains, this dual image stems from the fact that domestic cats are descended from Egyptian cats, which the Pharaonic civilisation revered as protectors of the harvest to the point of considering them deities, and which it exported all over the world. But in Europe there was already a particularly aggressive and pestilential type of wild cat which was a scourge to domestic animals and could even be dangerous to humans. It is this image that has long lingered in folklore, clashing with the positive image of the cat that came from the Nile. It is no coincidence that the ultimate triumph of cat lovers coincided with the end of peasant civilisation and the definitive rise of the lap cat, fed on dry food and tinned food.

These urban cats are probably not responsible for the damage now reported in a study that has collated over 533 scientific articles, according to which cats with access to the outdoors pose a threat to biodiversity in much of the world. But, of course, they are not the only ones. For over two decades, the diet of ‘free-roaming’ cats around the world has been analyzed by a team led by Christopher A. Lepczyk, Professor of Biology and Wildlife Conservation at Auburn University; Daniel Rubinoff, Professor of Entomology at the University of Hawaii; and Jean E. Fantle-Lepczyk, a researcher at the College of Forestry. Their study, published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, establishes a global database that enables researchers to measure the impact of cats outside the domestic environment, in both urban and wild ecosystems. The study concludes that domestic cats, when living freely or having access to the outdoors, constitute an invasive species present in all the planet’s ecosystems, with the exception of Antarctica. Furthermore, feral cats prey on nearly 2,100 different animal species worldwide. Most are vertebrates, primarily birds, followed by mammals and reptiles. Of the species preyed upon, 347 are listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, classified as ‘near threatened’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘endangered’, ‘critically endangered’ or even ‘extinct’. In terms of ecological impact, the evidence gathered shows that the predation pressure exerted by stray cats can affect populations of endangered species, exacerbating the threat to wildlife already under pressure due to habitat fragmentation and other environmental disturbances. Although cats are most commonly associated with hunting birds and small mammals, research indicates that at least seven per cent of the species consumed by these felines consist of insects and other invertebrates. Beetles are among the most common prey of this type, but crustaceans, arachnids, centipedes, snails, slugs and millipedes have also been recorded. In total, 148 species from this group have been identified in the feline’s diet. Of these, two are classified as ‘endangered’: the Aldabra grasshopper and the Tasmanian giant crayfish. Two other species are classified as ‘vulnerable’: the wētāpunga, a mouse-sized insect native to New Zealand, and the common crayfish, native to south-eastern Australia. Furthermore, the Canary Islands horned beetle is classified as ‘near threatened’.

In short, it’s best if cats are fed by their owners and cat-sitters. But in Rome, an appeal has been launched urging people to stop leaving cat food out in the open, as it is encouraging an invasion of the extremely pesky Vespa orientalis, which feasts on that type of food. Meanwhile, the Association of American Feed Control Officials and the British organisation Cats Protection UK have just issued a warning about vegan or vegetarian diets for cats, which can cause serious problems for animals that nature has designed to be carnivores. As well as having high protein requirements, they actually need essential amino acids such as taurine, arginine, methionine and cysteine, which are obtained exclusively from animal-based foods. They also need to consume vitamins, such as A and D, which other animal species can produce from precursors found in plants, but cats cannot. Furthermore, cats have a short intestinal tract, precisely because they are carnivores. A cat that does not eat meat can develop blindness, as well as heart, neurological, urinary, immunological and liver problems.

In short, humanising cats too much ultimately becomes inhumane. And in the end, it really is time to give the cats some tripe!